Turning Medium into a podcast player

Have you ever thought ‘I would like to listen to this post on Medium’? What about listening to a great podcast on your way to work and thinking ‘I would like to see an image of what the author is describing’ or ‘I want to remember that book he is recommending’?

Those were our pain points when we decided to build TapeWrite, a tool that allows anyone to enhance their audio by adding images, text with links and other goodies to specific points in the audio. When you use TapeWrite, you get an embeddable player you can then use anywhere, including Medium.

By adding your show notes to the audio, your listeners have all the extra information at their fingertips, even if they normally do not look at their screens when listening. There are many more advantages to adding rich content to audio as chapters, such as:

People can preview, navigate, bookmark and review your audio.

People can share specific contextual sections, pointing their friends to specific parts of a longer audio piece. People arriving to that section are presented with the information about that section so they have context about what they will hear.

If you do advertisement, you can add images of the products you advertise with a link to it.

Embedding a tape here on medium is very easy. Just paste the url of the tape you want to embed into the Medium editor. Voila!

Publishing audiograms with TapeWrite

The folks at The Economist are doing great work when it comes to social. Their recent coverage of Brexit on social media was a brilliant use of content marketing to then drive people to subscribe to their actual publication.

The work that Jenni Reid is doing with audiograms on Facebook follows that marketing funnel playbook. They create short videos with a snippet of a podcast and an attractive cover image. This seems to drive people to discover their long form podcasting content. Brilliant!

With TapeWrite you can now do that. The advantages of this method compared with what Jenni and her team is doing is that instead of a video you have clickable html being shown with the audio, so you do not need to add the link to the podcast in a comment as they do. You can add it on the audiogram itself!

Please ping me if you have any suggestion or feedback. We are in beta and constantly tweaking things and adding features based on what our early adopters want.

Happy publishing!