Podcasting is taking off like a rocket ship! As an online entrepreneur, you have a tremendous opportunity to leverage this platform and get your content, your brand and your marketing message out to a wider audience. That’s why, on September 30th of this year which was National Podcast Day, we launched our five day a week show aimed at women entrepreneurs.
If you are not familiar with recent developments in the world of podcasting, you may have outdated notions about this new media resurgence. Let’s take a look at how podcasting stands up to two of the largest tried and true platforms, blogging and YouTube. But first of all, just to eliminate any confusion, let’s be clear about what a podcast is and what it’s not.
A podcast is NOT simply a recorded audio file that you put on your website. There is one crucial difference. A podcast is a recorded audio file, in mp3 format, which has been uploaded to a media host (different from your WordPress blog host) and then that file’s special URL, called an RSS feed…and here’s the magic difference…Through that RSS feed, your audio files are then syndicated (distributed) via a third party, such as iTunes and other directories. It’s the distribution that makes the difference and what makes a podcast.
Your listener does not have to go every time to your website to get a new episode, but can simply subscribe to your show and when new episodes are uploaded, iTunes automatically pulls those episodes via the RSS feed into iTunes and makes them available automatically for people who have subscribed to them. By some estimates, there are 450 million English language blogs with a new one being started somewhere in the world every half second…so no matter what your niche in the blogging space, it’s already saturated with hundreds and maybe even thousands of other bloggers writing about the same topic.
Maybe you have thought about putting videos on YouTube to attract leads. But consider this: a whopping 4 million hours of new video content a month is going on YouTube! In contrast, there are some 225,000 active podcasts, but many of them are not active, many have poor quality content and for many of them, the audio is subpar. So in reality there is even less competition.
But, there is also a mistaken impression floating around out there that you can start a podcast, get tens of thousands of downloads nearly overnight and make gobs of money from sponsors and selling your products. That is patently false. Like anything else, making a quality product or service takes time and effort; producing, hosting and promoting a podcast is no different.
For many people rushing to get their podcasts launched and into iTunes, they may start off with a bang, but will inevitably lose interest as they realize that podcasting is going to take consistent effort, both in production and in getting and staying visible. That’s great news for the online entrepreneurs who have persistence, staying power and the ability to produce a high-quality show. Producing a consistent, high quality podcast is our vision for Pink Coattails, and this expanding audio media is proving the perfect platform to provide information, connections and a voice for women business owners so they can ride in on the ‘coattails’ of other successful women entrepreneurs.
To celebrate the launch of Pink Coattails, Dr. Britt has announced her “Biscuits, Breakfast and Business” contest. Two lucky people will win an in-person breakfast and two-hour business consult at beautiful Serenbe Farms south of Atlanta and there are other great prizes as well. The contest ends November 5th. To find out more and to enter just go to: http://www.pinkcoattails.com/biscuits.
To subscribe to the Pink Coattails podcast on iTunes go to: http://www.pinkcoattails.com/itunes.