Should you create a transcript for your podcast episodes?

Voice Over: 00:00:00

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the PodSchool Podcast.

Rachel Corbett: 00:00:10

Hello, welcome to the show. Today's question is from somebody who just put down their name as E. So hello, E. I'm not sure what your name is.

It could just be E. And if it is, fantastic. But thank you very much for the question. The question is, should you produce a transcript to publish with your episodes?

The answer to this is a resounding yes. And I gotta say that pre AI, the reason for this was mostly SEO and accessibility.

So one of the things that's so important is that your content is accessible.

And that doesn't mean just for people who are hard of hearing and need to read the content, but also for people who just are like, I can't actually listen to this right now. I'd really like to read it. It's easier for me. So. So it's really important to make sure that your content is available to as many people as possible.

So that's the first thing.

The other thing was SEO, because obviously if you had a transcript of your episode there, it's able to pick up all of the words that you're saying, and if there's lots of keywords there, then fantastic.

I always think if your content makes sense to do this, you should always create a blog post for your content and episodes anyway, because that can really help with SEO. And ideally, it's nice to see things laid out with headings and bullet points and in a way that's really readable as opposed to a big dump of text.

Even if, you know Google's reading that text. Back in the days of pre chat GPT, I actually used to take my transcript and I would then use that as the base of my blog post.

So I would go through and I would be reading it as I go, and I'm sort of rewriting it into blog post form now.

Moving away from the very important points of sort of accessibility and SEO, a massive reason to have a transcript is that you want to be utilizing AI tools to help you create content around your podcast. Everything that AI works on is text transcripts.

So a transcript where you've sat down and spoken for 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes, whatever it is, is a rich source of information that you don't need to then go and start from scratch again. You've got it all there.

You can feed it into chat GPT and it can spit out everything that you and it is incredible what you can make with this, these platforms, and how much time it can save you.

I cannot tell you how essential it is to be using this if you want to be posting on multiple platforms, which you do after you've released an episode. So some of the things that you can ask ChatGPT or your AI tool of choice for off the back of your transcript.

You can ask for blog posts, for email newsletters, for social captions for every single platform that you post on, for ideas for quotes, pull quotes, and any tips or carousels or polls or questions that might come out of that content. You can ask it for YouTube descriptions. If you're going to post videos on YouTube, you name it.

Anything around your content, if you've got emails that you send out to your email list, you can ask them to do a draft of that copy. Now, you cannot just copy and paste that because it will sound like AI has written it.

But it is so much easier working off words on a page than it is to stare at that cursor blinking away at you thinking, where do I start? So this, when content creation is so important, is just an absolute game changer.

I use it all the time with my podcasts, and I just cannot recommend it highly enough because the amount of time it used to take me, even just in that blog post example, to go through the words of that transcript and to manually change all of that into blog post writing used to take me forever.

Now I chuck my transcript in ChatGPT, spits everything out, I save it and then I go through and I just edit everything and I delete what I'm like, oh, no, that's bad idea. Oh, wow, that's actually a really great idea. Then I write it in my voice.

So it's, it's really such a great tool to use if you want to create more content around your show, which you really do. A few tools that you can use. There's a bunch of them out there now. Otter Description. I mean, Riverside Captivate.

If you've, you know, if you've got a host, often a lot of hosts of your podcast host, you might need to pay a little bit of extra. But I use Captivate and they just generate a transcript internally. Some of these hosts as well will use AI to try and create the tools.

They, you know, throw up a bunch of suggestions for titles. I'm not mad on the suggestions that they come up with at the moment, but I do use the transcript. So using those, you also need to.

If you're putting up a transcript for your episode, you must clean that transcript. So I actually ask AI to do that for me. Just in terms of grammar.

I like, please don't change my words, please don't paraphrase me, please don't change anything here, but just clean it up for grammar and spelling. Because you need to go through and make sure that that transcript that is spat out is actually human readable.

Because you don't want to be putting up a transcript with the idea of this is for people who need to read this transcript or want to read this transcript. And then it's like, it's just a really difficult read.

So you definitely want to be mindful of making sure that the transcript you're uploading is edited and that has had a read through because otherwise it can really pump out some crap. Now that does take time, right? So that's another thing I used to have to do manually or I would get my assistant to do manually. Now I'd get the.

I get chatgpt and I give it a bit of a scan.

But it cleans up the transcript whereas previously it would, you know, even little things like pod school would always come in as two different words. Or my website, they wouldn't put the.comau on it.

So I've just asked Chat GPT like when cleaning my transcripts, these are the common things that are wrong. Can you fix them? Even going through and sort of fixing those as well as the grammar and stuff, it can just save you a lot of time.

So should you do a transcript 100% better for your audience, better for accessibility, better for discoverability, better for workflow. A very, very, very useful thing to pull out of your episodes. It's not just about putting this up online so people can read it if you.

It is now a piece of content that can work so hard for you and it's really something that you should be utilizing if you are creating a podcast episode every week.

Because you know the content based hungry we gotta be promoting our episodes all the time and sometimes you just don't want to come up with those ideas yourself, you know. So let ChatGPT do the hard work and never take a holiday. You know, sometimes it does crap itself, I'll be honest.

And I'm like, what, what is happening here? What are you, what are you doing? But you know what? Nothing's perf so just got to move through that. So thank you so much for your question.

E. And if you've got a question, just head to the description of the episode. You will also find there links to my online podcasting course, Pod School, and my equipment guide.

If you just want to find out how do I set up a show and get recording, I want to do it now. Or download that guide and you'll have the answers. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. That's all for today.