How To Publish Enhanced Podcasts With TapeWrite
Audio is a fantastic medium. It is far more intimate and personal than video or text and it is perfectly suited for long form. On the other hand, audio is consumed when we cannot look at a screen and this makes it very difficult for listeners to remember or take action based on what they hear.
We solve this problem by allowing publishers to add timeline notes to the audio with the information that they would normally add in the show notes, but attached to specific points of the audio. And you can embed them everywhere, like here on Medium:
Step 1, click on “Create Tape”
Step 2, upload or import your audio
You can upload an mp3 from your hard drive or import it from your RSS feed. When you import from RSS, we scrap the show notes for you and put them in the first card.
Step 3, add a cover image, title and description
Adding a cover image is optional, but it will make your tape look much better on TapeWrite and everywhere you share it.
Step 4, add cards
Here’s where the magic happens. At any point of the audio you can press ‘enter’ or click on the plus button underneath the play head to create a card. This way you can divide your audio in chapters and add any content relevant to that section, like text with links, quotes or images. Here is how you add a picture.
And here is how you add text. You can also include links in it.
Step 5, publish
That’s it, you are done. Before you publish, you can add SEO ready tags to your tape so it can be found, and its language. Publishing as ‘unlisted’ will not show your tape in TapeWrite, but you still can embed it in your site.
Your public tapes will appear on TapeWrite
Be everywhere
You can share your tape, including deep linking to a specific card. We make it look really nice when you share on Facebook. The player is responsive so it does not matter where your audience finds you, mobile or desktop. You can embed the player on your blog as well.
Be social
When you publish on TapeWrite, your audience can engage directly with you. All the plays and comments are centralized in one single place, regardless of where the player is seen (Facebook, Twitter, your blog…) so you can focus on creating content and maintaining the relationship with your listeners.
FAQ
Why would anyone want cards with audio? People don’t consume audio looking at their screens.
Nor should they! The beauty of audio is that you can consume it when your body is busy and your mind is free (driving, cooking, rocking your kid so she finally sleeps) but it often happens that you mention a link, an article, something your audience may want to interact with. It is super handy to present the information right alongside the audio so they can bookmark the card and retrieve it later.
Cards also give context to your audience before, during and after the actual playing. One thing we get from our beta testers is that they like to browse them a bit to get a taste of the content. It also helps them navigate the different sections.
Does this mean a lot of extra work?
Not really, it is in fact the same amount of work you would need for creating your show notes. The only difference is that with TapeWrite you parse them and add them do different points. You can be as exhaustive or as brief as you want. If you want to add just one card with the cover image, it is entirely up to you.
What are the best practices for publishing on TapeWrite?
Difficult question. This is a creative tool, limited only by your imagination. One rule of thumb you may want to follow is to add one card per section of your show, so you divide it into navigable chapters. For each of those cards, you can add any relevant information you want your audience to remember, or simply a section title.
Feel free, however, to experiment. We did not design TapeWrite for transcript audiobooks but it turns out it also works (thanks Darcy Conroy).
Is the content in the cards SEO ready?
You bet!
How can publishing be free? Where is the catch?
There is no catch. Our mission is to empower quality journalism and storytelling, and that means getting publishers paid. We want to help lots and lots of creators to make a living and take a teeny tiny cut out of the revenue to pay our team a decent salary and keep the servers going.
Will you cross to the dark side and start selling listener data to advertisers?
As long as I am CEO, never. I am ideologically against that business model and so is my team. We believe in subscription models for content. If you want to include your own ads, as podcasters do today, it is entirely up to you.
Will I get statistics about listeners?
We aim to give you the best aggregated data in the industry, and are working on that at the moment. We will not give you individual data about your listeners, although we may consider an opt-in way for them to share their info with you.
Please reach out to me if you have any more questions. Have fun creating!
Borja on behalf of my awesome team.
