Transcribing your financial podcast can make it more visible and attractive. Unfortunately, many financial podcasts miss out on the opportunity to extend their show’s influence using transcription — whether they are unaware of its benefits, can’t find the tools, or have a lack of time and resources.
Transcription is essentially a written version of your podcast, it changes your audio medium into text and adds a beneficial layer of content that is beneficial to your podcast and website.
Transcribing your financial podcast is relatively easy, inexpensive, and most importantly, it doesn’t require you to change your podcast’s content at all. It simply requires minimal effort and, if done consistently — can give you great returns.
Great podcasts such as Freakonomics Radio, This American Life, and Masters of Scale use audio transcription and there are many reasons why yours should as well. Here are the top 5 reasons.
Reason #1: Your Financial Podcast Will Rank Higher on Google
This American Life, one of the more popular podcasts in the United States started transcribing their episodes in 2011. They reported an increase of 6.68% in new inbound traffic via search directly attributable to the new audio transcripts.
And these are the results for a general interest podcast. For a niche podcast, such as a financial podcast, the increase in SEO can be much more profound.
Adding an audio transcription version of your podcast allows search engines to crawl and index your content. Better indexing will lead to more search traffic and visitors. Google can’t crawl audio files, so all the great stuff you are sharing on your podcast will be buried way down on the results if you do not add text to your episode pages. Good SEO will promote your financial podcast while you sleep. Users will be able to find a listen (or read) of your episodes long after you’ve published them.
Transcription can help to boost your site’s search results beyond the podcast, they can help your main website rank better as well. All the interesting content from your interviews can be filled with the keywords for which your website can rank for.
Remember, 75% of clicks go to the first page of Google search results. Appearing on the first page is critical to driving organic traffic to your website.
Reason #2: You Will Create a Better User Experience for Your Audience
With audio transcription, your podcast has triple the opportunity to inform, educate, or entertain. It can be enjoyed by those who prefer to skim, listen, or read the interview.
A transcript gives listeners a sneak peek before jumping into the complete audio. They can skim over the text to catch the main ideas and perhaps jump into the episode in the section that most interests them. Studies have found that most people prefer to skim through the transcripts of videos before diving into the audio.
Listening to a podcast usually takes longer than reading a blog post. Before diving in, many listeners prefer to review the transcribed text to decide if they want to listen to the whole podcast or just jump into a specific section.
Some users might even ditch the audio completely and only read the transcript. Either they can be so enthralled by the content that they forget the audio, or they simply prefer to read instead of listening. If both options are available, the choice is theirs (which makes for an ideal user experience.)
More than 20% of U.S residents speak a language other than English at home. For those whose second language is English, transcription can help these listeners understand complex words or phrases. They can paste the text into Google Translate or use the text to follow the interview at their pace.
Your listeners are not the only ones that can benefit. Your content team will be happy as well. They will be able to easily repurpose your transcript into a blog post or other forms of content marketing.
Reason #3: You’ll Help Make Your Financial Podcast More Memorable
Audio transcription will make your podcast easier to share and store.
Every podcast has notable quotes. Bits that are so good listeners will want to share them or store them for future reference. Without transcripts they would have to pause the episode, rewind, pull out their notes…in short, it’s too complicated (especially if they are listening on the go).
With a transcript they can scroll over to the exact section of the episode they are looking for. They can easily copy the content, take notes, or share their favorite excerpts on social media or their website.
Audio transcription is especially important for financial podcasts discussing complex or nuanced ideas. Each one of your episodes will most likely be packed with key insight and practical information which is handy for your listeners to store and use as a future reference to make decisions.
Reason #4: You Can Add Credibility to Your Podcast by Adding Show Notes
Beyond audio transcription adding show notes can further improve your listeners’ experience.
Podcaster and best-selling author Tim Ferriss is a pro at adding interesting show notes and episode resources. Good show notes are like hooks that make it irresistible for users to press “play”.
His show notes include the most crucial points mentioned so that listeners can jump to that exact moment in the episode. Tim Ferriss and other podcasters include people mentioned, books mentioned, and relevant links as well.
With these resources, listeners can learn more about the topics or guests featured in each episode. They can also entice users to listen since they can share an affinity with the mentioned content.
Reason #5: Enable Deaf Users To Read Your Podcast Episodes
Last year, deaf podcast enthusiast Istovi asked this question on Reddit: “As a deaf person, I get sad when I think of podcasts because I cannot listen to them and there [is] generally no captioning support of any kind. Will you help me find podcasts that provide transcripts, captions, or whatever so I can connect to the podcast in that way? Thank you.”
The question got thousands of upvotes and ended up on the front page of Reddit, which is quite an accomplishment.
The attention his post received gives an insight into deaf people missing out on the great content of podcasts. Well, they shouldn’t be missing out on yours. With audio transcription, you will be able to improve the financial lives of millions of deaf or hard of hearing Americans by allowing them to read the content of your financial podcast.
So, How Can I Transcribe My Financial Podcast?
There are free and paid transcription tools and services available to podcasters as well.
A commonly used free program is OTranscribe. It allows you to upload an audio file and will play the audio at your preferred speed while you are typing. The drawback is that you will still have to do the typing yourself. There are also free automatic transcription services such as Podcast Transcribe.
Another option is to hire a contract freelancer on platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.
However the fastest and most popular option to transform all your episodes into text is by subscribing to a paid transcription service such as Rev or Trint. With Trint the first 30 minutes are free, so you can test the service before you buy it.
Once you have the transcribed text of your podcast you should display it on your website directly below the audio player with your episode, or in your show notes.
For these 5 reasons, if you have a financial podcast you should consider using transcription as part of your process. You’ll not only be creating a better user experience, but you’ll be helping to create a stronger signal boost for your podcast.
Starting a financial podcast and need some marketing assistance? Contact Gate 39 Media today.
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