Podcasts are THE new media of the masses... and it's only growing!

That's my interpretation of the results Edison research released from their January/February 2015 survey.

Why would I say that?

• Because the number of people listening to podcasts is growing every year.
• Because those who do listen, usually listen to as many as 6 podcasts each week.

It's a survey filled with insights regarding the general target market of EVERY podcaster...

and it gives plenty of info on how you and I can increase the likelihood that our podcast is found and listened to by people who WANT the niche information we have to distribute.

In this episode, I outline the findings of the survey, and what I think it means for podcasters.

The Podcast Consumer 2015 from Edison Research

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Podcasts are THE new media of the masses… and it’s only growing! That’s my interpretation of the results Edison research released from their January/February 2015 survey. Why would I say that? Because the number of people listening to podcasts is growing every year. Because those who do listen, usually listen to as many as 6 […]

Perfect sounding audio (technically speaking) is NOT a pipe-dream… Today’s episode is a head-to-head match-up between two new apps that promise to bring crystal-clear audio to the podcasting industry. The recording is about twice the length of my longest podcast so far, but you won’t be sorry you listened to this episode. Ringr (http://www.Ringr.com) is currently […]

This is the 4th of 3 posts on "SHOW NOTES" - hear the previous entries here

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Our show notes creation also includes social media blurbs...

That's what we call them anyway.

These are a combination of tweets and paragraphs, based on the episode content that we'll use to drive traffic to that specific episode.

Do you get what we're trying to accomplish here?

• We've already produced a great audio episode
• We've already written great SEO-optimized show notes

We've got to do MORE than just create it, publish it, and then let it languish in internet obscurity! We've got to promote the show!

We choose to do this for every one of our show notes clients WHILE we're creating the show notes themselves because it's the most natural time to do it.

And our SECRET SAUCE is that much of our show notes material can be REPURPOSED (one of our favorite words) into the social media shares.

So we're not really creating new stuff for social media, just reusing and modifying the stuff we've just made when creating our show notes.

Do you follow?

Here's an example of how we create our social media blurbs from our already existing show notes content:

This example is taken from the show notes we produced for one of our clients - Scott Voelker who does an Amazing show called "The Amazing Seller."

Here's a paragraph and header taken from the show notes we created for one of Scott's episodes:

WHY WOULD AN AMAZON SELLER WANT TO SET UP HIS OWN ECOMMERCE STORE?

Steve Chou thinks it’s a must for every Amazon seller to eventually move beyond Amazon to set up their own ecommerce store. There are many reasons, but two of the greatest are #1 – the ability to create your own promotional content, and #2 – the ability to capture your customer information and follow up on them during and after the sale. He’s found that ability alone to be a significant source of conversions for his products. If you’ve been thinking about setting up your own ecommerce sales platform for sales outside of Amazon, don’t miss this episode.

To create a "social media blurb" for from this paragraph, it's a bit of copy and paste and a dab of reformatting to include hashtags. Below is our finished "social media blurb."

Why would an Amazon seller want to set up his own #EcommerceStore? Steve Chou thinks it’s a must for every #AmazonSeller to eventually move beyond #Amazon to set up their own #ecommerce store. There are many reasons, but two of the greatest are NUMBER 1 – the ability to create your own #PromotionalContent, and NUMBER 2 – the ability to capture your customer information and #FollowUp on them during and after the sale. He’s found that ability alone to be a significant source of #conversions for his products. If you’ve been thinking about setting up your own ecommerce #SalesPlatform for sales outside of Amazon, don’t miss this episode.

As you can see, we did a few basic things to make a social media post from our show notes paragraph:

• We removed the heading formatting so we could include the heading as part of the...

This is the 4th of 3 posts on “SHOW NOTES” – hear the previous entries here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Our show notes creation also includes social media blurbs… That’s what we call them anyway. These are a combination of tweets and paragraphs, based on the episode content that we’ll use to drive […]

Quality show notes matter!Two episodes ago, I tried to convince you that you need to take the time to create quality show notes. If you missed that episode, you can go to www.PodcastfastTrack.com/shownotes1 to hear my reasoning.

In the last installment of Podcastification I showed you the first step my Podcast Fast Track team takes to begin the show notes creation process. It included:

Audio editing & creation of a bullet point outline of the episode

Keyword research

If you missed that episode, you can find it at www.PodcastFastTrack.com/shownotes2

Today I'm going to take you into the next step of our show notes creation process - The 500 word summary of the audio content.Remember, if you've followed my formula so far (covered in the last two episodes), you've already got 2 vital steps done:

You've got a bullet-point outline of the audio - which will come in very handy at this point.

And you've got a list of keywords to focus on when writing - which will also be very instrumental in creating a great summary of the audio.

So let's dive in...

Why include a 500 (or more) word summary in the show notes?

The main reason is really two reasons:

ONE: To give your readers a true TEASER (keep that word in mind... )a TEASER of what they will hear in the audio content!

You want your show notes to draw you reader IN to becoming not just a reader, but a LISTENER to the audio, which is where the true value is.

500 words is about right to do that in a way that reveals JUST ENOUGH, but NOT TOO MUCH.

TWO: 500 words is just about right to get some search engine attention.

Any shorter, it might be seen as an invaluable resource.

Any longer, it could be TMI (too much information).

500 words is just likehttps://youtu.be/SIkRgrMsTOM?t=2m14s ( the baby bear's porridge that Goldilocks ate)... JUUUUSSSTTTT RIIIIIGGTTT!

And before you get too anxious about the word count... let me put your mind at ease: WE NEVER COUNT THE WORDS!

500 is our target. We write what we need to write. We usually go over or under just a tiny little bit.

So relax.

What to include in the 500 word summary for your show notes...

There's a handful of important things you need to include in your show notes. We choose to include most of these in our 500 word summary:

Keywords (remember the keyword list https://podcastfasttrack.com/show-notes-step-1-to-making-them-epic-podcast-21/ (from the last episode)?) You're going to include them in your summary.

Deep links (that's links to other pages on your website... just in case you didn't know).

Outbound links (that's links to other reputable web pages or resources).

Why do we include these things?

KEYWORDS - it's obvious. We're trying to get the show notes post to rank for organic search traffic which in turn might lead to new listeners/followers.

DEEP LINKS - linking throughout your own website to RELEVANT content improves your SEO juice.

OUTBOUND LINKS - again, SEO is improved if you demonstrate that you're writing for your readers, providing them value, even if that value is NOT ON YOUR WEBSITE! But make sure the outbound links you include are to reputable sites, not some junky, spammy, ad-filled site.

HEADINGS - Why? We want the post to be scannable (since most people nowadays scan websites instead of reading them). Headings break up the content, highlighting some of the most important topics (hint: keywords), and ENTICING the readers to become listeners.

SHORT PARAGRAPHS: Did you get the operative word there? SHORT! We put these under each heading as mini-blurbs of what the heading-topic covers, and we do our darndest to write it in a way that makes the reader WANT TO LISTEN to the podcast audio.

How do we write the show notes summary?

ONE: We use the bullet point outline from step one.

The bullet points serve as a reminder of what we heard in the audio. It also serves as a road-map for the episode.

We are probably going to use at least SOME of the bullet points as headings.

Quality show notes can really help your podcast when it comes to organic search, audience value-adds, and even the luring of expert guests to be on your podcast. This second episode in the series helps you know exactly HOW to create them.

There is a two-fold problem when it comes to writing truly epic show notes

Good show notes have to be optimized, which takes a certain degree of expertise.

Creating quality show notes for a podcast episode takes time... is it worth it?

I've heard all kinds of opinions about the subject...

• In Facebook groups
• Google Plus communities
• On actual podcasts about podcasting

The truth is there's no one-size-fits-all answer.

But as a podcast producer whose company PROVIDES SHOW NOTES for many of my clients, I'm going to try to convince you that there is more reason TO create show notes than there is NOT to have show notes.

Here are my top 4 reasons you should consider show notes a necessity.

Show notes provide text-based content for search engines to find and display for people searching for the topics you cover in your show.

In case you didn't know, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines don't have the ability to crawl through the audio of your podcast and pull out keywords and topics in order to discover what your episode is about.

They rely on YOU to tell them what the audio is about, so that they can in turn tell the people searching for those topics.

That's one of the most important things good show notes do.

Now that doesn't mean that you can any old thing onto your site as show notes and expect the search engines to feature it.

You have to employ proper web-writing techniques that optimize your show notes for search engine ranking... which IS part of the difficulty of writing good show notes (which I'll address more fully in a moment).

But if you take the time to do that, you'll be creating the most organic way for people to find your episodes and become familiar with you and your podcasting brand.

On a side note, show notes are one more source of content. It's like another hook in the water. The more content you have out there, the greater your chances of landing that big client or raving fan.

Show notes provide one of the simplest ways for your listeners to locate the resources you mention.

The reason you're producing a podcast in the first place is to provide value to your listeners - right?

It's of tremendous value to make it easy for your listeners to benefit from the things you highlight or promote on your show. Here are some examples:

• Show notes are an incredible opportunity for you to funnel listeners to your own products and services through easily clickable links.
• It's a great way to include affiliate links to relevant resources, which is a nice source of additional income for you (just make sure you disclose that they ARE affiliate links).
• Show notes enable you to feature the resources of the guests you have on your show. Not only is that good form, it's a great way to nurture the connections you're making with people, which only serves to advance your cause in the end.

Now, some people have said,

I include all that stuff in the description of my actual MP3 file already. My listeners can find that information there.

That's a valid response, but let me ask you a couple of questions related to that:

• Are you telling your listeners that those resources are embedded on every episode you publish? You should be.
• You've already created a version of show notes to put IN the description of your MP3 file. Why not simply copy and paste it into a show notes page for that episode so you can get the natural SEO value of having another piece of content on the web?
• Have you considered that some of your listeners may actually LIKE to do things on the web instead of through the metadata of the file itself? I think it's better not to force-feed your listeners the format YOU prefer, give them options! It's about THEM, after all.

All that to say... show notes are one of the most natural ways for...

A bad recording space can ruin your podcast audio.

Yes, I said, "ruin" it.

What makes a room a bad place to record? There are many things but here's a list of the TOP 3 room issues, that I'm going to help you address in this episode:

1. A large room.
2. Lots of hard surfaces in the room (walls, floors, furniture, glass, windows, etc.).
3. A hardwood or tile floor.

All those and more cause the sound waves your voice is producing to bounce around the room, creating echoes and residual noise that your microphone can (and will) capture.

Once I've stated these 3 issues so clearly, the solutions to them are pretty obvious - but I'm going to walk through my favorite ways to solve them.

Then before we finish, I'm going to cover some extra steps you can take to take serious control of your sound quality.

1. Get out of that large room

Think of it this way:

The more space there is between your mouth and the walls of your room, the more distance the sound wave has to travel.

And as sound waves travel, they get wider, like ripples in a pond.

That means by the time they hit that wall 15 feet across from you, they have a LARGER profile.

Then they bounce off the wall and head toward another.

Eventually you'll have lots of large sound waves, bouncing from wall to wall, and into each other, causing an echoing nightmare from an audio quality perspective.

The solution is simple: Move your recording space into a smaller room.

The less square footage, the better.

2. Get rid of the hard surfaces

Of course you can't remove walls and windows, but you can add things to the room to make them less hard.

Simple things like:

• Wall hangings, tapestries, curtains, canvas pictures, etc.
• Overstuffed furniture instead of "hard" furniture.
• Place a thin blanket over your desk surface.

Get creative here. Anything you can do to make hard surfaces soft will make your room a better recording space.

Some people go all the way and purchase acoustic foam to hang on the walls.

And it doesn't have to be expensive stuff. You can use eggshell type foam mattress toppers if that's all you can find.

It may not be "studio quality" foam, but it beats the hard wall you have now.

In all honesty, that's what I've got hanging on my walls right now.

TRUE STORY: When I first began podcasting the only place I could set up my desk and studio was in our walk-in closet. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the best move I could have made, acoustically speaking. The hanging clothes and small space made it an ideal place to record.

3. Cover the floor

If the only thing you did to improve your podcast's sound quality was to cover your hardwood or stone floor with an area rug, you'd be amazed at the difference it makes.

And it doesn't have to be a hideous shag rug, just a normal area rug will do the trick.

When you do this you're eliminating the effect of one of the most sound-reflective hard surfaces in your room.

The echo will diminish. The "room noise" will decrease.

Guaranteed.

Extra steps you can take to improve the sound quality of your podcast studio

These extra steps have to do with changes you can make to the equipment you use.

You might be thinking about the dollar signs the moment you hear that, but I'm going to give you a couple of options that don't have to be expensive.

Change your microphone

You don't necessarily need an expensive microphone, but you do need the right kind.

There are two basic kinds of microphones - condenser microphones and dynamic microphones.

What you want for podcasting is a dynamic microphone.

The reason is in