Note: I now use Rev.com for all my transcriptions.

AskPat Episode 136 Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 136 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. Today we have a question from Keith, but before I get to that, I want to welcome a brand new sponsor to the AskPat podcast, a company I've worked with in the past before, actually. This is Flippa.

FLIPPA. Flippa is a site you can use to purchase an existing web business or website. It's a number one market place to buy and sell websites. I've actually purchased a couple sites off of Flippa myself. Haven't really talked about it much because I didn't put a lot of time or effort into the sites that I built and they kind of died out, but I know a lot of people like Chris Guthrie who have done really well buying and purchasing websites, and Flippa is the place to go. You could use one of your passions or interests and use an existing site instead of starting from scratch. To check it out, go to Flippa.com/pat. You can find a whole bunch of sites that are up for sale now, or you can even sell your own site there if you want.

Alright, now let's get to today's questions from Keith.

Keith: Hey Pat, Keith here with PDRcollege.com. We have a podcast dedicated to a niche industry called paintless dent removal, and guys are really enjoying it. They're downloading it like crazy. But we don't have any written blog posts to go with it. Frankly, my partner and I are just too darn busy to sit down and write on top of producing the podcast, which I'm sure you know, there's a lot more work that goes into it than it sounds like. My question is, should I have the podcasts transcribed and post those as blog posts in addition to the podcasts to be more easily found through search engines, and to give people who may not want to want listen something to read? Thanks Pat. Really looking forward to your opinion on this. Really enjoy all the content that you put out and all the help that you give to everyone worldwide. You're the man. Talk to you soon.

Pat Flynn: Keith, thank you so much for today's question. It's a great one because a lot of podcasters wonder about the whole transcript thing. What are the benefits? Should I even do it? It costs a little bit of money to get it done. Sometimes up to a dollar, sometimes even if you want to get a rush order in, up to two dollars per minutes, which is crazy, especially if you consider that a lot of shows are 60 minutes long or up to 60 minutes long, or even longer sometimes. There are a lot of benefits to creating a transcript. For your show specifically, you said that you don't have any blog content really, so it would be very ideal for you to have some sort of written content on your site. A lot of people go as far as putting resources and links and a little bit of a summary of the episode, so people who are subscribed to their blog can see whether or not that's an episode they want to listen to.

However, it sounds like your primary audience is already listening to your show, which is great. However, a couple things. One, it's always good to bring people back to your site for more information so that they can come and then subscribe to your email list or purchase things. Because obviously, when people are listening to your podcast, they're out and about, and they're not necessarily in front of a computer or not on your sales page or anywhere where they can get your services for example. Anything you can do to bring people back to your site is a smart thing. Having extra written content will help. Transcripts will help as well. You can tell people to go download the transcript from your episode, for example, to get them back on your site where all those call to actions are.

You also mentioned something important. SEO. Search engine optimization. Having transcripts available for your particular episodes can be very beneficial for your site in whole as far as search engine rankings, and also authority. Episodes are typically pages long, and each and any one of those words could be words that people are searching for on Google. Even if it's not a top ranking keyword, for example, that you might be targeting, those long tail key words together can drive in a lot of traffic. For SEO purposes, I think it would be a great thing for you to do at least transcripts for your audio shows.

There's a lot of other benefits for developing transcripts as well. Like you hinted at, there are people out there who don't want to listen to episodes. There might be a whole audience that you are not reaching because they are either not listening to podcasts or they just don't have the time or they can't listen to it. There's a lot of people who are obviously hearing impaired, and I think they deserve a fair chance to absorb all that content as well. However, there's a lot of people who can't listen just because they're at work or whatever. It's late at night and the kids are asleep, or whatever the case may be. Yes, you could put your headphones in, but you know what I mean? You are missing out on the opportunity to deliver your helpful content to your audience if you are not hitting them in any way that they can consume it. I think for that purpose it's good as well, but think about this: You can use parts of those transcripts that you create for other things as well.

You could compile every five episodes into an ebook, for example, and give those away and get people onto your email you. You could take all the best information from all the shows that you've done and put them into an ebook that you can then sell on Amazon, or even a physical book as well, and you can make extra money that way, passive income. You could take parts of those transcripts, for example, maybe the best parts of each episode and put them into YouTube. You could have little two minute, three minute slideshow with the best part of your . . . even with the audio of those particular podcasts along with the text and have them transcribed in the description, which will help with SEO as well for your particular website. There's a lot of things you could do here.

That's one strategy that I've been thinking about doing. A lot of people take their audio file and they just plop it on to YouTube, the whole thing. I don't think people are going to be on YouTube listening for 30 minutes or 45 minutes, right? They're going to listen. If they're going to listen, they're going to listen through their favorite podcasting app, right? But on YouTube, I think there's an opportunity for you, especially for your subscribers who may be primarily consuming content over video. Again, another part of your audience that you might be missing out on. Might be cool to tease them a little bit with a snippet of a particular podcast episode, maybe the best part of it or the best conversation that was in it, then link them back to either your website or our audio file podcaster, or both. That would be a smart thing to do.

Then, of course, once you get these systems down for getting a transcript created . . . and I'll give you a tool for that in a second . . . so you get your transcript created. Maybe you take parts of it out and put it into a YouTube video, or every X number of episodes it's put into an ebook, or whatever the case may be. Once you create these systems down, you could still go on just recording. You can hire somebody, a VA, a virtual assistant, to do all this for you. I would recommend at least testing this. Maybe test this for five episodes, then put those five episodes in an ebook, and then drive traffic to a landing page where they can get the transcript. Just see what happens. You might find that it might not be worth it, but you also might find that it can completely blow you away and give you results that are unheard of or that you never thought.

The last thing I want to leave you with, Keith, is a tool for getting transcripts done. I personally work with somebody that I've been working with for the last two years. This is somebody that isn't through a service. It's just I've hired this person to help me do the transcripts. She's been amazing, and we've been working together for quite a while, like I said. If you can't find anybody, there are a lot of people out there who are willing to do that, but if you can't find anybody specifically, you could use a service, which I've used before at Speechpad.com. That's Speechpad, like inkpad, I guess. But Speechpad.com. That will run up between 75 cents to a dollar per minute, which is quite normal, I would say. They do a fairly good job. There's a lot of other services out there, but they don't use a lot . . . they don't back check their articles and things like that, or the transcripts . . . Speechpad does a fairly great job. They have human beings who do it, which is why it's that price. So, Speechpad.com, and that's sort of the approach I would take.

I'm really interested, Keith, to see what you do with this. Congratulations of the success of your podcast, and now it's time to perhaps take it to the next level with written word. I think having show notes, or at least a reason to come back to your site, is something you should be doing, if you're not doing already. Collecting those emails, and of course a transcript is almost a no-brainer. At least test it out for five episodes, see what happens, and come back at me with the results. So Keith, thank you so much for your question. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

I also want to thank today's sponsor which is Flippa. You can go to Flippa.com/pat check out all the sites that are for sale right now. It's actually really cool to just browse through and see what sites are available. I've purchased a couple sites in the past, and they've done okay and they're still there, but I just haven't really talked about them much because I haven't done what I was hoping to do, which was turn them into case studies, but that's always available for in the future. Great tip: Use one of your passions or interests or maybe find a site related to your existing site, or if you don't want to start from scratch, this is a good option not a lot of people use. Flippa.com/pat. Thanks again to the people at Flippa for sponsoring this show.

As always, I'm going to end with a quote. This quote is from somebody who's been quoted here plenty times in the past that is late Zig Ziegler. He says, “Every sale has five basic obstacles. No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.”

Cheers. Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.