26. Why Transcriptions Are Worth Your Time

This transcript was created using Headliner. It has been copied and pasted but not proofread or edited, so it may contain errors or inaccuracies.

Laura: Welcome to Podcasting for Business Owners. I’m Your host, Laura McCrae, a podcast consultant, educator and self confessed podcast nerd. If you’re thinking of launching a podcast or want to grow the one you have, you’re in the right place. Hold on to your headphones and let’s go. Hello and welcome. M back to Podcasting for Business Owners, the podcast that helps you share your story, lead your industry and grow your network through podcasting. Today, I’m talking about why you should consider transcribing your podcast episodes. Transcriptions might not be the first thing you think about when planning your podcast, but they’re a useful tool that can benefit you, your guests and your listeners in so many ways. I’ll cover how transcripts make your podcast accessible to more people, why they’re great for search engine optimisation, some of the challenges involved in transcribing, and the tools to get you started. I’ll also share a couple of stories from my experience to show you the impact transcripts can have. Let’s start with accessibility. Did you know that more than 1.5 billion people, that’s nearly 20% of the global population, are hard of hearing? This statistic comes from a study by the World Health Organisation and it highlights how important it is to make your content accessible. By adding the transcript to your podcast, it ensures that you’re not excluding a large group of people from consuming your content. One of my clients is all about inclusivity. But when she launched her podcast, having a transcript for her podcast wasn’t at the forefront of her mind. There’s so many things to think of when launching a podcast. You’ve got to promote the show, record the show, wrote all the show notes and everything, and having a transcript just got missed. But when it came to inviting guests onto her show, some of them unfortunately said no. And the reason for this was because she didn’t have transcripts on her podcast. They said she wasn’t being inclusive. So for her now, providing an error free transcript is a really important part of her, uh, podcast process. This ensures that she’s being really inclusive even if you don’t have an accurate transcript. By having a transcript shows your commitment to making your content accessible to as many people as possible. Now let’s talk about SEO or search engine optimization. Currently, search engines like Google can’t hear your audio. This means that if you don’t provide a transcript, the content of your podcast isn’t searchable online. Adding a transcript gives search engines the text they need to index your episodes. This helps your podcast rank for keywords and increases the chance of new listeners finding you through search engines. While technology might change in the future, right now transcriptions are one of the best ways to make your podcast content searchable. If you’re already investing time and energy in creating great episodes, why not make sure they’re easy to find? So if you’re ready to start transcribing your podcast, there’s a few tools you can use. Some popular tools are otterai, Descript, and Headliner, and if you’re recording on software like Riverside FM and Zoom, they create transcripts for you automatically Anyway, some podcast hosting platforms also offer transcription features. I know they have this on Buzzsprout because I’ve seen it on there and I’m sure the other hosting platforms do it too. I think you might have to pay a little bit extra for this service. I currently use Headliner, but I’m not married to it. It’s just the first one I ever used and I’ve ended up sticking with it, but I’m open to other options. They all basically do the same thing. I should add that no AI transcription tool is perfect and there’s always going to be errors. And when I say always, I mean always. These transcriptions are never perfect. Personally, I don’t have time to read through my, uh, transcript and make it error free. I just don’t have the time and resources for this. If this is something that’s important to you, like my client I referred to earlier on in the episode, her VA reads through her transcripts for her and makes sure they’re perfect. So if this is important to you, I’d recommend getting a VA to do this for you or setting aside some time to do this. So for me, I just copy and paste a transcript from Headliner and put it on my website and I, uh, know it’s going to have errors in it, so I just put a little clause at the beginning of the transcript that says this transcript was created using Headliner. It’s been copied and pasted, but not proofread or edited, so it may contain errors or inaccuracies. So that just covers me. So it all depends on your priorities really, whether you want it accurate or you’re happy to just make do with what they these AI tools create for you. Beyond accessibility and SEO, transcripts

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Laura: offer some other great benefits. When I have a guest on my show, I send them the transcript of the episode. This allows them to repurpose the content for their own social media, blogs or newsletters. And it’s a Win Win. Because it helps them to create their own content and it also encourages them to promote the episode that they were on on my podcast to their audience. Another thing, some people prefer reading to listening. Or they might be somewhere where they want to consume their content and it’s in a noisy room so they want to read instead. I also spoke to someone the other day who really liked a podcast, but she couldn’t stand the sound of the person’s voice. So they prefer to just read the transcript of the podcast instead. So a transcript gives your audience another way to consume your content. Another benefit, transcripts make it easy for listeners to revisit specific parts of your episode. In one of my first episodes, I mentioned that there’d be a link in the Show Notes to a trello board that you could download to help you get organised with your podcast. And silly old me forgot to put the link in the show notes and a listener contacted me. She said, oh, I didn’t see the link in the show Notes for the trello board. I thought I’d made it up when I was listening. So I went to your transcript and searched up the word trello and realised I hadn’t made it up. So instead of re listening to the episode, she went to the transcript, searched up the word trello and saw that I did mention it. She contacted me for the link, which I then provided. By the way, I’ll be sure to add that link to this episode’s Show Notes and I apologise again for missing it last time. So there you have it. Transcriptions make your podcast more accessible, improve SEO, uh, and offer benefits for both your guests and listeners. While the AI tools will never give you a perfect transcription, even a basic transcript can add a lot of value to your podcast. If you’ve been wondering whether to start transcribing your podcast, I encourage you to give it a try. You could just do a trial run of the different free versions that these tools provide, such as Headliner, uh, Otterai, and Descript. And I’ll put the links to these in the show Notes. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time on, um, Podcasting for Business Owners. If you found value in this podcast, please leave. A five star rating and a review would be even better. Your support shows that this is a good show which will attract high profile guests and in turn deliver greater value to you. This podcast is produced and edited by me. Don’t waste your time on editing. Let me help you with your podcast. Cheque out the links in the Show Notes to get in touch.

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