Are you missing out on 47% of all audio listeners? Find out 3 top platforms to create and automat...

Hello, welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. Now today I'm going to talk about creating audiograms. How do you take the audio that you've got, for example, in a podcast or an interview, and make that into a video and to share that across multiple platforms? Now the reason I am talking about this is because increasingly we're hearing about people making podcasts. In fact, I'm making my own here for East West Public Relations. But we may or may not know this, but YouTube, whilst it's not a music platform, there are more people listen to the audio content on YouTube than anywhere else. So in fact, YouTube attracts 47% of all music streaming time. So you might be looking at Spotify and iTunes and Podbean and the growing number of podcast platforms. But if you're missing out on YouTube and also some of the other smaller ones like Vimeo, your podcast and your other audio content is not going to get noticed in the way that it should do. So amazingly enough, We find that, or rather the Music Consumer Rights Insight Report says that people are quite happy to listen to the radio on YouTube. So the key message from this Music Consumer Insight Report is that you don't need video on YouTube to be successful. I have to confess that this is something that that I wasn't aware of myself because I've been looking at iTunes as being and. Being the main channel for my own podcast. But it turns out that we also need to be thinking about YouTube, who pay over $1 billion to the music industry for advertising each year. But also, if we upload our own podcasts, for example, to YouTube, we can double the size of our show's digital footprint. Now, not everybody's got a podcast, but most people now are aiming to be on a podcast. So even if you don't have your own podcast, if you're a guest or you've been, for example, on the radio, not knowing where to put that content is a problem. And I'm going to talk about that today. Let's talk about how you can take your audio and make it look and feel like video in the video universe. Now, when I talk about content distribution. A big part of the way that I look at this now under the Speak PR program is about automation. So amplification, which is the A in Speak, is possible now for small businesses like mine because of some of the tools and the technologies that are available. Now, one of the things that I started to do with my own podcast is to upload it to, uh, Otter, otter.ai, and that is then being transcribed. And I have a, uh, a person in the Philippines who is transcribing that, making it into articles, and then they are putting that online into my social channels, including LinkedIn, for example. But what we're finding, of course, is that this is only part of the job. So let's look at some of the tools that, that I'm starting to investigate, uh, and that you can do too. Now, one of the key problems with YouTube is it's only accepting, uh, MP3 files. If you work on GarageBand, for example, it's creating an M4A file type. So I'm going to have to convert my audio unless I can download it from Buzzsprout and then format it and repost it again. Now, one of the platforms that you could consider using for hosting is one called Castos, which is C-A-S-T-O-S, and castos.com. If you pay for the slightly more professional user account, it has an automatic feed from your RSS to YouTube. That's going to cost you $40 a month for this, plus a number of other features. But Buzzsprout currently doesn't offer this, and nor did Libsyn. But if you get your podcast or your other audio content listed on a platform that already has a direct feed to YouTube, that would save the job, which would be fantastic. I haven't done that because frankly, I didn't, didn't even think about this when I started the podcast. But now I've got 1,000 downloads around the world. I'm really starting to think about how I can expand that, my listenership. Now the other app that we can use is one called Headliner, headliner.app. Now with Headliner, and I've registered for an account, I can do 10 videos per month and I can have an unlimited watermark and I can get transcription with each of the videos I create. So basically I upload the audio file, or what I'm doing with, with Headliner is I'm just adding the RSS feed from my Buzzsprout account and it's automatically pulling the audio file so I don't have to download and re-upload. Saves a whole stage of work. And with the free account from Headliner, I can then share directly to social networks. So this is great if you've only got, you know, 2 or 3 episodes per week, but I'm doing 6 days a week, so it's not going to be enough for me. But at $12.95 a month, I can have unlimited videos that are sent out, and I can generate my own watermarks, and I can also start to use some of their stock footage and stock images. Now, the, the only issue with that is that I'm starting to pay for things that I'm also getting for example, with my Vimeo account, which is the use of images, and also with my Canva account, which is also providing images. So we're seeing this convergence of all these different platforms. But if you don't have those other 2 accounts already, the Headliner.app may be a really useful way to start to get your podcast content uploaded and distributed and also subtitled. So that's pretty useful, I think. Um, then I also was looking and found a, a service called repurpose.io, and repurpose.io claims to have over 10,800 solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, podcasters, authors, and influencers working on their plan. Now what they have is the ability to once again add your RSS feed from your original hosting provider, and it will automatically repurpose unlimited snippets and make those into trailers. So that is really useful because I was talking to a podcaster the other day saying how valuable making these short 30-second trailers in, especially for things like your Instagram accounts. So now, um, Repurpose will convert audio to video and video to audio, but also what's nice is it will start to reshape the format into a square, for example, or vertical. Now that's really useful, especially, uh, if you think about Instagram where they'll only take a square format. You can currently, under their sort of $20 75 cents a month, which is billed annually, you can connect 5 social media platforms which include YouTube, Twitter, SoundCloud. So you can, you can distribute to, you know, if you like, your, your core outlets. But if you want to pay a bit more, then you can obviously upload, for example, with their agency plan, which is $104 a month, You can then go to Facebook and to YouTube and Dropbox and Google Drive. They do have an interim plan at $12 a month, which is enabling you to send content from Facebook, for example. So I've signed up for the free account, and I'm going to try my first 4 videos there, and I've connected it to my Facebook and to my LinkedIn account. So I'll let you know how I get on there. But this is something that is very useful, and John Lee Dumas, who has one of the world's greatest podcasts called Entrepreneurs on Fire, says that he uses it because it automatically creates a video for each of his podcasts, and that saves him lots of time. Now, John Lee Dumas publishes every day He has nearly a million followers on his podcast, so it's good enough for him, then it may well be good enough for me as well. And I'll just have to decide which price to go for. But I think if I do that, then I'm having to stay on my Buzzsprout and add repurpose.io, or maybe look at moving across to Castos, which seems to have both the hosting and the limited distribution. So which one to go for? As we look at making our podcast go out to video, I'm going to start off by doing that manually. We've got some 55 episodes and we've just started our YouTube channel as a consolidated channel, and it's going to upload my legacy, my back catalog and do that manually to start with, just to get that up and running. And then over the coming weeks, I can share with you which of these services I find are the most productive. I think the key point here really is that when we create our own content, as an interview on the radio, be it a text, and be it a podcast, or a video. There are tools out there that you can use on a very basic level for free, but just upgrade to, for example, $12 a month and you have a podcaster plan which enables you to automatically distribute your audio to video without getting involved at all because it pulls directly from your own hosting service And this is really the secret to the amplification part of our Speak PR program. We call it Speak, Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and To Know. The key to amplification is automation. So if you look at what you're doing currently, if you're creating content of any kind, how can you reformat it? For example, I'm doing a podcast, I'm making that into text. I'm putting that into my LinkedIn, putting it onto my website. I'm taking my podcast. I'm going to make that into an audiogram, and I'm going to send that to my YouTube, to my Facebook, and to my Instagram. So there's one formula being used by people in digital, which is the 20/80 rule, which is 20% of the time goes into content creation, 80% into the marketing and distribution. But of course, technology is our friend. It doesn't mean that we have to spend 80% of our time doing distribution. We just have to research and set it up, and then 80% of our energy and maybe our budget may go on it, but it doesn't have to be 80% of our effort. The technology is there to help us do that. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. I hope that's been useful for you if you're trying to get your content, especially if it's audio, to the world. Don't forget, YouTube is over half of the audio, even though we think of it as a video channel. So thank you for listening, and if you'd like any more information about what we do, please visit us on our website eastwestpr.com. Subscribe to our newsletter and to this podcast, and until our next show, hope I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you.