If you are a blogger it’s a well known fact that you can no longer operate in the vacuum of your web site. You have to expand beyond your blog. The most common ways people do that are via social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.  While those are necessary and great outlets, they’re saturated. Everybody has a Facebook fan page and everybody is on Twitter. It’s not going to help you differentiate yourself very much.

I stumbled upon podcasting by accident when I decided to start a weekly series called “Interviews With Up and Coming Bloggers.” That evolved into a site of its own and I became known as the guy who interviews people. Starting a podcast has allowed me to connect with 100’s of bloggers that I might never otherwise have talked to, and extend my brand beyond my blog. Once you start a podcast you’ll be leveraging iTunes as a distribution channel and reach an audience that might never have heard of you. While there are millions of people producing written content for their blogs, there are far fewer who are regularly creating audio content.

A Podcast Gets People Talking About You:

There’s something about allowing people to hear voice that creates a stronger connection. I’ve had countless people tell me “I listen to you on the way to work everyday.” That means that somebody is connecting with you, your voice, and your brand every single day.  If you’re creating something of value they’ll naturally go out and start telling other people about it.

Choosing a Subject

Figuring out what your podcast will be about is not the easiest thing in the world. But it in many ways it comes back to the same way you chose your blog topic. Find something you are passionate about and that other people would be interested in. Cliff Ravenscraft turned a podcast about the TV show Lost into a movement and eventually created additional podcasts which have turned into significant income streams. If you try to create content around something you have absolutely no genuine interest in, it will definitely fail.

One of the things that seems to stop people from exploring multimedia content is that it’s something they’ve never done before. It’s also putting yourself out there for the whole world to hear and see. What you forget is that before you started blogging it was something you had never done. Eventually you stopped being afraid to push publish. Multimedia content and podcasting work the same way. Chances are your content won’t be spectacular when you start, but it’s something you’ll improve with time.