Category: 30-Day Tax Marketing Challenge

Now that you’ve had your hand at converting a written piece of content to video, let’s do the same thing but turn it into a podcast.

Yep, today I’m going to show you how to launch a podcast in under half an hour. It’s really not that hard, and you’ll be taking advantage of the growing trend in audio marketing content.

First, if you’re handy with certain software tools, like Audacity or VLC Media Player, you can simply open your video from yesterday and rip out the audio. The specific of how to do that are far beyond the scope of this post, but if you have either of those tools, amongst others, you can just open a video file and save it as audio.

Alternatively, just re-record the video you made yesterday, except do it with audio only. The voice memo app on your smart phone is perfectly adequate, but if you have a headset, you’ll get better audio quality using the default recording app on your computer.

Either way you go, you’ll wind up with an audio file that’s the same as what you recorded to video yesterday.

Now, what to do with it?

There a many ways to set up podcast feeds. You can do it with WordPress plugins, via Amazon Web Services, or a 3rd party podcast host. The latter option is the easiest, and the easiest of those that I have found is called Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout offers a free plan that is adequate for our needs, but their lowest price plan is only $12/mo, and is the plan I’m on.

Just create an account, fill in basic details, and upload your file.

They will then give you a podcast feed address, which you can then submit to Stitcher and iTunes (within Buzzsprout).

Boom, you’re a podcaster!

Of course, there’s more to building a podcast audience than this, but it’s a start. Be sure to post your new episode on your own blog, and email it out to your leads and prospects as a touch point.

As we wind down this challenge, and with Thanksgiving sale season coming to a close, don’t forget to take your 14-day trial of Gold membership.… Continue reading

Yesterday, we discussed a simple way to convert your audio and video marketing content into text. Easy peasy.

Today, we’re going to discuss the opposite direction. Maybe a bit less obvious.

Referring back to the content inventory you took a few days ago, consider your existing written content. This could be blog posts, lead magnets, books, etc.

Take something relatively short. E.g., not your entire book, just a couple pages. A sub-sub-topic. Single blog posts work great for this.

Then, whip out your smartphone, put on a smile, hit record, and start reading.

Yes, indeed. It’s that easy. And yes, you’re going to record yourself reading your own words.

Is this a bit more awkward than recording yourself reading out of Pub. 15 like we did a couple weeks ago? Maybe.

But it works.

Do one take. One and done. Post it to the YouTube channel you created a couple weeks ago. Be sure to make the appropriate settings to this video, as before.

This should all take less than 20 minutes. Other than creating the video itself, it’s also a simple task to hand off to a staff member.

Tomorrow, you’ll get to hop on the podcasting bandwagon, also in just 20 minutes.… Continue reading

In case you’ve missed any of the challenges in this series, you can always review them at:

https://taxresolutionacademy.com/30-day-tax-marketing-challenge

Yesterday, I suggested that you conduct an inventory of the marketing content you already have. We’re talking videos, blog posts, books, PowerPoints, presentation recordings, audio recordings, and anything else that you’ve created for your practice.

For the next few days, we’re going to look at specific processes for converting content from one format to another. It’s easier than you’d imagine, and it makes the task of creating marketing content much easier and faster.

Today, take any piece of audio or video content you’ve created. Tax-related, obviously.

Take that file, and head on over to either Rev.com or Temi.com. These are simple, cheap online transcription services that will convert your audio/video into text. They are owned by the same company. Personally, I prefer Rev, as a human will transcribe your audio, producing a better end result. The downside is that it comes at a higher cost than automated transcription, which is what Temi does. The cost difference is a factor of ten, at $1 per minute versus 10 cents per minute.

With the Temi output, you’re going to have to do a lot more cleanup than you do with Rev. It’s one of those time vs money trade-offs that you’ll have to decide upon for yourself.

Even with the Rev output, you’re still going to want to spend some time rewriting certain things in order to make it more “article-ish” rather than appearing like a transcript. Other folks have different attitudes about this, but I don’t like putting out material that is obviously a transcript. I’ve done it, but I cringe when I do. So taking the time to polish up your content is worthwhile, from a perception standpoint, in my not so humble opinion.

But either way, once you have the transcript, you get to do a few things with it. Here are some of my favorites:

• Post it to your blog as an article.
• Feed it through a tool like Missinglettr in order to use it for social media marketing.
• Post it to Medium as an article, and include an inline link to something else back on your website.
• Send an email to your lead/prospect list as a touch point.
• Include a copy in your monthly client/prospect print newsletter.
• If it’s a video that you’ve posted on YouTube, upload the transcript to YouTube in the transcript