Podcast Transcripts - Why every podcast needs them

A Transcript, a textual version of your podcast episode, is awesome on many levels. It improves accessibility, makes it easier for people to find your content and gives you the chance of repurposing your valuable content for other uses.

Why you should transcribe your podcast

Audio content has many advantages over text, but more often than not it is good to also provide a written version of a podcast episode. Here are only a few:

• People who can't hear your podcast can still consume your content
• Searches on Google are text based
• Makes it easy to find, quote and share valuable parts of an episode after listening
• Opens opportunities to easily compile your content into blog posts, articles, presentations or even books

I am sure there are many more reasons, but those are the ones we're going to focus on in this article.

Improved accessibility

Not being able to listen to a podcast episode can have a lot of reasons, from not physically being able to to not liking to listen to verbal conversations. Everyone should be able to consume your content and it also opens up a whole new world of audiences for you.

Searchable and more important, findable

The process of search engines, like Google or Bing, going through websites and making the content searchable is called indexing. Indexing text is, compared to indexing audio, a piece of cake. But without your podcast being in the search engines catalalogs, your missing a lot of opportunities with people searching for exactly the stuff you were talking about in your latest episode but not finding it because the search engine does not understand it. Change this by providing a transcript and see your website visits and eventually your subscriber and download count go through the roof.

Finding, quoting and sharing value

Most of your audience listens to your podcast because they get value out of it. It does not matter is this is entertainment, life improving or business value, they come back because they like what they hear and probably want to share the value they find with others. However, if you ever have tried to share an audio snippet of a podcast you listen to, you know that it's next to impossible. So why not give your listeners something they can scan for their favorite part and then easily quote it on their blog or share it on Twitter, Facebook or whatever the kids are using today.

Making more out of your content

Some of you might podcast for the fun they get out of it, others because they want to share their expertise and yet others because they want to push their business forward. So why not reuse something you already have produced and turn it into something new. The hurdle for converting a part of an episode into a blog post or a slide deck and presentation you can give at a conference lowers by a lot when you already have the text available and being able to reshape it into another format.

Up next

This time we told you why you should offer transcripts, next time we'll show you how to do it. So either subscribe to our blog or follow us on one of our social media accounts to learn more!