Internet Marketing Notes

Podcasting is getting serious attention nowadays but relative to blogs, the podcast sphere is still relatively small by comparison. In a recent seminar that I attended, internet marketing guru Derek Gehl did point out that now is a good time to capitalize on the podcast space as it’s still pretty much a new frontier.

Recently, someone asked me about how I implemented the podcast feature that I have on this blog. If you have listened to any of my podcast, it’s not me who is in the podcast.

Doing an actual podcast of your own voice recording takes time, energy, and also persistence. What I’ve done in this blog is to have a computer read out my blog posts.

The podcast is generated by a free text-to-speech (TTS) service called Talkr. If you are hearing TTS technology for the first time, it’s not new. Windows XP has it. My first experience with TTS was in the late ’80s! But, the voices then sounded so robotic.

Recently, natural-sounding speech technology has been making tremendous leaps and in my own testing, the quality varies from acceptable to near-natural.

Using natural-sounding TTS technology, Talkr is able to read an RSS feed and convert the text to MP3 audio. The “female” voice in the podcast doesn’t sound that bad either though I wish I could choose from a few other voices.

I’ve also used this service in my other blog which is powered by Blogger. Whether you have a Wordpress blog or Blogger blog, you can easily embed a link to download and play the Talkr-generated podcast for a particular post.

Here are some of my tips when creating Talkr podcast for your blog:

• If you want your each post to be read aloud in full, make sure your RSS feed does not output only an excerpt of each post but to generate the full text of each post. You can configure the feed settings from the control panel of your blog.
• If your emphasis is on best podcast experience for your users, minimize on the use of images in your blog posts. If you are using Feedburner as your feed for Talkr, turn off the Feedburner FeedFlare feature if necessary.
• Also, for best listening podcast experience for your users, use short phrases or sentences in your post and minimize on capitalizing each letter in a word like “THIS”.
• After creating a podcast in Talkr you can create a chicklet for your podcast feed on your blog plus embed an audio link (like “Listen to this podcast”) for each post entry. If you are using Wordpress, there is a plugin for Talkr which allows you to embed the link automatically without having to edit your templates. However, if you know HTML, it’s probably better to add the link manually in the desired templates as you have more control over the appeareance of the link and which template the link should appear.
• Once you have your podcast made public, drive additional traffic to your site by registering your podcast feed in various podcast directories and pinging these directories whenever you have a new post. Within Talkr, you can also optimize your podcast for iTunes and other directories by adding additional information about your podcast.

As an aside, I mentioned yesterday that contextual advertising for podcast could be coming soon - another potential source of revenue and advertising opportunity. Cool eh?

Listen to this podcast

Read also:

• Nothing Beats Traffic to a Website!
• AdSense for Audio On the Way?
• Free Website Traffic Generation Tips
• Internet Marketing Videos Galore at YouTube
• You Might Want to Know This If You’re Blogger

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