Introducing Recommends, Amazon Affiliate Links and Other Goodies
Well hello there,
We busy bees at TapeWrite have been working on bringing you new features. If you follow our journey, you know that our mission is to connect audiences in search of great content with publishers of all sizes who can entertain them and keep them informed.
TLDR
For everyone:
- Introducing channels. We hand pick great shows so you can just press play.
- Recommends. Let your friends curate your listening experience.
For publishers:
- You can import episodes from an RSS feed.
- Money! We added an easy way to monetize your audio show.
- Embedding coming soon!
Channels!
On-demand-spoken-audio is a format you fall in love with when you discover shows that fit your interests. My cofounder Gabor and I are musicians and deeply love music but we never listen to it in our cars, because we prefer to spend the time with audio shows.
When we bring people who don’t know this format to TapeWrite, it can be a bit overwhelming. Where does one start? To solve this problem, we just launched channels. They are curated lists of shows which follow a certain topic. I maintain those lists myself, so I can guarantee you that every single show is worth listening to. Once you discover a show you like, you can follow the author so you won’t miss new episodes.
What are my friends listening to?
You know that cool video 3 of your friends shared on Facebook? You probably are compelled to watch it, to see what the fuss is about. We want to bring the same experience to audio.
When you sign in, we import your social graph (that is nerd for “we ask Facebook or Twitter who your friends are”) and then you follow and are followed by everyone you already know. Then, we have added the “recommend” option. It is much like the recommend works here on Medium, a way of letting your friends know “this episode is cool, you should listen to it”. You will see in your feed episodes recommended by people you follow, so your listening experience is curated by you and people you trust.
The following features are for publishers, so if you are on TapeWrite just to listen to great stuff, this is all the awesomeness we have for you (for now, more stuff coming soon).
If you are reading this part, you mean business!
We are constantly talking to publishers to try to make TapeWrite the best place on the internet for publishing audio shows. We have a couple new features for you, and hope you like them.
Importing from your RSS
This one is pretty self explanatory. Instead of uploading an mp3 from your computer, now you can also import any episode from your RSS feed directly to TapeWrite. The really cool feature is the next one.
Amazon affiliate cards
I am particularly excited about this one. Now you can link to any product within Amazon from a card, and attach it to your affiliate ID.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, here’s the short explanation: you can link to any product in Amazon, and when your listeners buy that product -or anything in that shopping session- you get a nice cut out of it (more info here).
Think about the implications of this feature! It is a total game changer. The strength of using the cards is that any extra information is available to your listeners right where and when they are listening. If you link to a product you are advertising, and let them know they can buy and you will get a cut at no extra cost, they can take action without leaving TapeWrite.
You become your own ad agency, and can choose products you really believe in and that fit your audience, and the money is not bad! In fact, if 1/500 of your listeners buy what you are advertising, you can get more money like this than with a traditional sponsor.
This is a very new feature, so if you want to try it and you get stuck, please ping me. I’ll walk you through it.
Embedding
For months we were not convinced that offering embedding was the right way to go. Boy did we get that one wrong! Today we launch the next development sprint, and two weeks from now (if the Gods of code allow it) you will have a nice embeddable player that will look great on your blog, both on desktop and mobile. And no, we will not charge for it.
This is it for now, I am back to building TapeWrite.
Have a great day,
Borja on behalf of my awesome team.
