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How to Capitalize on Free Content From Podcasts
Category: WebmastersA major challenge for webmasters is getting or building content that will engage visitors and bring them back to your site often. This article describes how to use other people’s podcasts to add highly engaging audio content to your site and keep it up-to-date automatically.
One of the major challenges for every website owner is generating compelling content that will engage visitors, keep them one your site, and bring them back in the future. Audio and video are great at engaging visitors, but not everyone has the time, tools and talent required to produce quality audio and video.
Those who don’t want to produce their own audio and video content can take advantage of content generated others using syndication technologies. In this article, I’ll show you how to syndicate podcasts — ie. how to enable your website’s visitors to listen to someone else’s podcast right on your site.
The first step is to find a podcast on a topic that will be of interest to your website’s visitors. To do that, use your favorite search engine to search for “podcast directory”. You’ll find a number of directories listing podcasts covering a variety of topics. You can also find podcasts that may not be listed in the directories by searching for, for example “internet marketing podcast”, “human rights podcast”, etc.
Be sure to listen to a few episodes of the podcast before you syndicate it - just because it’s on the right topic, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s interesting! Also be sure to check the publisher’s terms to make sure they don’t prohibit syndication of their podcast. Most won’t because syndication gives them free expose to a wider audience.
Once you’ve found a podcast, you’ll need a script to import it into your website. (Why do it manually when there’s software available that will keep your site up-to-date with the latest podcast episodes automatically?) Be sure that the script you choose can display an audio player on your page, and not just a link to the audio file. Otherwise, it will be too cumbersome for the user, as well as taking them away from your site!
One script that does this well is , your webpage will be updated so that visitors can always listen to the latest episode right on your site.
All that’s left to do is make sure that you have original textual content on your site for your visitors to read while they’re listening or after they’re done. You can leave the audio work to someone else.
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