Remember when people first started walking around with a Bluetooth in their ear?
I have, still do, and will always hate that. Mostly because when I see a person who is looking at me, with their lips moving, I assume they’re addressing me.
And I hate the smug look I get when that person keeps talking, but turns their head so I can see they have a Bluetooth headset.
My issues aside, it did give me a really good idea.
Faster Content Creation with Audio
In a recent post we talked about how you can sometimes leverage one action into many activities – killing two birds with one stone, if you will.
When I’m waiting for a meeting to start, in a car on the way to an event, or standing in line , I can record some quick thoughts for blog posts, or articles. (And I’ll look at the ground instead of making smiling eye contact with people and then looking confused when they smile back at me.)
If the audio quality is good, I can even share those audios as podcasts.
You’d be surprised how much content you can manufacture if you turn this into a habit. If you’re willing to pony up around $5, you can even turn that one piece of content into three.
Think of a tip, create a short audio for it, transcribe it, and pick 10 – 15 images to go with it. Edit some text into those images (or some links with ThingLink) and you have:
- an audio podcast
- an audio blog post for your site
- an article
- a guest blog post
- a video slideshow
- a YouTube video
- a video podcast
- a Slide Rocket deck
You could even combine some of the ideas to enhance a product – have you ever been watching a how-to video series and wanted a transcript?
If you’re a heavy computer user, you likely type between 40 and 80 words per minute. Light users are closer to 30 – 40 words per minute. We speak at 120 words per minute. So you could have that 600 word article done in 5 minutes.
Sometimes I want to type – I even have to if it’s a complex idea, as I’m using to thinking as I type. If I’m creating concepts or looking for clever turns of phrase, transcription is not my fall-back.
But when I’m writing an article in an area I’m knowledgeable about, it’s ideal. I pretend I’m speaking to a favorite client or colleague and explain an idea, how to steps or list of resources as if I’m talking to them. Cut. Print.
This can speed up all your content creation dramatically – think of how long it takes you just to Edit a blog post, never mind actually typing it out. With adding art, etc, it can take me up to an hour for an average blog post. Transcription reduces that time to 20 minutes – it’s just editing and finding images, after all.
In the next post, I’ll list some tools that will help you with this task – including cheap sources for transcription.
Flickr image courtesy of Yutaka Tsutano 
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[...] the last audio content creation article, we discussed how you can use audio recordings to create tons of content at lightning [...]