The Real Estate Tomato: Warning: These Simple Podcasting Secrets Will Increase Blog Traffic

As I head out of town for the week, thinking I really need to get an article published, our new friend Jessica Donovan from Real Estate License Direct swooped in with a guest post, on a topic that I have hardly covered: Podcasting. So lucky you; instead of having to wait until I get back with enchanting stories from the turquoise coast of Bermuda, Jessica is holding down the fort with this sweet post.

Thanks Jessica!

Warning: These Simple Podcasting Secrets Will Increase Blog Traffic

By Jessica Donovan

What if someone told you that you could increase your blogs traffic, subscribers and exposure with little to no work and without costing you a single cent, would you be interested? Listen, if hearing all of that wouldn't peak your curiosity, you may need to reconsider your means of generating new clients, because that would have the rest of us doing some extreme acrobatics that our bodies were just not built to handle!

All jokes aside, your blog needs exposure to be successful. It’s the simple truth, without having some sort of exposure whether it be through the Internet and/or real estate communities, your blog will not flourish and grow up to be a big blog. Now, now, relax a bit, there are a lot of ways to gain exposure, in fact a lot of them are covered right here on The Real Estate Tomato, but have you given any thought to gaining more exposure through the extremely hot podcasting universe? Well guess what, you can gain lots of exposure, even more targeted traffic and loads of new subscribers by simply clicking a few buttons, setting up some free accounts and instantly converting your plain old blog into a podcasting machine!

How to Turn Those Plain Old Blog Posts into Popular Podcasts

How can we not love the Internet, or more specifically, all of the great tools the Internet places at our disposal! There are actually a couple of very good and free blog to podcast conversion services, so please allow me to cover each one:

Odiogo - In my highly experienced yet humble opinion, the Odiogo "post to podcast" service is the best option available on the market at this time. This free service allows you to not only turn all of your future blog posts into podcasts, but it will also convert all of your past posts as well by utilizing the incredible power of rss feeds. Their service uses a unique text to speech program that allows listeners to "tune in" on your articles and listen to what you're writing about.

Once installed on your blog, Odiogo will automatically add a listen or play button above your posts giving readers the option to sit back and listen to each article. Odiogo will also give you free, detailed download statistics for your podcast channel along with the option to embed ads in your podcast channel to make a little revenue from those visitors. Best of all, the service is available on a variety of popular blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and more.

Talkr - While this service is extremely similar to what Odiogo offers, I just don't feel that their speech program is of the same quality, in other words sounds as good. Though they do offer a very nice user interface, again with detailed reports and customized submission to the iTunes service, which is really nice. The account is free to setup and only takes a minute, they will also produce a complete rss feed for your site that includes the mp3 podcast files for users to listen to at their convenience.

One nice thing about this service is that all of the features can be hosted completely off site for you, meaning that you can serve podcasts from your blog through Odiogo and use Talkr as a second means for additional exposure without the two conflicting in any way. I do suggest that you take a look at Talkr's free podcast service.

Premium Option - If you have the extra money, you might also consider going with a premium blog to podcast service such as AudioDizer, which offers some very intriguing distribution and advertising packages.

What About that Exposure You've Been Selling

Ah yes, exposure! Well here is the great thing, by simply setting up your free accounts on the two services above you are already receiving more exposure to your blog. Your new podcasts will be listed in their directories for people to find you by category or search term, all they have to do is click play. Also, as I mentioned above, Talkr will submit your podcast to iTunes which is excellent exposure and you can't beat the price but with a little leg work your sites exposure can double, triple, quadruple and even more, by submitting your podcast feed to the hundreds if not thousands of podcast directories available online.

I know, I know, busy agents don't have the time to go sniffing around for free podcast directories, it needs to be easier than that. Great, because it is much easier, here are some great lists of free podcast directories, just find the ones you like and submit your podcast:

That list of sites should keep you busy for a little while, of course if you run out you can always search Google for even more directories that will accept your podcast

Is There Anything Else I Need to Know About Podcasting

Everything above should just about wrap it up. Although you might want to consider publishing full feeds on your blog before setting up any of the services above. Publishing partial feeds will only allow for partial podcasts which may turn away potential listeners, so do them and you a favor and switch over to the full rss feeds.

Welcome to the Vine, Jessica!

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Tags: Real+Estate+Podcasting, Blogging+Advice, Real+Estate+Liscence+Direct, Jessica+Donovan

Comments

This is very cool! I'm giving Odiogo a spin at Mortgage Porter. I feel like a kid with a new toy. Thanks so much for sharing.

Posted by: Rhonda Porter | Oct 15, 2008 8:56:08 AM

Jessica - Thank you so much for the welcomed information! I've been just recently working with podcasts and want to find other avenues to use them and bring them more exposure! I will be checking out all the links you shared!

Posted by: Candace Robinson | Oct 15, 2008 9:08:33 AM

Hi Jessica! This is great timing. I've been want to learn more about podcasting. How can we tell if we have a full or partial RSS Feed? My blog comes into my Google Reader as a full post.

Posted by: Judy Peterson | Oct 15, 2008 10:10:23 AM

You are all very welcome! Podcasting is just another great tool that we can utilize to build a larger audience for our web projects and I hope that all of you give it a try. I have seen some amazing results on several projects using podcasting and in some cases it has doubled and tripled the size of a single blogs readership, which is a lot for any one "extra" to do.

Thank you for the great comments and I wish you all the best,

Jessica

Posted by: Jessica Donnovan | Oct 16, 2008 8:42:37 AM

Hi Jessica, Jim and Molly!
This was amazingly easy to do with a little help :-) I'll probably do a post to introduce it and then get going with the marketing. Thanks again.

Posted by: Judy Peterson | Oct 16, 2008 12:20:33 PM

Thanks for sharing, tell me do you have some form of affiliate program i can join? Please let me know where to go to join.

Posted by: Lead Generation program | Oct 23, 2008 2:47:50 AM

The idea of free podcasting for our blog sounded great, but has drawbacks that other Tomato fans should keep in mind. After reading this post, I immediately had mp3 files of our blog posts created in Odiogo. I think you should mention to the readers, that if they write with acronyms popular within their niche or industry segment, those words can be mispronounced. Plus, the tempo of the speaker was a little too robotic. We write our blog posts with bullet pointed info, and the voice results in the podcasts were unimpressive -- just long run-on sentences. Also, I'm a woman writer and do not like having my podcasts being spoken by a male voice. Maybe I overlooked that option in Odiogo, but did not see that I had a choice of choosing a female voice.

The other point is a little more sensitive. Our business focuses on socially responsible real estate. It is not appropriate for just any company to advertise on our blog, since inappropriate advertising could undermine our mission. As far as we can tell, neither Odiogo nor Talkr give us the ability to screen advertisers.

I did like the AudioDizer sample posts that I heard -- and understand that they come at a price. But the customization of voice, jingles, etc. seems to offer a little more professionalism. Am still exploring that option.

In any event, we do love you passing along this advice in the first place, despite some of our podcasting experiences this afternoon. Keep up the good blogging!

Posted by: Lisa Galley | Oct 30, 2008 6:11:16 PM

Thanks for sharing the free services Jessica:) it's like your sharing your toys to us for free. thanks a lot!

Posted by: mikel | Apr 29, 2009 5:41:45 AM