Doing it yourself
Any time you can get your product or service on the air it’s a good thing. It’s even better if you can get yourself some airtime and do the plugging first hand. That’s the beauty of Youtube: Acquire a channel, shoot some videos, get some followers and before you know it you have your own duck-taped version of the QVC Network.
Some pretty awesome and lucrative endeavors started out just like that. I don’t try to make more it than it is. If you want to beef up your sales presentation you can ratchet your efforts up a notch and produce a Podcast (just your voice or you and a guest). What do you have to lose? These days the need for product is so great your chances are as good as any that you have your finger on the pulse of some original programming.
Enter Audible
Amazon Audible is going the same route (OK, maybe they have a little bigger budget to work with) with original content voiced by professional talent. In fact, Nieman Lab explains that “Long-anticipated original content has finally arrived in the form of a new “Channels” section in the Audible mobile app.”
The Channels section (currently in beta and rolling out on iOS and Android to some Audible members even as I write), streams collected short-form audio: Ranging from read-aloud versions of New York Times articles to complete shows from PRI’s The World to episodes of Charlie Rose. Nieman Lab also points out that “Audible is even serving up its own multi-source collections of content (i.e. “The Daily Rush” and “The Weekender” among others)
Podcasting is the new blogging
Audible is looking to push the boundaries of audio content. They refer to it as “short form content” of 60 seconds or less. Perfect for the complete lack of attention that impacts everything we do in to shorter and shorter clips: Movies are shorter, songs are shorter. Heck, let’s make news content shorter as well. You can snicker all you want but podcasting (in whatever form) is the new blogging. Podcasting is to now what blogging was to the early 2000’s.
Now wrap yourself around this: When it comes to platforms (as in, how can you get your podcast on the air), podcasting has been a remarkably open one. All you need is access to a server and you can publish to the world. Think of what that means to your business! The possibilities are endless.
Show me the money
Believe me when I tell you, this podcast stuff is a good thing. Oh wait, is the word podcast too “millennial” for you? Ok, let’s call it a program. And because these programs are a good thing, the mass availability of distribution through an RSS feed for example is going to privatized and quick. Which is why you have platforms like Audible Channel coming online that, by the way, comes complete with an audience that is already paying $14.95 a month to download virtually every Kindle book in existence.
A podcast by any other name is still a podcast. The sooner we learn to harness its power for good the sooner we all make a buck.
