Freelancefolder

Promote Your Freelance Services With A Podcast/Vodcast

Posted May 27, 2008 in Marketing 12 Comments »

Do you want to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in a niche? An excellent way to promote your skills as a freelancer is to create and publish a regular podcast about a select topic. By regular, I mean on either a daily, weekly or monthly schedule and sticking with it.

This podcast would appear on your professional website, where you promote your services. If it’s done well and is informative, it could help establish you as an expert.

Podcasting or vodcasting regularly also builds your public speaking skills, which could come in handy if you ever decide to give workshops or talks – a practice that can pad out your freelance income.

What If You Work In Several Niches?

If you’re a generalist who works in more than one niche, you have two choices:

1. Pick a topic that focuses on your most important niche – a la The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule).

   So if you work in niches A, B and C, and niche A currently gives you 80% of your income, maybe that’s where you should focus – especially if you want to prove your mettle in that niche.

2. Pick a topic so that you can promote your skills as a whole. E.g., podcast about freelancing or about podcasting.

However, you do have to decide, just as with blogging on your professional website, who it is you’re trying to reach with a podcast. At least with blogging, even if your content is aimed at someone other than potential clients, the latter can find you via search engines by typing in appropriate keywords – assuming you’re writing about topics of interest to them. For podcasts, if you don’t at least use appropriate tags to categorize them, and/or accompany them with an article, then there’s not much search value.

Should You Podcast or Vodcast?

Here’s a bold statement: I believe that the average person prefers activities that involve multiple senses over singular senses. I.e., video with audio over just audio. (Although there are times when your site’s visitors might prefer just audio, say for downloading to their iPod for listening during a commute.) Still, there are many reasons why a freelancer might not want to appear on camera:

1. Prefer visual anonymity, for personal safety.
2. Uncomfortable in front of a camera.
3. Don’t want to spend the extra time, effort and/or cost that’s necessary for producing video content. (You can produce regular audio podcasts with at very little cost beyond a reasonable microphone.)
4. Can’t remember lines without visual cues, such as a sheet of paper or large-print cue cards. The latter means that you can’t produce the vodcast by yourself, unless you have a means to flip the cards remotely.

If you’re avoiding live video only because of reason #4, you could use a teleprompter. If you can’t find one, some communities have videographer/ filmmaker collectives that rent equipment out to members.

What About Combining Still Images With Audio?

If you’re not ready for live video with a host, you can still leverage the benefits of the video format and of using a video sharing site for hosting (instead of a podcast hosting site). Here are some options:

1. Show a site/podcast series logo for the duration of the audio portion.
2. Show multiple images or a slideshow for the duration of the audio portion.
3. Screencast using Camtasia Studio, CamStudio (free) or something similar, and add narration either as you go or during “production”. This works best if you are reviewing software (desktop or web) or producing tutorials on how to use specific software.

Benefits of Video Podcasts

By “video” podcasts, I mean web video content that does not use live footage of any host – just audio and one or more images. If you’re not ready or do not want to produce live vodcasts, you still have some benefits in using video podcasts:

1. Allows you to visually brand your podcast by displaying your site logo or a custom podcast series logo.
2. Allows you to ease into adding slideshows, screencasts or video fragments without changing format. So you might eventually start replacing a few seconds of static image with live video content (movie trailers, video of host).
3. Allows listeners to download just the audio portion – with the appropriate tool – for use on an iPod or other media player. (At least until you start using live video.)
4. Low cost. Can be produced with pre-installed software on most PCs (Windows Moviemaker) and Macs (iMovie). (Some of the software I use for podcasting and screencasting does run on Linux-based computers, though I’m not sure about vodcasting.)
5. Uses video sharing sites, which generally have greater online presence than podcast hosting sites, and not to mention tend to offer free hosting.
6. Builds your skills in a controlled transition to video content, as discussed in Applying the Principles of Kaizen and Bootstrapping to Build Your Freelance Skills.

For more info, see my article, How to Podcast Using SplashCast or YouTube, at Performancing, for actual details on how to go about this. The article includes a list of suggested equipment and links to suitable software – some of it free or with 30-day fully-functioning trials.

Tips for Effective Podcasting

Even if you choose to go with just a podcast (audio), plan ahead:

1. Write a script. Repeat, write a script. You can always improvise on top of that script.
2. Warm up your voice. (Wearing something warm helps.)
3. Practice the script out loud, and revise it if you stumble on wording. The final wording should be conversational and flow well, and that’s not always evident at first write.
4. Allot time for multiple takes, even for topics you know fairly well. If you’ve never done this before, multiple takes might be inevitable, until you learn to relax your body.
5. Start by speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. There are already enough podcasts out there where the host is difficult to understand.
6. Pause slightly between sentences, and even longer between paragraphs. This helps later, when you have to edit multiple takes.
7. Be passionate without overdoing it.
8. Smile while you’re recording, unless you’re discussing a serious topic.
9. Use a reasonably good microphone, preferably on a mic stand – even a tabletop one. While you can use cheap (sub-$50) mics, they tend to make your voice sound hollow and cold. There’s more authority in a podcast if your voice is warmer. The alternative is to use a quality digital recorder (of the non-memo variety), which I’ve talked about in A Beginner’s Podcasting Guide, also at Performancing.
10. If you produce a “video” podcast, as discussed above, host at a good video sharing site. Then make sure that you add suitable “tags” to your videos
    when you’re uploading. This increases the
    chances of being found via search engines.

For additional tips, read 9 Podcasting Tips.

Summary

A quality, consistent, informative and regularly published podcast can build your presence online and brand you as a subject matter expert for a given niche, as well as build your public speaking skills – something that’s handy for a transition into well-paying workshops and talks. Thus, the time, effort and minimal cost could provide a worthwhile return.
One last bit of advice: your podcasts do not have to be in English.

It depends on the market you are catering to. For more about the podcast/ vodcast process, what tools/ gear to use, and where to find them, please visit the articles linked to above. Also check out Podcast Academy for great podcasts about podcasting.

Raj

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About The Author: Raj Kumar Dash is a long-time freelancer/ web consultant, an experienced and published writer, a published author, former print magazine publisher, retired programmer, hobby composer and short story writer, and aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter.

Currently he is a lead blogger at Performancing.com, and a weekly contributor to FreelanceSwitch and FreelanceFolder.

About the author: Raj Kumar Dash is a long-time freelancer/ web consultant, an experienced and published writer, a published author, former print magazine publisher, retired programmer, hobby composer and short story writer, and aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter. Currently he is a contributor to FreelanceSwitch and FreelanceFolder and editor of Nettuts.