The Seven Seductions of Podcasting

I ran across Jon Buscall’s website this morning. Jon is a first-rate marketer from Sweden and on his blog, Jon shares his experiences in running JontusMedia, a sole-proprietor communications, content, and marketing business.

Jon features a content channel that too few of us exploit: podcasting. The podcast I listened to was episode 20, which focused on “productivity.” It ran for about 20 minutes and offered four tips for business owners who “do it all.”

I’ve featured those tips below, but, for now, let’s talk about the Seven Seductions of Podcasting, to wit:

1. Makes your wisdom portable. Your customers/clients can listen to your podcast while they are driving, exercising, cooking, etc. If you’ve got good solid information to share, your window of opportunity to communicate grows exponentially when you podcast.

2. Allows you to multi-task while marketing. You can communicate convincingly via podcast anywhere, anytime: at midnight, in your pajamas, while folding laundry, recovering from the flu – you name it.

3. Barriers to entry are zilch. Podcasting requires very little equipment. If you’ve purchased your computer in the past three years, you’re equipped to record an audio file with a microphone and save the recording as an MP3 file, which you can post to your website or blog.

4.  Quick start-up is facilitated by online training videos. You’ll find many “how to podcast” videos on YouTube. This one takes you through the steps to create a podcast. It’s a bit tedious, but if you can sit through it, there’s a good overview. Note, the speaker on this video talks about Audacity, which is a popular program used for recording. Most of the Audacity-related videos are quite good.

5. Keeps your wisdom coming and going. podcast, which can be listened to during lunch and/or downloaded to an iPod, helps your customers bypass the info overload and consume your message effortlessly.

6. What a refreshing break in the onslaught of monitor myopia! How nice would it be for your customers/clients to be able to listen quietly, wherever they are, whatever else they are doing? This is a very nice nod to your “customer relations.”

7. Podcasting puts you on yet another marketing channel. This is the day of integrated marketing and you need to give your customers/clients a choice.

And now, Jon Buscall’s Productivity Tips. Thank you, Jon, for these tips and for the inspiration to write about what you do so well: podcasting.

1. At the beginning of the month, use a spreadsheet to schedule a month of blog posts. Write a few if you feel like it, but get 30 emotionally-charged blog titles down from which to get the creative juices flowing.

2. Tend to Twitter every day. Call up older blog posts if you must, but aim for 10 tweets per day. Note: Jon recommends the “Buffer Up” app for Tweet scheduling.

3. Weekly, spend an hour looking at the data and analytics of your business. How many visits, comments, retweets, follows, etc. did you get? Don’t obsess. Just make a note of the data to use as reference points.

4. Set up an infallible “to-do” process for project management. Jon likes Basecap and Hi-Rise by 37 Signals.