How To Add Transcripts to Your Podcast and Video Posts
Making your content easy to consume for everyone who visits is an important way to get your content out to as many people as possible. This post covers transcripts in detail, but I’ll also cover the other three formats as well.
You’ve probably noticed that most of my interviews are posted in four ways:
1. A slide presentation posted as a video. I simply listen to the interview again and create PowerPoint slides that highlight what we are talking about or add a bit of information that helps clarify our topic. I’ve tried saving time by actually creating the slides while I’m conducting the interview, but it became too much and the clicking of my keyboard interfered with the interview.
2. A flash player so that visitors can listen to the audio right at the post. This step also builds the podcast feed for iTunes (the plugin I use is simply called “Podcasting” and is from Spiral Web Consulting.
3. A direct link to the full mp3 file. Some people want to download the entire file so they can listen while offline or burn it to a CD. This makes that option available.
4. Transcripts. Some people would rather print out the text transcripts of the interview and read it. I do this frequently if I’m headed to the airport and want some reading for the trip. Or if I just want to get outside for a bit and enjoy our beautiful Southern California sunshine, this is a great option.
I use a service that actually specializes in medical transcription called MT-STAT. They aren’t the least expensive and they aren’t the most expensive. But they do terrific work and only minimal editing is needed if there are a lot of financial terms for the podcasts we do at TraderInterviews.com. For general “talk show” interviews like I do for MemberCon that don’t have a lot of complex terminology, I typically do zero editing. They are very good.
Transcription services definitely fit the phrase, “you get what you pay for” so my advice is, unless you want to do a ton of cleanup on the files that come back to you, find a service that does quality work and figure out how to pay for it. The keyword-rich text is great for search engine spiders and will help your rankings – it’s worth the extra cost. Expect to pay between $.75 and $1.25 per minute of audio.
If you’ve got a large community of fans, you can sometimes solicit them as volunteers to transcribe the entire audio file for you. It’s certainly not a long-term solution, but it’s free. I always wondered how in the world they got their listeners to do it for free for them, but I guess that’s why they call them “fans.”
Andrew Warner over at Mixergy.com does something interesting that looks like a great compromise. I’ve written about his site in the past. Andrew conducts interviews with Internet entrepreneurs and the content is outstanding. He puts the raw transcripts into a Google Doc and them embeds the doc into his post. He then invites visitors to edit any errors in the Google Doc.
Check out an example at his latest interview (and while you’re there, subscribe to his feed). Andrew reads this site, I believe, so Andrew if you’re reading this perhaps you can comment about how it’s working out. Do you do the raw transcript in-house or do you outsource that? And how is the community editing working?
The Interview Income blog is written by Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. The Interview Income Blog is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
