Free Tool To Pull Your Visitors By Their Ears And Turn Them Into Readers
Turning an occasional visitor to your blog into a loyal reader is one of the ultimate goals for every blogger. The variety of tools we put into use to accomplish this goal is quite amazing when you analyze them closely. Multitude of plugins, subscription forms and of course – Content!
Content Is The King! But can I perhaps suggest just one more thing here – usability? And no, I’m not talking about “look and feel” of your blog but rather about providing an option to your visitors to get your content in different format. A Free Tool to pull your visitors by the ear and making them loyal readers…
Perhaps one of the most overlooked options – providing your content in different formats can add some very loyal readers to your blog. Even if not in huge numbers – they are loyal and consistent! See screenshot below for my Auto-Podcast readers and subscribers:
If you looks above you will notice a growing and consistent base of people who chose to receive my content in audio format. And that option is made available via a service (which is still free) called Odiogo.
What Is Odiogo?
I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and here is quote form the official website:
Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device.
In simple terms: they take your blog’s RSS feed and turn it into a podcast of very decent quality. It is not nearly human but it is very easy to listen and since it ads value to your blog it is well worth investigation. There are a few things you need to know before and during the integration but we are going to cover that right now…
How To Add Odiogo Podcast To Your Blog
Please keep in mind that I don’t have a fully integrated Odiogo on my blog i.e. I don’t use Odiogo listen button on every post but rather provide an option to subscribe to my podcast on sidebar, which more then likely has direct effect on low numbers shown in image above but it is done due to a personal choice…
You can either provide similar option as I do or fully integrate it into your WordPress blog:
- Signup for Odiogo service. You will have to provide your blog information here and your stats, so make sure it is all correct. Once you receive an activation email – proceed to step 2.
- Install WordPress plugin. You are provided with plugin if you would like to add the “Listen Button” to each and every post as well as Sidebar Widget. I personally choose not to use the button and simply added the subscription option to my sidebar but you can play around with what works best for you. Instructions are simple to follow at the link I provided.
- Enable Full Text Feed. Odiogo uses your feed as a source for creating a podcast so providing partial feed is not an option here. It’s been a while since I have signed up so I don’t remember for 100% but I think they actually check before your blog is approved. Just navigate to Admin->Settings->Reading and enable Full Text for Syndication feed.
- Add Odiogo XML-RPC service to your notification list. By default odiogo scans your content every couple hours for any changes but I recommend you take advantage of their XML-RPC notification to make your new content available in podcast so much faster. Simply add this service to your Update Services list under Admin->Settings->Write: http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/
- Add Podcast Feed to Your Blog Code. While this step is optional I don’t see why you wouldn’t… You already have a podcast generated by Odiogo so might as well allow people to subscribe to it. Open your header.php and add a code like one below but replace the Podcast URL with your own:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Podcast” href=”http://podcasts.odiogo.com/web-2.0-how-to-spot-er/podcasts-xml.php” />
You can get the link you need by simply following to your Odiogo Podcast page and locating it as shown in image below:
Once you have done all above, you are ready to provide your visitors with new option – Podcast of Your Content! … so make sure to advertise it properly and let people know about it!
Final Notes
At the time of this post – Odiogo is a free service. They do however reserve the the right to start charging in the future for usage so please pay attention to their TOS when signing up. I can only assume that all existing customers will receive notification before the Terms will change to make an evaluation and decide if they would like to continue using it or not – when it becomes paid service.
Also keep in mind that while Odiogo provides the Audio feed of your blog – it doesn’t keep the mp3′s for all the articles. Meaning that if you integrate “Listen Now” button and a visitor attempts to actually do it on older blog post, they will get a message that it is no longer available. This limitation is the Reason I don’t integrate the button.
Perhaps option to store old audio files and provide them to your blog visitors can be something Odiogo should make a paid service that goes beyond default 10 articles (my guess cased on what I see) and allow people who want it on their blog to purchase it. I know for me it is not something that is critical but simply something that affects the usage.
Odiogo Stats – at this time there is no way for you to check your stats but they do email you monthly with your statistics. The screenshot I have used in this post actually came directly from my email. If statistics are a big thing for you – this service doesn’t provide it but considering that its free – can we complain?
If you need even more info – here are few links I have found on the subject:
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About The Blog Author
Alex Sysoef is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer and ProBlogger who shares his passion and knowledge of WordPress, SEO, Social Media and traffic strategies on his blog WordPress Howto Spotter. Connect on Twitter or Facebook
12 Responses to “Free Tool To Pull Your Visitors By Their Ears And Turn Them Into Readers”
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[...] There are certain bloggers which I always check their blogs almost every day. My friend Alex Sysoef is one of them. He wrote a great post: Free Tool To Pull Your Visitors By Their Ears And Turn Them Into Readers [...]
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[...] There are certain bloggers which I always check their blogs almost every day. My friend Alex Sysoef is one of them. He wrote a great post: Free Tool To Pull Your Visitors By Their Ears And Turn Them Into Readers [...]
Does having people subscribe to your audio files impact your affiliate sales?
Jason’s last blog post..SEO Book Keyword Tool
Nope, those are unrelated. It is similar to Full Text Feed RSS – does it impact sales? NO, not in my experience. You provide more convenient ways for people to access your content and only.
Alex
This is an interesting tool, but we can wonder how effective it really is. I guess it all depends on the blogs using it. For instance, a gadget blog or a political blog may use it very effectively, while a cartoon/humor blog may not. Just my opinion.
OOM’s last blog post..Do you see everything? Can your eyes fool you?
You are correct, but then ANY tool's effectiveness is relevant to the audience…
Alex
I’m having second thoughts on enabling full text feed. This may cause the search engines to view rss subscriptions as duplicate contents. I’m not sure, though.
Angels last blog post..Getting More Backlinks Using Pingbacks and Trackbacks
No it will not. I always provide full text feed. Duplicate content is generally refer to the same content on YOUR blog. For example same post fully displayed in blog home page, single page, tag archives, dated archives…. you get the picture.
That is why I advocate usage of MORE tag or excerpt on your blog. Same content on other sites is not duplicate content but simply repeating content and as far as I know is not penalized. They do rank this content based on discovery date / time, or so I heard.
I am just starting out in the wonderful world of web marketing. This blows my mind. It creates so many possibilities.
Thanks for a great series of articles. They are much needed and very helpfull.
Dude! Amazing Resourse.
Whatever wordpress stuff you be selling I will be buying.
I am attempting to install my first WordPress theme (thesis) and about to pull my hair out. GoDaddy is so very not helpful right now.
Point me to the proper “shelf” or the name of someone to do it for me.
Hey,
as usual you have provided a very “usable” and very new idea, to improve my websites popularity, and usability.
This is one suggestion I will definately utilize.
Thanks for this tip.
PS. I am not keen to use full text in my feed as the images and text seems to format very oddly.
Oh, by the way, how does Odiogo interpret images in a feed?
.-= GavinMcmahon´s last blog ..YouTube – Internet marketing services, search engine optimization =-.
Some interesting questions have been brought up, like as to whether one should enable full text feed. Hmmm…
I can see where the podcast would definitely appeal to some subscribers, though. Is this idea fairly new? Maybe that’s why there seems to be some controversy going on as to how effective it may be.
@GavinMcmahon, I would also like to know how Odiogo interprets images in a feed. Maybe someone can answer this for us?
Thanks,
Peggy
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