Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business

Chapter 17

Podcasting: Is This Thing On?

Podcast (n.): An audio program in a compressed digital format, delivered over the Internet to a subscriber and designed for playback on computers or portable digital audio players such as the iPod.

As you can see by the definition, the term podcast is more about the delivery mechanism than anything else. But as the medium has evolved over the past several years, you’ll often hear people refer to audio downloads as podcasts. There are also video podcasts (see Chapter 16). Here, we are focusing on audio.

Podcasts are a great way for your organization to share audio content with your audience. Although online video is considered sexier than audio, you can’t easily consume videos while driving, walking on a treadmill, or working on a spreadsheet in the office. Think about all the places that your audience might enjoy accessing your content and where audio would work better than video. Quite a few, right?

Podcaster, blogger, and speaker Mitch Joel, who is the author of Six Pixels of Separation (Business Plus, 2009), agrees that podcasting appears to have lost some of its appeal in recent years, particularly as video has boomed. But podcasting remains one of the best ways to produce content, because it allows you to essentially be the program manager of your own radio station. What’s more, unlike traditional radio, podcasting allows you to target as narrow an audience as you wish, so your show can draw a very specific audience of qualified listeners. ...