How Transcriptions Can Level Up Your Podcast

In today's episode, we answer three listener questions: 

1. How can I transcribe my podcast episodes?
2. Why do podcast transcripts matter?
3. How do I publish transcripts so they show up where my audience is?

We'll give you clear, practical guidance on all things transcripts!

Mentioned in the episode: How to Rank Higher on Apple Podcasts (Data‑Backed Guide)

Disclaimer: To have Buzzsprout automatically create transcripts for your episodes, you must be on any of our current paid Buzzsprout plans. 

Share this with a creator who needs it, and leave a review if it helped! 

If you have questions about transcribing your episodes, reach out to the Podcaster Success team by emailing support@buzzsprout.com.

Keep podcasting!

Transcript

Welcome To Podcasting Q&A

Cara Pacetti 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. This is a super exciting episode because today we are not tackling one question, but three questions. And we are talking all about podcast transcripts. The questions we'll be answering today are: how do I transcribe my episodes? Why are transcripts so important? And how do I get my transcripts in front of my listeners? Transcribing your podcast means turning the spoken audio from your episodes into written text. And while this may just seem like one extra step in your podcast production process, transcripts can actually be one of the most valuable additions to your podcast workflow. Since this is a new step in your podcast workflow, let's talk about how we do it, the logistics. Good news is if you are hosted here on Buzzsprout, we make this even easier than ever. If you are on any of our current Buzzsprout plans, we will automatically transcribe your episodes for you using high fidelity transcripts. So every time you upload your audio files into Buzzsprout, a transcript will automatically be generated for you and available to you right inside of your account. So this is a super exciting feature, super easy to use, and makes it really easy to transcribe your episodes. Now, if you're not hosted here on Buzzsprout, there are some other options out there for you. Descript is a great all-in-one option for not only recording and editing your episodes, but also transcribing them. They will provide a high fidelity transcript as well that you can use and you can edit those transcripts directly on their site. The last option I want to share is for those who aren't looking for an all-in-one service, but they only want to focus on transcribing their audio episodes, I recommend checking out otter.ai or rev.com. These are going to be great sources for transcription only services. So now that we know how easy it is to have a transcription for your episodes, why do we even need them? One benefit of transcribing your episodes is that it's actually a very thoughtful way to serve your listeners. If you think about it, not everyone can easily listen to audio content. Some people are hard of hearing, and others may just simply prefer to read instead of listening to your episodes. And so providing a transcript allows more people to engage with your content, which ultimately helps you to reach an even wider audience. Transcripts also help your podcast show up in search results. So when you publish a transcript on your podcasting website, search engines suddenly have thousands of words of text that they can index for each of your episodes. This means there is an opportunity to discover your podcast when people are searching the topics you've discussed, the questions you've answered, or even specific phrases mentioned in your episodes. This discoverability piece of your podcast is done using SEO or search engine optimization. If you want to know more SEO tips and how you can sharpen that tool, let me know. Send us a text using the Text the Show link in the show notes. And I'd love to just highlight and dive deep into SEO and the podcasting space on a future podcasting Q&A episode. But for now, I am going to include our blog post on SEO tips in the show notes below. Another maybe hidden benefit of transcribing your episodes that I think is a little bit underrated is the use of transcripts to repurpose content. Using your transcripts, you already have written words. So when it comes to creating content like blog posts, social media quotes that you're sharing, newsletters, uh maybe you're creating episode summaries. This is already done for you because you have everything you said during your episode in written form. And so it makes content creation and content sharing much easier. In addition to that, if you have your transcription for your episode in front of you while you're making edits, it's very easy to follow along. And sometimes reading the words can really point out if you are speaking out of turn or maybe you could have said something better. I find that if I'm reading my transcript while I'm making edits to my audio episode, that tends to help. So that's a little pro tip if you want to take that and give it a try. The last piece in all of this is how do I get my transcripts in front of my listeners? So when you're hosted on Buzzsprout, your transcripts are included in your podcasting website and specifically on your episode page. So when your listener is listening to the episode, they can be reading right along with your transcript too. We will also include your transcript in your RSS feed. So any of the listening directories that support transcripts will include the transcripts with your episodes. Most directories will show the transcript alongside the episode descriptions. I know that for Apple Podcasts, when you're using the Apple Podcasts mobile app, you can actually follow along and the transcript will be presented as closed captioning. As you speak, you'll see the transcript play out on your mobile device. It's actually a very eloquent and pretty uh look. And they also will show the static text when viewing the podcast on their desktop app. Keep in mind, while we can guarantee that your transcripts have been added to your RSS feeds, it is totally up to the directories how they choose to display that information on their end. If you have your own podcasting website, then you can actually get your episode transcripts in front of your listeners by adding your transcript along your episodes to that website. So you can use the BuzzRout embed players to go ahead and embed your episodes on your personal website. And then you can copy and paste your episode transcripts just below the embed player to make a wonderful listening experience for your listeners to follow along with your episodes. In your BuzzRoute account, you'll see a small link icon next to your transcripts. This will provide you with a URL that contains a full plain text transcription of your episode. So this benefit makes it super easy to copy and paste into your website editing platform. If you have any questions about transcribing your episodes, you know we have a full team here that's ready to answer them. Just shoot us an email at support @buzzsprout.com and we'd love to help you with that. I'd love to answer any of your questions about podcasting or transcribing your episodes on a future podcasting Q&A episode. So send us your questions by clicking the send us a text link in the show notes and let us know what's on your mind. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.