Choosing a Title
| In the last chapter, we talked about picking a subject you are passionate about, which is clearly the number-one piece of advice from current podcasters. In this chapter, we are going to talk about first impressions. The old saying is, you only get one chance to make a first impression. With over 30,000 (soon to be over 100,000) podcasts to compete with, listeners will have less and less time to spend when looking at a new podcast. And they almost certainly will not give you a second chance with so many others to yet explore. The very first thing any potential listener will ever learn about your show is the title of your show. How you choose a name will go very far in setting up that first impression. Let's look at some great names:
We bet most people can tell what each of these podcasts is about as soon as they see the titles. It is often important to pick a title that clearly lets potential listeners know what your show is about. This is especially true for niche shows and shows that are about a specific subject. You want to make sure people looking for that subject can easily connect your show with the subject (see Figure 5.1). Figure 5.1. Searching for "Comedy" podcasts in iTunes narrows the pack a bit, but there's still a huge number of podcasts from which to choose. Chris at Tips from the Top Floor, a podcast about Digital Photography, renamed his show Digital Photography: Tips from the Top Floor, after the release of iTunes. That simple change helped his subscriber numbers to increase drastically from about 1,000 to over 10,000. The English as a Second Language (ESL) Podcast launched in July of 2005, and by October of that year had over 10,000 subscribers. Jeff, the host of the ESL Podcast, did not do any promoting of his show; he simply listed it in iTunes and people searching for that subject signed up in droves. His only real marketing was the name of his podcast. For shows where the subject matter is a little more gray (comedy or entertainment), a catchy unique title may be more appropriate. Yeast Radio, The Twisted Pickle, and The Evil Genius Chronicles really tell you nothing about the content, other than that the creators of these shows at least have some creativity. And if a listener is searching around the Comedy section of a directory, a name that jumps out at them may be more likely to be clicked than a boring name like The John Doe Show. Let's try something: You are looking for a show that is likely to make you laugh and entertain you. You are also looking for something a little different than standard fare. Which of the following would you click?
Granted, if you are French and don't like puffy orange junk food, you may go with the latter. But most people would go for the former. If you already have a blog or a website with some sort of following, oftentimes you are best served to play off the name of the site or blog. Some great examples are TheForce.Net Podcast, Suicide Girls Podcast, iLounge.com Podcast, and, of course, The Diggnation Podcast. All these used the popularity and traffic from their sites to spur traffic to their podcasts. But this really only works if you have established traffic. If your blog has a strange name and no traffic and you are looking for the podcast to help bring traffic to the blog, you may be better suited picking a new name for the podcast that might attract attention. Once you have some potential names picked out, go into iTunes, Yahoo!, Odeo, and Podcast Alley and do a search for those names and derivatives of those names. Early on in podcasting there were podcasts with the following names:
Talk about confusing! You can practically hear the potential listener base dropping through the floor. It is very important to look at the other names of podcasts out there so you don't create unwanted confusion. The couple of hours of work you spend now researching good names and looking at what is out there will save you tenfold that amount of time and frustration later on if you have to change your podcast's name. Once you have narrowed down potential names, go to your favorite registrar and see if you can register, at a minimum, the .com, .net, and .org web domain names. You want to make sure you protect your namespace. There is nothing worse than having a podcast about religion located at www.yourdomain.com and then having a porn site register www.yourdomain.net or .org. And if your podcast/website takes off and those names are available, trust us, someone will register them and you'll end up wishing you had done it when you had the chance. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 162