Mosher Media Podcast – Writing Blogs Using a Transcription of a Video Podcast.

In this episode of the Mosher Media podcast Dan Mosher presents findings and observations on using YouTube transcriptions of a video blog style podcast delivered from a few select talking points. As an example, below is the written blog based on this video podcast.

After a long hiatus, the Mosher Media podcast is back and today we are talking about what we might call old guy guessing or even old man tinkering. Today we’re going to talk about Mosher Media’s social media efforts behind the scenes. Of course we’re glad the Mosher Media podcast is back and thanks to Soundcloud and YouTube, all of the Mosher Media podcasts that we’ve already done are still there. We’ve had a lot of fun putting together these podcasts and as usual I have a range of topics to discuss. Hopefully I’ve been able to provide some insight into the media business and provide something that is useful if you’re interested in using video or media to grow your business. Some of the things that I’ve suggested and some of the tips that I’ve provided are things that you can do yourself. There’s a lot of things in media that a business owner who’s also doubling as the marketing person can do with media, social media, podcasting and more to grow the business. And ultimately, that’s what all of this is about. It is about putting food on the table. It is about finding new customers. It is about letting people see who you are, what your products and services are and using all of the incredible tools that we now have available to us, which for those of us who have been in business and in media for decades, the tools we have now are incredible, if not mind blowing. I could not have imagined in the early 90s when I was starting out in video production all of the things that we are able to do now. It is absolutely incredible. And as you could probably tell if you listen to any of my podcasts, I love this business. I love all of these tools. I love how the media business has evolved over the years. I’m still in it after all of these years and still feeling fortunate and blessed that I have been able to stay in the work that I love and the industry that I love. What I want to talk about today is the use of blogs to grow your business, specifically video blogs. There are some tricks and some tips I would like to provide, and one of them is that the moment you post a video to YouTube, you will have available to you within a couple of minutes a Transcription of your podcast speech. And if you are not a good writer, but you’re like me, you enjoy having a couple of talking points and sharing thoughts, you’re writing a blog as you record your podcast. So if you’ve written all your talking points, and you know what you want to say, and you know all of the ideas because you’ve got them in your head, and you record your speech. Once you upload the video to YouTube, YouTube will give you a transcription. You simply copy the transcription, edit it and post it to your website as a blog. If you want you could even provide the transcription to a writer for editing to craft it into a well written blog. If you have the time you could rewrite the transcription yourself and take all of those words that are yours and put them into a blog. This is a fast and easy way to have a written blog on your website that is authentic. It’s your content. It’s you speaking from the heart. It’s you sharing what you know. And if you’re doing it like I do, the goal is to have some thought that’s come to me or something that I’ve tinkered with in our business that has been successful, something that has worked. I am at a point in my career where I want to share what I’ve learned. And of course through a lot of these podcasts and blogs I’ve shared a number of mistakes and failures. We celebrate those mistakes and failures as the only way to move anything forward. To fail is to learn and to accept failure and embrace failure is the way to gain experience. The idea behind all these podcasts and blogs is that your audience comes away with some new idea, some learning, maybe even some inspiration. Now let’s talk about what you do with all this text once you have it. Search engines like Google love text. Take the text and post it on your website as a blog. Once you put your blog on your website, add pictures, maybe even a link to the video or embed the video into the blog page. If you’ve done a video podcast or an audio podcast on the same topic and that’s where all the content for that blog came from, it would make sense to create a page on your website that’s easy to get to or post the content as a blog. If you’re using WordPress, then you make it as a post so it’s automatically in the blog section. Then you take all of your text that comes from the transcription of this amount of talking, post it to your web page as a blog, put up an image to go along with it to make it visually interesting. Doing this yourself is great. Of course, if you have a web developer, there’s nothing wrong with sending an email that says, here’s my text, here’s my picture and here is a link to the video on YouTube. In my experience, if you really want to embed the video into your web page or blog in a more advanced sort of way it is better to post the video to Vimeo or a more professional video hosting service like Google Cloud Storage or Amazon Web Services. Vimeo is the way to go and I’ll tell you why. With Vimeo, you can pay an extra fee if you are so inclined and you can turn off the Vimeo branding on the player. If you have a Vimeo pro account and you have all of your videos hosted on Vimeo, then you put the Vimeo link on your web page. The lack of the Vimeo branding on the player takes away the ability of the person looking at that particular blog to click on the Vimeo link and then go to your Vimeo channel. There’s nothing wrong with somebody looking at your Vimeo channel, but you want to keep all of your viewers, your traffic, or your reader on your website. You want to keep them focused on your blog and not click away from your website. This is what I have learned, and again, this is old guy guessing and old man tinkering. So, if anybody out there that works in social media professionally, which of course I do not, wants to call me out and say, “This is something we’ve known for years and this is hardly new information”, go ahead and call me out. I love a good roast. I like to create my blog, put it on the website, post a link to it on my LinkedIn, on Facebook, all of the places on social media that I like to post content so that the person isn’t seeing my complete blog on Facebook. They’re seeing a little section of it, a headline, a teaser. So if they really want to see what I’ve written, they have to click through to moshermedia.com. Another trend I’ve noticed lately is that everybody is putting their link in the comment section of their social media post. A lot of this is learning by watching what everyone else is doing. I have noticed that when the local TV stations are posting a news story they put the headline as a Graphic but then it says” see link in comments” or “see story below” with a link to the story on their website in the comments. LinkedIn is different. I haven’t seen anyone on LinkedIn posting links in comments, only on Facebook. So I just started doing this. This is the kind of thing where if everybody else is doing it, we should probably be doing it too. Of course this philosophy isn’t a good idea in other parts of your life, but on social media, if other people are doing it and you’re Noticing, give it a try. Look around at who you admire. Maybe you have competitors you admire, maybe people in other industries that are doing social media things and you say, “Wow, they’re doing a good job.” No harm in emulating what they’re doing and then test to see if that creates some success for you. What is success in all of this? Success is when somebody searches on Google or some other search engine using the keywords video or they type in video production Akron Ohio and our site ranks at the top. I want Mosher Media to come up at the top. Right now at the time of this podcast if you type in video production company Akron we rank one or two or three. I believe it’s because of all of this work I’ve been doing. I will tell you again, I’m not an expert. I always think I’m just lucky. I’ve just done enough tinkering to move the needle. I think Google rewards some effort. You don’t have to have a lot of traffic, you just have to have one more click, one more viewer or one more visitor to your site than your next closest competitor. So if the guy down the street has three people looking at his website, good for him. All you need is five and you win. And in a niche business like ours, we don’t have tens of thousands of people looking at our websites. All we need is to have just a couple more than the competitor. I will also say that if you have a company Facebook page and you’re a small business serving a region or a market or you’re just serving your hometown and you have 2,000 followers on your Facebook or LinkedIn page, you are doing great. If you have a YouTube channel like we do that has 1,500 subscribers then you are doing great. Our YouTube channel has 1,590 subscribers and I appreciate every single one of them. I would like to be doing even more content that is hopefully beneficial for all of our followers and subscribers. For some reason there is this idea that you have to have a million followers or a million subscribers to be successful in social media. But the reality is if you own a small business and you have 1,500 followers then create content for that audience. These are people that took the time to follow and subscribe. They want to hear from you. This is an opt-in mailing list. A thousand followers on your company Facebook page is a win. I’m going to suggest that no matter what level you produce video, even if you put up a webcam. Even if you built a home studio and you did put up a webcam, in my opinion, one of the most important things is the sound quality, especially if you’re doing it the style I’m doing here where a good majority of the listeners will only be listening to the audio. Much of our podcast audience will listen on Soundcloud or on other audio only platforms. They won’t see the YouTube presentation. So audio is very important. On the topic of audio I can’t leave out my personal dilemma. Since we produce a lot of television programs and a lot of those video interviews are at a news desk, I prefer lav mics. In a lot of scenarios, these voiceover mics, or as we would call radio mics or even podcast mics have better sound quality. So, I’ve decided that since the majority of my audience will be taking in this content in an audio only format that I’m going to ditch the lav and I’m going to go with a voice over style mic. And it’s so if you go over to the local Best Buy or go online to Amazon or B&H Photo New York or one of those kinds of places, you can buy a podcast mic for $100 that will sound a thousand times better than the tiny little mic that’s built into your webcam. And if you were only going to do one thing in your attempt at a do-it-yourself media video home podcast studio, audio is the place to spend money. The most important thing for me is to make sure I provide something useful. With today’s topic, I am hoping my readers and listeners have gained something from my experience with using podcast style video blogs. These ideas are fun but at the end of the day they have to have a business purpose. How can these ideas grow your business? How can video blogs improve your SEO? One big answer is that Google finds and logs these on social media and on your website. Google rewards effort. The final thing to discuss is with the disclaimer that I’m not an SEO expert. I’m not a digital marketing person. I am a video production media person. That’s my gig. I’m just sharing what I’ve observed. And here is a big one. If you build your YouTube channel with solid video content and you have it properly connected through your Google Business account that includes Adwords and Google Places you will have greater success. In Google Business or Google Places, whatever it’s called this week, they have a place where you can connect your YouTube channel for your business. And then the traffic on your YouTube channel that is set up for your business, branded for your business, can improve your SEO if it’s linked properly. Google gives you credit for your YouTube traffic, and obviously if you get a lot of people looking at your YouTube videos and there’s links to your website in the YouTube post this also helps tremendously. Make sure your YouTube channel is properly verified so you are permitted to add clickable links within your YouTube post. In this blog we’ve talked about a lot of things, and many of the things I’ve talked about are things you can do yourself. And no matter whether you do it yourself, hire a freelancer or a full-blown video production company, you’ve got to use video to grow your business, to put food on the table, and that’s what it’s all about.