Chad’s Blog
Pragmatic Technologies for Life and Business Success®
This week’s reflection point: Over the past several years I have helped my clients create thousands of pieces of powerful content. From articles and process diagrams, to audio and video recordings and numerous products to name a few. Today, I’d like to focus on the elements of creating effective audio recordings or podcasts. Here they are:
- Message -Select a topic that is of great interest to your clients to help them increase and accelerate their success.
- Structure – Keep it simple and in three sections that represent the opening, body and conclusion. You may want to consider following the structure of a case study, where the opening describes the challenge your clients are facing, the body discusses the solution or how to resolve such challenge, and the conclusion is the potential impact and benefit they would receive or the call to action to execute.
- Style – I prefer creating or listening to conversational podcasts that are practical and filled with intriguing content that are thought provoking.
- Format – Feature yourself as the expert, or introduce a featured guest contributor, or have someone interview you or you interview others.
- Length – Always err on the side of creating shorter pieces rather than longer ones. Our clients are busy people and would rather get your advice quickly. Based on feedback from our clients, I’d suggest you keep them between 3 – 5 minutes each. For interview podcasts I would suggest you keep them around 20 minutes. There is nothing wrong with one minute podcasts that provide quick powerful tips.
- Recording software – There are several good options to consider but if you on a Mac I’d suggest GarageBand and if a PC probably Audacity software.
- Sound – Since a good sound will either make or break the quality of your podcasts, I highly recommend you invest in good microphones. You can get a good one between $100 and $300.
- Music – Although software options such as GarageBand provide free music you may use for your podcasts, I suggest you purchase music that you may incorporate at the beginning and ending if your podcasts that will make them more unique.
- Intro and Outro – Record a short (10 seconds) introduction and conclusion to brand your podcasts. Intro example: “Hi, this is Chad Barr and this is my podcasts series Raising the Barr.” Outro example: “Thank you for listening to raising the Barr. For more Internet strategy tips go to my blog www.ChadBarr.com”
- Delivery – Enthusiasm is the key to keep your audience interested and engaged.
- Publishing – Post your podcasts your blog and interface them to iTunes so they are published other places and beyond your own site.
Podcasts creation is fun and the rewards are great but make sure you don’t make these mistakes.
This week’s tip: It is simpler than you think. Just start and you will quickly discover another effective way of creating powerful content and increase your global reach.
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© Chad Barr 2014. All Rights Reserved.
