AP 0948: How Do I Produce Podcast Transcripts?

AskPat 948 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey. What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 948 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me. As always, I am here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

Really quick, this is out of the ordinary here for AskPat, but I just want to take a moment. For those of you who've been listening for a while, maybe you're on a drive, or you're on a walk with your dog or your family, or maybe you're out jogging, or at the gym . . . Wherever you are, if you've been listening for a while, I want you to imagine me giving you a high five right now, because I'm just super thankful for you. I wish I could give you all a high five, because it's just super cool that you're taking the time to listen, so I appreciate you so, so much. If you ever do see me in person, just give me a high five and I'll know that you listen to this here. So, thanks so much.

Super cool. All right. Now, here's today's question from Brad.

Brad: Hi, Pat. My name's Brad. I have a question regarding podcast transcripts. Do you recommend adding them to your podcast posts? How do you go about creating transcripts? Do you have an automated way of doing it or do you hire someone? So on and so forth. I guess, what are the benefits overall of doing it and what are the downsides of not doing it? Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Brad. Thank you so much for the question. Transcripts are really important to me and there are many podcasters who produce them and there are other podcasters who don't. You can have a successful podcast without them. However, a transcript can help your podcast step up to the next level.

Now, for me personally, I know I have a lot of hearing-impaired members of my audience. For them alone, I would do it for them. I have a significantly large audience, so there are going to be many of those people and I want to make sure they get included as well. In addition to that, there are a lot of people who, although they might be able to hear a podcast, they just don't have the opportunity to sit down and listen to them. They want to take in the content, however, and a transcript can be a great way to speed through it much faster. I've heard some stories of people who have listened—and that's in air quotes—listened to the podcast at work while reading the transcript because they can't listen to it out loud. For those reasons, you could potentially start to transcribe your show.

You can test it out. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to go into the backlog and do all of them, although I have done that myself. You can just start with one and see what you can do with it. See if people actually will read it, see if people will benefit from it. There are other people, like James Schramko from SuperFastBusiness. He uses his transcript specifically as a lead magnet, to help drive more email subscribers into his list. I know a lot of people—and this is myself included—who use transcripts to not only add value to the podcast, to not only help people read it as well, but also to be able to quite easily take bits and pieces out of it, to take the text out of it and turn it into something like an ebook or turn it into quote cards for social media, or use it as quotes in specific blog posts.

Here's the other big thing. A number of people are using the transcripts specifically for SEO purposes, for search engine optimization purposes. Either copying and pasting that transcript and putting it in that blog post along with your show notes, or using some other tool to hide that text and only when they click on a link to then open it up on the same page, using . . . I think there's a plugin called Spoiler or wpSpoiler. It's for people who don't want to see the movie spoilers for movie reviews. They click on that when they want to hide everything or see everything, so you could use a tool like that. Honestly, I don't know if that tool still exists, wpSpoiler, but there are many other tools out there that enable you to hide text and then show it. That's a great place to show Google, but not humans unless they want to see it. So, that's why you might want to start transcribing your show.

They aren't terrible things that happen if you don't. However, there are a lot of cool things that can happen if you do, like I already mentioned. You won't get hardly anybody who says, “Hey, why don't you have a transcript?” I think it's something that is still seen as sort of a plus or a bonus, not something that's necessarily required for your podcast. I would recommend doing it if you have the funds, because it does take a lot of work to get a transcript done. In the beginning, because I didn't want to spend money on my business, because I was just like, “Oh, I got to keep it all for myself and I can do all this stuff myself,” I actually transcribed a couple episodes on my own. I soon realized that, “Whoa. I don't want to do this anymore,” because it took forever. It took like two hours to do a thirty-minute episode, because it's just like, “Play. Type. Rewind a little bit. Play. Type.” Oh my gosh. It just took forever. There's some people out there who can type much faster than I can, who have better listening skills and can remember things much better than I can. Those people are—some of them are transcriptionists or transcribers and they do a wonderful job.

I use a tool now called Rev. You can upload directly to that through your desktop. What's really cool about Rev is I also use it to . . . When I record things on my phone, like notes and things like that, you can click a couple buttons to, through your app—through Rev, the app that you download—have a human on the other end transcribe it. I believe the price, at least in this point in time, is one dollar per minute. So, you can see how it adds up. A thirty-minute show, thirty dollars for transcription. You typically, through Rev, will get it back within twelve hours, which is super handy. It's done by a human and the quality is about 99 percent spot-on, so I've never had any problems with them.

That's what I've used. I've also used a virtual assistant in the past too. That's taken a lot longer and can often be a little bit more expensive too, so Rev.com is a solution I would offer right now, unless . . . Many of you might know some other solutions, in which case, share them. Use the hashtag #AskPat948, again #AskPat948, if you know a place to get transcriptions done. I would prefer to have them done by a human as well. There are some automated tools, like Dragon speech software or something like that, that allow you to speak and have the system or the computer analyze what you're saying and type it out for you, but it's never . . . I've never been in front of a software that was able to interpret my sentences, and the structure of what I was saying, correctly. You spend more time correcting than if you were to actually just do it on your own.

Hopefully that helps, Brad. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. I want to offer you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote today from Henry Hewes, and that is . . . This is a really interesting one, by the way: “To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.” Recurring. Recurring? Recurring. “To be reborn, to be—” Excuse me. “To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.” So true, right? How many times do we feel like we need a reset button or we want to try something new? We need that feeling of new and fresh all the time, so keep that in mind when you're selling something. How can you make somebody else's life feel renewed and refreshed? All right. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.