Podcasting truly has a lot of potential for marketers even if they don’t regularly publish audio files (purists probably disagree with me here) you see, podcasts are a great way to distribute all those audio files. In 2004 it seemed to me everyone was publishing or making available their teleseminar calls for downloading and I’d get an email like ok it’s ready to download go download it here. Two hours later I’d sometimes get a follow up email with apologies to those who didn’t get that email and to remind everyone to put the list on their white list etc.

A better way would be to get people to subscribe to your free teleseminar recording podcasts. Then when your audio is ready for download just podcast it, and subscribers will get it downloaded on their computers automatically and in some cases will even play automatically. Although nothing can ever truly replace email yet but making a podcast available in addition to your list has it’s benefits:

• No more “I didn’t get your email” problems
• No more running your email through the spam checker – what a pain
• Wider distribution – reach not only your subscribers but those reluctant to get on a list no matter what
• Get crawled fast! Yup. Even with my awfully limited podcasts my podcast feed remains my 2nd most subscribed feed and I got into major RSS engines quickly
• You still get in touch with your contacts and can still provide a special message and no typing!
• Members only call? No problem you can password protect your podcasts

So is it a reality? I’d say yes and you don’t have to use it for teleseminars only. It could be your audio blog or audio version of your blog. And if you’re new and looking for an opportunity or to do something new you could even do full fledged shows like my friend Kelly McCausey who has a great resource Shoestring Radio If you’re wondering what is this whole podcast thing, good thing wrote a 2 minute tutorial 🙂