The Value of Podcasting

So I’ve been doing the Webside Chats podcast for awhile now. I thought I’d write and let everyone know how having a new podcast has been going as a content and traffic strategy for Friday Traffic Report.

Webside Chats for Content

The response from readers has been positive, but a little lighter than I expected. My feeling is that people are listening but forgetting to comment on individual chats. Also, people are downloading them from the RSS feed and not necessarily listening with the player on the individual chat posts all the time.

The chats in total have been downloaded over 2000 times since I started. This means people have grabbed them with their “pod catchers” and put them on their iPods or phones to listen to them. That’s a great sign of interest so far.

Webside Chats for Traffic

The traffic I’ve been able to isolate as being generated by Webside Chats is encouraging. It is definitely traffic I’d have missed out on without the podcast, but maybe not for the reason you are thinking.

Being able to interview people who fans search for gives me new keywords to score for in the engines. Darren Rowse isn’t just a great guy, he’s also a great keyword.

People looking specifically for content they can consume as a podcast now have ways to get it through me. Where before they’d have to come to Friday Traffic Report to read, they now have options to listen to great marketing interviews on the plane, on the way to work, or while working out.

When you do a good interview, your interviewees link to you. I’d never gotten a link from ProBlogger other than through comments before I interviewed Darren for Webside Chats. The links from high traffic sites will be helping in the search engines as well as driving traffic directly to the site.

Has Webside Chats Been Worth It?

From a content standpoint: absolutely.

The experts and web celebs provide great content that is insightful and in demand for internet marketers and bloggers.

From a traffic standpoint: absolutely.

The show’s guests link back and send traffic, making the podcast more and more popular as I put up new episodes. Those links help in Google as well and they are the highest quality links you can get on the web today because they are “in content” links and not just blog comments or blog roll links.

Other Benefits of Podcasting

Your blog becomes a multi-media experience with more to offer readers and, now, listeners.
You get to place your podcast RSS feed in podcast directories and on your social site profiles. You can expose your site, yourself, and your content to whole new channels where new, targeted followers can be reached.
You ramp up your credibility as a content provider and expert considerably. Everyone can write a post. Hardly anyone takes the time and effort to put together a good audio or video podcast with regularity. Your readers will immediately think more of you and your blog for having a regular podcast because it is so different than 99% of the content providers in every niche.
With a podcast you can network with bigger and bigger “celebrities” in your niche who will respond to you and want to take part in your show. This not only gives you content most others in your niche cannot or will not go after, but it puts you in the “Larry King” position in your niche. People start contacting you to be on the show.
By having a vehicle through which to network effectively with the top people in your niche, you benefit by having conversations that can lead to joint ventures and other connections with the people your interviewees know.

We are contacting people constantly for future shows. We aren’t limiting ourselves to the “usual suspects” in our niche and are looking at experts and successful people who are not only web celebrities, but who are known and respected offline as well. I think people will be surprised at who we get to be on future shows.

Here’s a Recap for Webside Chats Thus Far