Online radio expert Daron Babin talks about Webmasterradio.fm, Internet radio, podcasting, podcast search engine marketing and two new search engines for audio and video podcasts.

Daron Babin is, together with his wife Brandy Shapiro-Babin, the core of Webmasterradio.fm, the most influential online radio station for Internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Readers that followed our coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, know that we interviewed Daron while being there.

We had, as a matter of fact, planned a regular let’s-write-this-down interview, but we should have known better. I (Per Koch of Pandia) ended up interviewing him live on the radio up in the Webmasterradio.fm stand. That was definitely a first for me!

And yes, you can listen to the interview instead of reading it, as Daron & Co has been kind enough to put up the audio file at the Webamsterradio.fm site.

Selecting themes for radio shows

Per: You are focusing on webmasters and very advanced web users, and Webmasterradio represents the front end of technology. How do you select the themes for the various programs or shows?

Daron: I have people come up to us all the time and say “How do I get a radio show on Webmasterradio?” Quite honestly, we don’t take this lightly. We don’t just put anyone on the air.

We really like to be selective and cherry pick what we would call the cream of the crop out there of the industry’s finest. The finest minds and the most respected, people that have traveled through many, many conferences, giving of their time and expertise.

Since we are the official radio station for most of these prestigious conferences, we have access to these people. We find who would be a good fit based on what’s happening trend wise in the industry. We talk to them. We bring them into the fold, as part of the family.

Motivating show hosts

Per: It must be quite a commitment to be a podcast host. How do you motivate them? A common problem in the podcasting sphere is the lack of regular programming, or hosts that talk more about their private lives than the topic at hand.

Daron: You know, that can be a problem. Most people who do podcasting have never done professional podcasting at all. Of course, there are large entities that are podcasting or just breaking into it, but all of the one-off podcasts that are out there are typically amateur.

For us, when we look to bring someone on as a show host we explain the commitment up front. We have a show host agreement. That agreement spells out expectations on both sides of the fence.

Quite honestly we tell people: “If you make the commitment, you’re in for six months. Don’t weasel out! Make sure it is something you want to do!”

Keeping them motivated is really easy. I don’t have to do that. Our listeners do that.

It is always great to do a trade show, and it’s great because our show hosts will come up to us and tell Brandy and myself that: “Wow, it is amazing, the people who come up to me and tell me specifics about a show they heard.” It excites them because they realize that someone out there are really listening, and that is true incentive.

Innovative podcasting

Per: How about the genre? At the moment most podcasts are based on the same formula: One or two hosts talking over the phone, sometimes with a guest or two. Will you have round table discussions, experimental radio plays, music and sound effects? Where’s the limit?

Daron: We have music and sound effects. The music that we use is from a very large licensed library. We all know that the RIAA has initiated regulations for broadcast of copyrighted music on the Internet and that has really crippled most small Internet broadcasters.

We don’t broadcast anything that we don’t have a license to. Everything that we produce is original. All of our commercials and all of the music and sound effects used for it we have the rights to. So we are pretty much independent and stand clear of any of those regulations.

As far as format goes, why mess with something that works? Having been in production for years, doing round table when audio’s concerned is difficult, because typically everyone is going to be on a conference bridge.

Let’s say you have six people. One of them is talking at a time, but one of the others may be sick and has a cough. The other one may have children running around in the background. One may be on a cell phone in a car or at a train station.

You cannot control of this background audio at the mixer because if you hit “mute” you mute the entire conference. So from a production standpoint you have to be mindful of what your capabilities are and still produce something that is quality for the end user to listen to.

Transcribing audio content

Per: There are probably quite a few webmasters out there considering doing their own podcasts, and they will have to think about search engines and how people find them. We know that regular search engines like text (and a lot of it!) and the right keywords. We are talking about sound and audio files here. Do you have some practical recommendations on how to overcome that problem?

Daron: Absolutely! We are transcribing all of our content.

Per: Automatically?

Daron: It is not automatic. We have been working on a process for that. I don’t expect that problem to be solved within the next six months, but we are working on it. We currently use a team of people to do our transcription.

From a search perspective, if you transcribe all of your content, I tell people: “Take that transcript and show that in the ID3 tag. Put it in the lyrics section of the ID3 tag. That does make the media file larger, and it takes a little longer to download. However, that media file is now embedded with every spoken word in text, which is huge.

Now, take that one step further. Tie that media file to the transcript and have multiple pages for that transcript. You now have multiple pages of original content that can be indexed and that link right back to that media file.

The engines are now capable of seeing everything outside of a one paragraph description in an RSS feed. That’s a big difference.

Optimizing audio files

Per: You were talking about the size of files. We are talking about a tremendous amount of bandwidth here. Is it expensive?

Daron: It is quite expensive. We currently use Akamai as one of our providers. I also have another provider that we use. It is something you have to investigate in advance.

If you are doing a podcast that is mostly talking — just voice — then it is not necessary to have a CD quality bitrate. You can actually transcode that file down to a lower bitrate (such as 56K, or 86 to 96K). Instead of delivering a 128K media file that has been expanded by adding the transcripts, then you downsize that bitrate to accommodate for that. Your file size is still going to be on the large side. However, it is now optimized.

So, there is still a cost to doing business and of laying a proper foundation, but in doing so you can do well. As the bandwidth is concerned, negotiate that up front, and don’t look back.

Advertising

Per: That brings us to income, and any budding podcast editor out there would like to know how to earn some money on this. You have a lot of advertising, and I guess you make the ads as well?

Daron: We are 100 percent in house. Our team writes everything. They prepare all of the creative, do all of the in house editing, all of the production. That helps us keep costs down. In a streaming business you have to watch corners every which way.

We have been very careful about who we brought on to the team and we maximize every angle to be able to make sure that everything we produce at Webmasterradio is timely, professional sounding, engaging, entertaining and funny. Our team goes to a lot of effort to help drive listeners by virtue of really cool, funny promotions from some of the shows that we have done.

I like to keep things under the roof, because creative flow is good and we have a very creative team.

The chat room

Per: You have live shows, and at the same time people can make use of iTunes or any other media system to download the files. When you do live shows, you often have a chat room. Is that popular? How does that work?

Daron: It is very popular. In fact, the chat room is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And they cut business deals in there. They cut traffic deals. You could find freelance graphic designers. If you need someone to write for you, draft a bunch of articles for you. Done!

All of the shows that we produce — 98 percent of them — are produced live. When they are produced live, and you are in the chat room, you can actually ask questions of some of the experts — people that you may not have the opportunity to speak to at one of these conferences.

Type your question right into the chat room and our producers make sure that that question gets to that guest or host, and you’ll get an answer back.

They will encourage you: “Pick up the phone!” We have an 800 number where you can call in and ask your question live. It has a real interactive feel about it, in a way that gives people a very empowering feeling, because they are able to approach people who may seem, typically, inaccessible because of their popularity.

Helping users find and download podcasts

Per: In spite of the success of the iPod and all the press podcasting has gotten, many still don’t know what a podcast is, let alone how to find and download it. How do you help users access your content?

Daron: Quite simply put: We have download links on the website, so those that don’t understand subscribing to the RSS podcast feeds can simply click on a link that says “download podcast”.

Even if they are not acquainted with the term podcast, it gets them accustomed to it. As they continue to download shows just by clicking on a download link on the website, they become more familiar with it and the user interface of the site itself.

We are beginning to work towards educating our users, but we really don’t have that much of a problem with it. Our users are early adopters. They get this technology. It’s not rocket science for them.

Per: And most of your listeners go to your web site. We use the iTunes downloading system and subscribe to your podcasts, but most of them use the website.

Daron: A lot of them use the website, but we still have a tremendous subscriber base from iTunes, from Google’s feed reader, MyYahoo, and any number of major feed readers. That’s encouraging as well.

Search.fm

Per: A bird told us that you are working on projects that go beyond Webmasterradio. We tried to access search.fm. There is nothing there now, but could you tell us a few words about that?

Daron: Search.fm is something that we have been working on the back burner. It is based on what we have learned from Webmasterradio content deployment and content search, the dynamic nature of ID3 tag writing on the fly, and dynamic content delivery based on the GoIP location of the user requesting that.

[Based on] all this new stuff we have begun to work on search.fm and b2b.fm, two entities where one — b2b.fm — is going to be for b2b podcast search (video podcast, audio podcast), and one — search.fm — that will be large scale podcast search for the consumer base. [We will] take this to a whole new level with the speech-to-text translation of those files, files coming inbound through the submission process.

We think there is a future in it, considering the ever growing popularity of podcasts and obviously there is a need for it. We’ll keep people informed as those things develop.

Per: We are looking forward to it. Thank you very much!

More to read

See also our review of Top 5 search engine marketing podcasts

Webmasterradio.fm website

Search Marketing Gurus have an interview with Daron’s wife and Webmasterradio co-founder Brandy Shapiro-Babin

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM (Search Engine Guide)

Pandia’s tips and tricks for Search engine optimization for podcasts

Pandia’s coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York April 2005

More Pandia interviews with search engine experts