From Word Salad to Reader's Delight: Transforming Transcripts to Engaging Blog Posts

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:

My grandpa used to say, any tool is easy if you have the right tools. However, if you're using the wrong tool for the wrong job, you're gonna end up with results that leave you frustrated. So today, I wanna talk about transcripts. Lot of people are using transcripts, and a lot of people are using them wrong.

Announcer: Mike Russel [00:00:25]:

Welcome to Your Podcast consultant, small lessons with big value. With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this hall of fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author, and mentor to 1,000. Now he wants to work with you. He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson [00:00:50]:

I just sat in a webinar about SEO, which is short for search engine optimization, and everybody was all giddy about transcripts because, well, anything we can do to get us out of typing, well, we're all for that. And the person that was running the webinar said the same thing more or less that I say, don't forget, yes, Google loves words. Absolutely true, and that's why you should treat every episode like a blog post. And that description of your episode should be like a blog post with subheadings and things like that. So that's absolutely true, but that's the point. A transcript doesn't have subheadings, and, also, it has a lot of words. It is basically a word salad. And Google likes words, but more importantly, Google likes good words.

Dave Jackson [00:01:51]:

And so this is where there are a couple things you can do. Number 1, for me, you need to rewrite that transcript. You need to go in and adjust it. Now why? Because we don't talk like we write, and we don't write like we talk. So you need to take that transcript, which is word for word, the way we talk and massage it until it looks like something people would read. I don't know about you. When I go to a page and I see that it is just the good old fashioned, somebody hand had this transcribed and they threw it on a website, I leave almost immediately, and I am not the only person that feels that way. So the goal was to get people to your website, and maybe a transcript does that, but the other thing it might do is boost your leave rate.

Dave Jackson [00:02:45]:

They call that the bounce rate in Google, meaning people showed up, and they instantly left, and that's a direct opposite of what you are doing. Now there are a couple ways to to kind of try to cut corners on this, you might throw your transcript into some sort of AI tool, and that is an option, keep in mind, I don't call AI artificial intelligence. I call it assisted intelligence because, at least in November of 2023, those tools, on occasion, will just make stuff up. And you have to be very careful with that because it's your integrity that is on the line. So if you use AI for anything, go back and reread it because people are going to think it's coming from you, and you don't want AI to ruin your integrity. But I did mention subheadings, and this is where SEO comes into play. There are all sorts of tools that you can use to find keywords that are very popular, but yet, for whatever reason, not a lot of people are trying to rank for those. And sometimes, that's the better strategy than trying to rank for the really, really, really popular words because, well, it's just a harder battle.

Dave Jackson [00:04:07]:

So let's find what people are looking for, but there's less competition, and that's where having keywords and having subheadings. Subheadings are those, larger black words, I guess all the words are black, but bold words typically that break up an article. Because if you just send somebody to a wall of text, they're not gonna read it. Right now, there's kind of a little buzz phrase, TLDR, and that stands for too long didn't read. So people don't read. They skim. And so this is where your subheadings come up, and they break this long article into bits and pieces. And so people see, oh, they talk about this, this, and that, and that, and then they decide if they wanna read it or not.

Dave Jackson [00:04:50]:

And, of course, if you have your player on your website, they might just click play. And, of course, you have links to Apple, Google, Spotify, all those apps right there in the episode so that they can follow as well. So just be careful. Yes. Transcriptions, there are tons of tools. There is things like Castmagic. There is Capt Show. There is as well dot ai and all these, you just upload the MP 3 file, and it will spit out just about everything except the kitchen sink.

Dave Jackson [00:05:22]:

If you just want transcriptions, there's Otter dot AI, and these are great tools. But in most cases, you want to go over them and make sure that they're not shooting your integrity in the foot, and also make sure that it's readable. It's something that people would want to read. Remember, when we're on our website, as much as we're trying to court Google to come find us, what we're really trying to do is to court people to come to our website. So write for people, not Google. That's what I've done for 18 years, and I have a pretty high ranking on the school of podcasting. When I have SEO people come in and look at it, they're like, wow. You rank pretty high, and I don't really do much.

Dave Jackson [00:06:11]:

I just listen to what my audience wants, and then I write an article. I don't use transcripts. For me, by the time I beat a transcript into something that's readable, I coulda just typed the whole thing myself. So that's what I do, and I usually do that before I press record. I'm a little ADD. So by writing a blog post, it really helps me figure out what the heck am I trying to say. And then I take that blog post. I boil it down to a couple of bullet points because they don't wanna just read the blog post because, well, that's boring.

Dave Jackson [00:06:43]:

And then I talk to you, the person that's sitting across the desk from me right now, and I'm telling you about the topic that I wanna talk about. Today's topic is how to use transcripts properly. So keep that in mind. I mentioned back in episode 142 that you can also use transcripts for editing, which I do quite a bit. But I just wanted to once again touch base on the subject of transcripts. The last thing you wanna do is have it transcribed and then copy and paste into your website. You need to remember, people are going to read that. Google doesn't just want words.

Dave Jackson [00:07:19]:

They want good words. If you need help with your podcast, I would love to help you. Go over to school of podcasting.com/consultant and sign up. Not only do you get our awesome podcast community, you get step by step tutorials to walk you through every single part of podcasting, and you get unlimited 1 on 1 consulting with me. Again, go over to school of podcasting.com/consultant. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters, and I can't wait to see what you and I are gonna do together.