A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

Jon,

You raise some very valid points! My thoughts on them:

It's reasonably cheap to have students or use something like elance.com to produce transcripts and automated tools are getting better.

Looking at teleseminars, some folks have had success selling both recordings AND transcripts (e.g. Dan Janal at prleads.com) so obviously there is some interest in transcripts of audio.

Free and easy transcripts online would be GREAT for SEO - one potential strategy would be to put them online -- eventually, maybe after a month or two.

Now some podcasts have had success simply saying, "Hey faithful listener, please fill out this survey." Probably the simplest approach. It's worked, for example, for forimmediaterelease.biz

Hey Ted,

I didn't think about freelancers like those on elance. Good idea.

Yes, finding some way to put the transcripts online while not eating into the sales too much would certainly be the holy grail. I think it is a case of one or ther other, though, so perhaps a waiting period like you describe would work.

I think we can all agree that simply asking listeners to fill out a survey is not only ineffective, it's also error prone. Voluntary web surveys have little crediblity in my opinion.