If creating great content was easy, everyone would be doing it, at least that’s what my dad always told me.
Time and energy are the great barriers keeping business people from delivering compelling stories and helpful information through the various marketing channels.
Even though most of us understand the marketing power of web content, the majority of businesses don’t have a media arm to produce endless amounts of engaging blogs, images, videos, and podcasts.
The good news is, you don’t have to be a publishing company or a media outlet to produce high quality content. There are opportunities everyday. Gary Vaynerchuk coined the phrase, “Document, don’t create,” and we couldn’t endorse this more.
Staring at a blank screen, hoping for the spirit to move you toward some killer piece of content only leads to frustration, inconsistency, and lesser quality content.
Here are 4 ways to create an engaging podcast without the headache:
Record your presentations.
Whether you’re giving a keynote or a sales presentation, recording the audio from the event adds hardly any additional time and energy. You’ve already put in the work preparing your message, and it’s obviously relevant to at least some portion of your audience. Now simply record it with your phone or mic.
Q & A session? Make sure you pick up the audio from those asking the questions and add that as another valuable piece of the episode. Bringing a guest in to speak at your event? Record it (with their permission) and now you’ve got 2 episodes.
Conventions, trade shows, and conferences you put on provide a perfect opportunity to get boat loads of audio from relevant influencers in your industry. Spending a little bit of extra time making sure you get a good, clean audio recording of what’s already happening can yield big results.
If you can edit these files yourself, great. If you want to save time and ensure quality, send them off to an editor/producer and add your audio logo.
Interview your friends and colleagues.
Inviting guests to your podcast is the easiest, most engaging way to inform and entertain your audience. Inviting your friends and colleagues is the easiest way to acquire guests to your show.
If you dive deeply into one topic, each guest could be one episode. If you want to hear from multiple perspectives for a particular topic, you may have a few guests answering the same few questions.
To make things even easier, you might use the same set of questions for every guest who comes on your show. Once you’ve exhausted your own network, ask your friends if they know someone who would enjoy being on your show
Voice over your text library.
If you’ve been adding content over the years, whether internal resources or customer-facing, you’ve probably got some important messages to share. The segment of your audience looking for podcast content may not be familiar with all or any of it.
If you’ve got someone on your team with the ability to deliver an engaging, high energy reading (aka one that doesn’t sound like reading), have that person turn your text content into audio. To upgrade the quality, send your materials off to a seasoned voice talent and have them read, record, and send you back a finished file. Literally couldn’t be any easier.
Pull the audio from your videos.
Content source #3 in your easy-peezy-lemon-squeezy arsenal is using the videos you’re already creating to take your message even further. Just like with text versus audio, some people just prefer to consume content through a podcast while they walk on a treadmill instead of watching a video.
If you used a mic during your video recording, your audio file is ready and waiting. Just get it edited to make sense without the video (add explainers where necessary) and boom goes the dynamite – you’ve got another podcast to publish.