Got back a little while ago from the first day of Podcamp West, a gathering of 150-200 podcasters at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Among those on hand: Chris Heuer, Chris Pirillo, Michael Geoghegan, Steve Rhodes, Chris and Uta Ritke, Tim Street, Corey Denis, Doug Kaye, Charles Hope, Robert Scoble, Angelique Acevedo, T.J. DeGroat, Eli Spector, Steve Sloan and Craig Syverson (a fairly male-skewed crowd).
Spent more time outside talking to podcasters than inside at the panels, but came away with a few nuggets from the on-stage participants:
Kris Smith: "Find your voice." Experiment. Try out different styles. Don’t think you have to put your first recordings online.
Vic Podcaster: "Don’t let the technology get in the way. You want to focus on the content."
"Be honest, be real, speak from the heart."
"Don’t worry about how many listeners you have, that’ll drive you nuts.
"Listen to the feedback from your audience."
"Want traffic? Add a Technoratli tag that says ‘live nude girls.’ "
"Trade links with other podcasters. Second Life is a good traffic driver."
"Don’t expect 5,000 downloads of your podcast in the very first week. It takes time to build up."
I’ll be posting three video interviews I conducted at Podcamp West soon.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Someone really said this?:
“”Want traffic? Add a Technoratli tag that says ‘live nude girls.’ “”
I hope they were kidding.
That’s not values based.
All that is going to get them is a lot of traffic from people who probably aren’t looking for their podcast.
Nice post!
Looking forward to the video interview.
cheers
PS
Sorry … yes, Steve, they were kidding. Guess you had to be there. :~) They then went on to stress the importance of tagging.