A Blog with a Podcast (BlogCast): A GREAT Idea
Written by Scott Whitney
We are in the final stages of developing a brand new website for one of our long-running shows, the Living in Las Vegas Podcast. One of the most exciting things we’re developing is the seamless integration of a stand-alone blog along with the podcast content. For companies interested in reaching out to their customers and prospects in more then one way, this is the way to go.
Here’s why I LOVE this combination: It allows me to touch my audience with the rich media associated with the podcast AND also allows for quick hits–brief bits of information that keeps the audience and me connected.
More importantly, if you configure your website correctly, you can create multiple RSS feeds to allow your visitors to access what they want when they want it.
For example, we’re going to have the following feeds:
- ALL — This feed will contain both the blog posts and podcast episodes.
- AUDIO ONLY — This feed will just contain the podcast audio posts
- BLOG ONLY — For folks who just want to read the more frequent blog posts, this is the feed for them.
Because the foundation of our new site is WordPress, this is VERY easy to do. Let’s say for example that this blog contained podcast episodes as well. And let’s further agree (for this exercise) that the Speaking category was my podcast category.
To access just the Speaking category via the web, you would go here:
http://www.podworx.com/blog/index.php/category/speaking/
To turn that into an RSS feed, just add the word feed to the end of the URL:
http://www.podworx.com/blog/index.php/category/speaking/feed
Pretty neat, huh?
This is an especially good idea for companies that have long gaps of time between podcast episodes. Now, as you’re preparing for your next episode, you could be teasing your audience with a glimpse of what’s to come or provide other useful information that doesn’t warrant the production of a full podcast episode. Regardless of how you use the blog+podcast combination, you can be sure that you’ll further enhance the connection between you and your subscribers. Which is the point, right?
Posted on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 · 2 Comments
We’ve been doing this at our site, too. In addition to the reasons that you mentioned, our other hope was that it would allow our audience, most of whom is new to blogs and unfamiliar with podcasts, to learn about our podcast and try it from the player within the blog. Many of our readers have told us that ours is the first podcast they’ve ever listened to. I think that if we had a separate blog for the podcast show notes, we would have never gotten those listeners.
Excellent point, Ann! We all must recognize that many (most?) people still don’t know what a podcast is. Regarding the embedded player, in a talk I’ll be giving next month, the embedded player will be an important part of increasing the probability of listenership.