Podcasting is a powerful way for authors to expand their visibility and promote their expertise. This month, SkillBites invited Steve Lubetkin, managing partner of The Lubetkin Media Companies, to provide tips on producing effective podcasts.

As Lubetkin explained, podcasts are a wonderful channel for authors to communicate with their audience, if they are done professionally. They are a low cost vehicle for educating one’s target market; and they help elevate one’s ranking in Google, which loves audio and video content.

Here are some of the podcasting tips Steve shared:

1. Don’t try to sell your products or services. Podcasts should not sound like a commercial.
2. Podcasts should be short. While some are as short as 60 seconds, and others are 2 hours or longer, the sweet spot is 15 to 18 minutes. That’s about as long as people’s attention span these days.
3. Before conducting a podcast, prepare a script. While you don’t want to read from the script, you do want to sound fluent. You may want to run the script by your lawyer to make sure there’s nothing you are planning to say that could be a liability.
4. Podcasts can be done as often as need be – daily, weekly, monthly or just periodically.
5. Video podcasts are much more complex and time consuming, and people can’t watch them while they are driving. However in some markets, such as non-profits, they are much more effective than audio podcasts.
6. To broadcast your podcast, use a content distribution platform such as libsyn.com. Depending on how many podcasts one is distributing and the length of those podcasts, the cost is as little as $5/month.
7. Authors can find lists of people who do book podcasts at bookreviewpodcasts.com and bloggers at bookblogger.com, to obtain an interview on a podcast or have a blog post written about their expertise and their book.

Steve can be contacted at Steve@BeingTheMedia.com. He is the co-author of The Business of Podcasting, which is due to be published in the next few months.