These are some notes I took on podcasting at last fall’s Podcamp Topeka. I “rediscovered” them, and decided they could be useful to some of you.
Rob Walch, who’s Vice President of Podcaster Relations for Wizzard Media/Libsyn and does the Today in iOS podcast, gave this presentation. Here are the notes – maybe more libraries need to start a podcast!
Some podcasting facts:
- There are over 1.8 million blogs, but only 200,000 podcasts
- Podcasting is much easier to listen to now. You can still do it the old way – dump it to an iPod. But you can also use an app, download directly from iTunes to your iPod, or just listen on the web.
- Podcasts have really loyal audiences – one podcast has listeners who are getting tattoos related to the podcast!
- Audio is much more popular than video podcasts. Audio is much more portable.
iTunes and podcasting:
- iTunes is really important to the success of a podcast
- The podcast’s title is really important, especially in iTunes. Make sure to stuff keywords into the title, because that’s a primary keyword area for iTunes.
- Artwork has to be great on iTunes. There are apparently two guys at Apple who pick featured podcasts for the podcast app, and they don’t pick bad artwork…
September 2012 podcasting stats from Libsyn (a major podcasting service):
- 50% got 153 downloads per episode
- 20% – 1000 downloads
- 10% – 4000 downloads
- 8.6 % – 5000 downloads per episode
- 5% 10,400
- 1% – 50,000
- If you can get to 1000 listeners, you are doing an awesome job
Submit your podcast to:
- iTunes
- Podcast411.com – directories
- Zune next best place
- Blackberry podcasts
Some How-To’s for Podcasting:
- One mic – you hold it, you are in control of it.
- Don’t host on your website. If you store your media files there, and your podcast gets too popular, your whole website might shut down… that means you have shut your whole business down. So host the podcast somewhere else….
- Frequency sweet spot … Weekly and consistent – like every Friday. You will be put into people’s routines. Same day, same time
- Edit! Hugely important. Even in interviews. Editing is good. Remove ums, ahs, etc.
- Prepare – do some prep work.
- Get a call in number for your show and leave voice mail messages. If people hear themselves, they share it. Especially teens…
Pic by owaief89
I’ve been doing a library book review podcast for about 6 years now: http://www.abcbookreview.com
My cohost works at a different library now, but we are still doing it. We try to record in person as much as possible, since the audio quality suffers when we record via Skype. There are probably ways to improve the audio quality, but I am a stressed out computer services manager right now, so I don’t have a ton of time to sink into it. We love doing it, though, and we’ve had a lot of success with it.