Back in the 2000s few people could build and edit a website. You had to know HTML and often instruct a web design agency to build your site. Customers were charged per page built and change requests were also costly.

At the moment most people don’t create podcasts. Now I am not saying everyone who listens to podcasts want to create one but there a lot of excellent public speakers out there who don’t have the know how.

Whether it’s the recording equipment or the long winded editing process these are issues which put people off getting started. Just as people commission agencies to build web sites in the 2000s podcast production companies offer services for editing your podcast from adding jingles, hosting and distributing.

Nowadays, people use WordPress, Wix and Weebly to build websites with no technical skills. This has lead to a further explosion in the total number of websites on the internet.

At the time of writing there are 700,000 podcasts published. Podcasts are growing rapidly due to the rise of smart speakers, AirPods and voice search. Google is now indexing podcasts which means when a voice search is conducted podcasts will surface and will have greater importance than their text based equivalents.

If you want to get the attention of your customers and prospects now is the time to start a podcast as they become more discoverable. Advertising revenues are also now growing for the podcasting medium as people drop their screens for the convenience of voice. If your are in the car or at home quite often voice search is easier handsfree.

Start your first podcast on Sound Branch:

Create your free account here.

Sound Branch puts you in control of your podcast creation with no complicated editing skills needed. If you can create a playlist on a music app you can also create a podcast using Sound Branch it’s that simple.

The lifeblood of any organisation is the ability for it to sell and generate revenue. Of course retaining customers is as important as acquiring customers. Whether your sales staff are hunters or farmers you’re trying to drive average order values, lead generation, conversion rates and customer retention rates.

How can you turn your B players into A players? How can you recruit more effectively and efficiently? How can you turn sales calls into podcasts?

In this short guide, we are going to talk about three ways in which you can re-imagine sales training and enable better coaching of your teams.

Step 1 – Hire Sales Professionals Using Audio Profiles

Instead of back and forth email, use voice notes in one-to-one chat to attract and engage candidates in your talent funnel. Your hiring committee can play back audio profiles to accelerate decision making. There is no need for your hiring team to waste time scheduling telephone interviews. Voice makes your hiring process more personable for both you and your candidate.

Step 2 – Coach your Sales Team using Voice Notes

You can’t use Slack and email when you’re driving your car, it’s simply impossible and against the law. There is a lot of dead time spent in cars so how do we turn this dead time into productive time? Connected cars with Bluetooth allow you to voice message colleagues.

There is the sales forecast in the CRM but actually getting a sales rep to speak out their sales forecast is more believable and more credible. Again, voice messaging conversations can be done one to one or one to many with the whole organisation.

Management wants to avoid the Chinese whispers in business where he said she said they said. Voice messaging in your salesforce gets to the customer truth and make better decisions. Conversational analytics overlaid with CRM and financial data allows you to make better decisions.

Future leaders can be identified and bad news can be delivered early and authentically. Don’t get me wrong, the CRM is a useful tool for the modern salesforce and email is not going away. However, listening to the voice of a salesperson and how their day has gone well, management can support and encourage just in time.

Step 3 – Magnify your Sales Staff with Podcasting

People buy from people. We’ve heard this time and time again but what if you took your best sales staff and turn them into podcast presenters interviewing your customers and your prospects.

Cold calling is hard and requesting a meeting often leads to rejection. But when you turn the table and you ask a prospect to be invited to a podcast more conversations happen.

Getting your top sales people with their personalities hosting podcasts is a brilliant way to establish a personal connection with your client but also a wider audience. Furthermore, junior members of the sales team can listen to these podcasts. Perhaps one day once they’re trained up and have achieved the appropriate results they too can start their own podcast?

You can get your very own Sound Branch branded voice site for your organisation here:

http://soundbranch.com/sign-up-business

PS On your voice site you can hire using voice notes and audio profiles, send voice messages for internal communications and create podcasts with no editing needed.

PPS Artificial intelligence on the platform saves time with life transcription to reduce administration and sentiment analysis to understand the emotions in teams. Artificial intelligence such as live transcription reduces administration time. Sentiment analysis AI allows you to see your the emotions in your teams.

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

How to start a podcast in 6 steps

1. Plan your podcast
2. Plan your episodes to get a feel for your topic and its longevity.
3. Choose a format.
4. Choose your equipment and record your podcast.
5. Publish your podcast.
6. Next steps.

Plan your podcast

To create a podcast you need to ask who and what is your podcast for? Finding an audience is key to a successful podcast.

Whether you are looking at podcasting from a hobby perspective or a business perspective as long as you provide your target audience with valuable and entertaining content you are on the right track.

So, why do you want to make a podcast? It’s important to know “why” so you can stay motivated even when you’re finding it difficult to grow your podcast.

Give them a reason to listen.

Whether you provide information or entertainment make sure you provide value for your listener. A reason to listen means they will come back for more.

Planning Your Episodes

It’s time to think about your podcasts episodes. So, how long should an episode be? Your podcast length depends solely on the content. Don’t cut down good content or pad out short content!

A long episode would probably be anything over an hour and a short episode would probably be anything under 20 minutes.

Whatever you choose just try to be consistent. If you have 40 minutes of valuable content don’t down to 20. Just because you want to do 20-minute episodes. Try to find a consistent length for an episode which is tailored for the content you make.

How often do you release an episode? Just like your episode length, your content will dictate this. There’s a good case for putting out a weekly episode if you can because consistency is key for longevity.

Longevity is still possible if you do a fortnightly or even monthly show because there’s no point just putting episodes out for the sake of hitting a self-made deadline. One excellent episode a month instead of 4 very average episodes has more chance of growing your podcast.

Your listeners will tell you if they think your episodes are too short or too long. Use your audience to make changes and adjust to the most popular format.

However, be wary of making big decisions based on one or two comments. Only change things if it’s something that will benefit the majority of your listeners.

Choose a podcast format

It’s your show. This means you can choose whichever format suits you, and you don’t have to stick with one.

So what are the common types of podcast formats?

A solo show is also known as a monologue.

You don’t need to rely on anyone else and the podcast is also exclusively yours. You make calls on sponsorship and monetization and you don’t need to split the profits.

However, it is the most intimidating style of show for a beginner. You need to make sure you remember that you’re not talking to yourself and that you’re talking to the listener.

A co-hosted show alongside a friend or colleague.

Make sure your co-hosted podcast has great chemistry between the presenters. This can create a great listening experience and you can bounce off each other.

When choosing your co-host make sure both you and your co-host can set aside time to record. Set out ownership early. Who’s podcast is it? Will you split any future income 50/50? Make sure everything is clear from the get-go.

An Interview podcast.

Doing an interview gives you the opportunity to have a chat with someone and have a fresh voice every episode. Your guests will have their own audiences who may listen to the interview and could end up subscribing which is a good way to grow your audience.

You will need to learn the skill of interviewing through practice, so don’t approach the celebrities in your field from the start. You also need to constantly find and approach potential guests because without them you have no show.

Some less common but interesting other formats you could try:

Documentary: As the narrator, you walk your audience through a range of interviews and conversations to paint a picture and tell a story.

Roundtable: You are the regular host and you get a number of guests/permanent co-hosts to talk through one specific topic.

Recording your podcast

Equipment.

The minimum you need to record a podcast is a computer or laptop with a built-in microphone and access to the internet.

However, the lower the cost for your setup and equipment, the more limited the sound quality of your show will be. However, a simple USB microphone setups can give great results if you choose the right mic. The benefit of keeping things simple in that it’s easy and a lot cheaper. So depending on your budget choose the equipment suited to you and go from there.

Recording and editing software.

You need some software to actually record and edit the audio. The good news is that this doesn’t have to cost you anything.

There’s a free programme called Audacity which is suitable for all your podcasting needs and can be used on both Windows and Mac. If you’re a Mac user you probably have Garageband installed by default which is also a popular audio software for podcasters.

If you want to pay for something more professional there’s Adobe Audition, which is available through a paid subscription.

Editing.

This is where you iron out mistakes, stitch together audio clips, add in music or FX and make sure it sounds great with EQ, levelling, compression and more.

If you’re prepared to spend a bit of money to save time, you can always outsource your editing and hire someone else to do it for you.

Music.

You don’t have to have music, but many choose to add it at the beginning and to the end to add an extra layer of professionalism.

What Music Can I Use? There are a lot of websites that have music you can legally use on your podcast. The music will be referred to as royalty-free, stock, or library music. You can choose to pay a one-off fee for a song which entitles you to use it on your show, or you can now get subscriptions that give you access to a library of music.

It’s possible to find free music for your podcast if you search for creative commons licensed music, but it’s often very commonly used. Always check the source site and make sure you have permission to use a particular piece of music.

So now you’ve done the groundwork and planned out your podcast, it’s time to get to work and start recording your first episode.

Publishing your podcast

You can publish your podcast in different ways. The most common is via a media host but you can also publish it by yourself if you self-host.

Media hosts are services that store your audio and allow your listeners to listen, download, and subscribe to your podcast. You can either have a website set up on their site to deliver them, or place them on your own existing website.

Once you’ve created your show inside your media host of choice, you can then submit it to be listed in various directories, where listeners can discover, subscribe to, and download it.

If you want to self host your podcast you need a personal server to generate the RSS feed to syndicate your podcast. This option offers complete control over your podcast, but is complicated and can be time-consuming unless you are an experienced web developer.

A new way you can publish a podcast is via Sound Branch. The platform makes creating a podcast really easy and requires no editing skills. It gives you total control over your podcast and is easy to use. It has basic features like push notifications and the ability to create a playlist of your episodes. Download the app or go to www.soundbranch.com and start today.

Next steps

Once you launch your podcast out in the world, that’s when you’ll move on to thinking about promotion and building your audience.

If you consistently deliver great content for a wanting audience, then you’ll eventually be in a position to start thinking about monetising your podcast.

There are several different podcast ad networks that can connect you with advertisers. They do all the work of finding advertisers, negotiating rates, give you a script, and more. You usually need a larger audience of at least 5K or 10K listeners per month. So grow your audience stay consistent and you can reap the rewards.

As offices fragment into remote teams, work becomes more visual and social media makes us more comfortable on camera – it’s time for collaboration to go beyond text.

In a click, you can record yourself to get an idea across in a personal way. Instead of scheduling a video call, employees can asynchronously discuss projects or give “stand-up” updates without massive disruptions to their workflow.

We want to make it very easy to bring the humanity back in.

With more and more people working from home bridging the gap between the office and the home office can be achieved with voice messaging.

The collaboration space is becoming much deeper than just email plus documents. Voice plus documents makes collaboration a little more interesting.

Why wait on email?

Sound Branch is your platform for team communication. Post important voice messages, podcast your news and tell stories to connect remote teams.

Your team can listen to and comment on voice notes in the app, or directly from the web.

Your team wakes up to a daily flash briefing of what’s important. This curated audio makes it easy to get caught up fast and helps remote teams.

With Sound Branch, you know who listened to your update.

See which voice messages create energy and engagement, and which ones aren’t getting through!

Learn more at:

https://soundbranch.com

PS Save time with fewer emails and meetings needed.

Voice Tech Podcast recently published their 21st episode, which features our CEO’s podcast on nanocasting.

In this episode, Sean introduces the concept of nanocasting, and explains how it can be used for public broadcasting, team status updates, recruiting new staff, and more.

Sean also explains how audio is unique in providing the perfect combination of authenticity of message and auditability of content, thanks to the combination of speech to text and search technologies.

Sound Branch is a feature rich application that could well be the Twitter for voice that so many have been predicting, and this episode will help deepen your understanding of this emerging form of communication.

Since the inception of the smart phone, we have all become happy snappy taking so many photographs we need to store them on the cloud as we have run out of space on our phones. Add video and this problem becomes more pronounced.

Whilst we capture lots of photos and videos we don’t capture that much voice data. OK, perhaps the odd journalists record voice with voice memo or phone recording services but these people are few and far between.

The real opportunity is getting lots of people recording their voice. As voice resides in many different places it’s not been recorded in one place. Voice data is all over the place, be it voice mails on your phone, your work voice mail system, WhatsApp voice notes and phone conversations which aren’t recorded.

Now, I’m not saying personal phone conversations should be recorded. But if they are business calls recording and transcribing the audio could save a lot of time. What we need to get smart on is how we record voice data. Imagine if you could search back all your conversations, analyse the sentiment and play them back!

As we enable digital teams and more people work from home we need to ensure that those teams are connected. Slack and instant messaging are useful but don’t lead to personal conversations. Google Meetings, Zoom Calls and Go To Meetings work fine but you need to schedule them. Surely, there is an easier way to make communication more personable without the scheduling and leveraging the usefulness of voice data.

Linking the business KPIs with the emotions in the business is a sure fire away of enabling harmony and engagement in your business. What if your CEO listened to every single conversation! Well, there aren’t enough hours in the day I hear you say. There are enough hours in the day if you change the approach. Again we need to change the habits on what we input to get better output and competitive edge.

There are three changes to make. One, do not schedule meetings unless they are absolutely necessary such as first time meets with new staff. Two, record all your voice data and messages in timelines, groups and chats. Finally, ensure all voice messages have a limited duration of 10 seconds.

Meetings don’t start on time, they often aren’t minuted and cost businesses lots. The trick is to give everyone a voice by having fewer meetings and, instead, having short form nanocasting voice notes. This gives greater breadth to conversations in a more inclusive and diverse audience. By having more voices and a breather width of listening, your brain power is expanded. The Chinese whisper disappears and the customer truth comes out.

At first, this change of approach will seem alien to many people. Firstly, some people don’t like the sound of their own voice. Forcing people to think more than they talk and get their message out in 10 seconds is a challenge. Finally, some people like sitting in meetings!

If you are brave and bold enough to have fewer meetings, record lots of short form audio and then play it back. This leads to greater insights, business intelligence and smarter business decisions.

What if you could map with AI the sentiment of staff after losing a deal? How could you link the quality and quantity of internal conversations to net promoter scores and repeat business? Who are the leaders in the business and how could you suggest using AI, which questions they are not asking and which staff they haven’t praised for a while. What if you could book travel automatically based on business conversations? How could you suggest which learning resources should be consumed based on conversations or a missing conversation?

The interesting part is when you have the voice data you can do lots with it. Fail to capture it and you will be left behind. Businesses need to adopt a multimodal approach to voice capture and recalling conversations across the web, mobile devices and smart speakers.

The great thing about voice is when we have all left the business or retired, our staff can benefit from the history of our voices. What about listening to the founders of the business back when they started talking about the company values? Like a fine wine, voice data goes up in value over time. Indeed, Rome was not built in a day so you need to start capturing your voice data now to harvest the benefit in your near future.

You can learn how to capture more voice data and put this to use at:

SoundBranch.com

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

 

It’s harder to get into Y Combinator than it is to enrol at Stanford or Harvard. Further to that, only 10% of startups survive and only 5% of startups truly scale having graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley. Most startups fail or become zombie businesses because they don’t find product market fit. Product market fit is where you solved a massive problem, sometimes deemed “The Hair on Fire Problem”.

You’ll know when your startup has found product market fit because there will be queues for your product round the block, a flood of orders will cause your bank balance to grow significantly. At Y Combinator startups are encouraged to get a user growth of 5% per week. Growth of 1% and 2% per week is acceptable but 5% is the goal.

The mentors and partners at Y Commentator encourage startups to build final viable products (MVPs). It’s less about the technology and more about the problem you are trying to solve for customers. Only when you have found product market fit should you start scaling the technology. The problem lots of startups make is they start building the technology too soon and end up having to iterate their software through pivots. There is nothing wrong with pivots but building the technology too soon may lead to a startup running out of cash. If investors have given you some seed funding and you run out of cash, why should they fund you again?

A winning team and a massive market with a significant problem are what you are looking for. Once you have found these you then need to continuously speak to users to get to the product market fit. You can be speaking to users face to face but with global user bases, this won’t always be possible.

Sound Branch now offer developers and software houses the ability to embed in their apps and web based applications an audio record to get the customer’s voice. You will have seen mobile apps and websites’ pop ups which ask you to rate the site and post a review. These reviews are done with text so including the voice gives start ups a new dimension. The voice gives you emotion, sentiment and intent and therefore a richer data set of user feedback to work with.

In conclusion, the more feedback you get and the richer that feedback the more likely your startup is going to become the next unicorn. If you want to reach an IPO and shoot for the stars after you have established a winning team and a large enough market, all that matters is the voice of the customer. Voice feedback allows you to co-create with your customers. It doesn’t mean you’ll be the next unicorn, it just significantly increases your chances. Good luck in trying to find product market fit, you will need patience and perspective.

You can try Sound Branch out for free. Create your own account below:

https://www.soundbranch.com

The more effort you put into publishing the better the results. Now one way to do this is through good preparation and thinking about what you’re going to say. Other ways of improving what you publish are to sub-edit and rewrite.

But if we ignore the content for one moment and we think about new technologies such as live transcription, this allows curators to output richer experiences in less time.

What if every text message you sent had audio. How about every email being emotional with sound? What would it be like if you can listen to people on Twitter instead of simply reading out posts?

Podtexting uses the latest live transcription artificial intelligence for bloggers, journalists and editors to speak their thoughts and have this automatically turned into text on the fly.

So instead of a post being merely text or just the audio, your audience can receive both. Now given the fact that we only remember 10% of what we read and we retain 50% of what we hear and see, this will lead to more memorable experiences.

You might say why bother with this approach, is it not confusing? The reality is lots of people around the world struggle to read and quite simply people have a preferred method of contact.

Some people prefer to scan read and others prefer to listen. Quite often how they consume content depends on circumstances and environment. For example, if they’re on a quiet train coach they might prefer to read whilst driving the car listening is best. In other settings, people will want to do both.

This is not just about your readership and your listeners, there are wider connotations to this dual play multichannel approach. Often when we say multichannel we mean we send an email and then perhaps a podcast link at different points in time. With podtexting simultaneously the audio and text are posted leading to more consumer choice or double threaded experiences.

On an e-commerce shopping site for example if a user both listens and reads they are more likely to memorise information and will be more likely to convert. This has massive connotations to the way we build websites and we think about how people consume content. Imagine browsing a website on your smart TV with your voice and reading the text whilst listening.

And finally there is a twist. Not only can you post content with both audio and text at the same time you can also match the content with a sentiment. Using artificial intelligence, emojis can be added to your posts based on emotion. Now an unhappy face automatically posted to content on an e-commerce site might actually not help your conversion rate. But think about product reviews, not only seeing the text from the consumers with a voice and there are emoji based on their satisfaction.

The more data we have about peoples’ thoughts, intents and emotions will lead to smarter decisions for broadcasters and consumers. Independent of the type of content and the use cases, a new approach to content syndication which includes Just in time podtexting is a game changer. For the entertainment industry and for online, as a whole.

Below is a podtext posted on Twitter as a Twitter card:

And Mrs May is not going down without a fight and will give everything that she’s got https://t.co/fK8Ir8jhpK

— Newsanywhere (@newsanywhere) December 12, 2018

You can learn more about podtexting at SoundBranch.com. Sign up for your free account.

 

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

Some people struggle with reading and writing. Other people simply want to save time with frictionless ways of recording and documenting information.

Here we take a look at some of the best voice notes apps on the market.

Sound Branch (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, Alexa, Google Assistant)

Sound Branch is a multi-modal voice notes platform available on the web, on mobile apps and via Alexa and Google Assistant. All voice notes are transcribed to text allowing powerful voice search.

Record your voice on the web and mobile to create flash briefings. For example, you can say Alexa ask Sound Branch to play my Inbox. Or you can say OK Google play my timeline.

One cool feature in Sound Branch is sentiment analysis which allows for the detection of emotions in conversations. You can then filter by the emojis which are happy, sad or indifferent.

As the best voice notes app, Sound Branch is focussed on short form voice bites of duration of 10 to 20 seconds. It forces people to think more before they speak. Short form messages allow powerful voice search. You can, therefore, search people’s thoughts rather than simply search web pages.

Otter.ai (Android, iOS)

Backed by the initial investor in Google, Professor Chilton, a Canadian who now works at Stamford University. Otter can detect different peoples’ voices for transcriptions and is great for recording meetings. Transcribed minutes can be complemented with Live Photos.

Apple Voice Memo on iOS

Without transcriptions the preinstalled Voice Mel app allows you to record audio. Once you have the audio, this can then be shared on iCloud, Dropbox, email etc

Google Docs

You can also do speech to text in google. If you are writing, this can be a quicker way of getting your thoughts down. You can still correct with your keyboard but for 1st draft collections, this is really fast. Obviously, you need to ensure you have a microphone on your computers.

Now that you’ve found the best voice notes app for your team, it’s time to get the most out of it. Here are some resources to help:

• Check out soundbran.ch for Sound Branch key features
• Visit this video channel to see demos of the product and hear from customers how Sound Branch helps them build winning teams
• Follow Sound Branch on Twitter (@soundbranch)
• Sign up to create an account at SoundBranch.com

If you have any questions about the best voice notes apps or need more information to help you choose the most suitable app for your needs please feel free to contact us.