How to Make the Most of Your Podcast

A podcast is fantastic for sharing valuable content with your audience. Listeners tune in on their daily commute, at the gym or when they’ve got some downtime, and they can be played at any time, for free, on a smartphone.

You can record a podcast with minimal equipment, or have a slick production with theme music, a voice-over introduction and professional editing. Many podcasts feature guest experts, so there’s lots of knowledge being shared.

You’ll have your own system for promoting your show, but what about reusing the information discussed within the podcast? A full transcript of the audio is a good starting point, but make sure you edit it – you don’t need the ‘hellos’ and so on, and cut out the repetitions, hesitations and so on (click here to find out more about why good-quality transcription is important).

What to do with a Podcast

A one-hour podcast could generate 6,000 words or more, which is a lot for people to digest. Colin Gray, The Podcast Host, suggests that rather than publishing the transcript in full on the page with the audio player, you pop it in a box which displays just the first few lines. If a visitor wants to read the whole thing, they can click to expand the box.

Colin also recommends producing a blog post of between 500 and 600 words, which contains key points from the podcast, but is more than a summary. You may want to include Tweetables, within the text, so readers can share helpful points on Twitter. Include an image (of the guest if there was one) and a subheading to break things up.

Podcast Shownotes

Show notes are also valuable, particularly if you’d like to share contact details of a guest, links to sites referred to in the discussion and any freebies or resources you’re offering to listeners. There’s a lot of advice online, but it’s better to keep the show notes to around 100 words, especially if you’ve done a summary blog post too.

Once the text is all done, you can start sharing it in various ways on social media, just as you do with blogs – make sure you tag the guest in updates, and use hashtags as appropriate. Create graphics of the key points. Edit snippets of the podcasts that you can share as teasers, pointing back to the page with the full audio and podcast.

You can also use the podcast as the basis of a video – film yourself discussing some of the points raised, or produce a PowerPoint with the audio over the top – re-record it if it’s too hard to sync the original.