Podcasting beyond borders

If you are a podcaster and American, I am sure you have never considered launching a podcast in a different language.

Am I right?

• Why on earth would you do that?
• Why make a decision to bring yourself out of your comfort zone of speaking your mother tongue?
• Why would you speak a language in your podcast that your own fellow countrymen are not familiar with?

Some podcasters, however, make that decision. Because they know that they will reach a much larger audience.  A  global audience.

Who ARE these people?

Maybe they are already part of a huge global community – like Father Roderick (Roderick
Vonhögen), who is Dutch and podcasting to the Catholic community.

Maybe they know that their topic has nothing to do with nationality, but with suffering from an eating disorder , like Anne-Sophie Reinhardt from Schwitzerland, who talks about fighting anorexia in her podcast and about beauty and her intercontinental life in her two other podcasts.

Maybe they already have the whole world as their playground like German photographer Chris Marquardt, whose Tips From The Top Floor podcast has given him international podcast awards.

Languages have never been a barrier for Scottish Mark Pentleton. On the contrary, he speaks five or six languages himself and he has decided to break down language barriers all over the world with his Radio Lingua Network.

I am sure you can learn a few things from these podcasters who are all panelists in the session I am chairing at BlogWorld NY. Choosing a global target audience from the very first episode takes planning, insight, good language skills, an international mindset  – and a heck of a lot of travelling.

You can get a feel of the Global Village in room 1A15 on Tuesday at 11:30am. Hope to see you there.