From the course: Hypersyndication: Maximizing Your Web Video and Podcast Audience
Welcome
From the course: Hypersyndication: Maximizing Your Web Video and Podcast Audience
Welcome
- Hi, my name Rich Harrington and in this course, we're going to explore new ways to extend the reach of your web videos and podcasts. Now, if you're a video producer or even an audio producer, the techniques we're going to cover will help you get more eyeballs for your content. This means a broader reach and potentially, a much larger audience. Our goals really focus on this concept of publishing. Now, in the past, it was really important that you publish to your own website. If you didn't, you wouldn't reach people. But a lot has changed in the world, particularly with the rise in popularity of social media. Now it really comes to divide and conquer. It's important that you go where people are rather than trying to constantly pull them into your own website, you go where the crowds are already gathering. Now, it's important that you have a healthy mix of both. A home base where people can find you and where you can more deeply engage with them as well as a strong, active presence on social media and on other user-generated communities. We're going to explore both of those topics during this course. In order to succeed, your content needs to be seen by as many eyeballs as possible. So instead of trying to only pull people into your own website, consider going where the crowds are already gathering. I've organized this course based upon a logical flow of events, making sure that you understand the core technology behind syndication, the RSS feed as well as different outlets, from mobile to desktop to even television sets. Now, you may only need one particular delivery platform but I encourage you to watch all of the videos in this course, as it will help you understand the capabilities and there's a lot of technology that we weave into an individual section that will apply to other delivery platforms. We're going to explore the concept of, what is hypersyndication? Making sure that your content is syndicated to multiple outlets. The act of syndication is the process of re-publishing, or sharing content. We'll address RSS, or real simple syndication. This is the core technology behind things like blogs. But it's also used under the hood by websites like YouTube. With RSS, it's possible to set off a chain of events. Doing things like triggering social media messages, or even the re-sharing of content to different networks. We'll address specific techniques for things like targeting computers as well going to mobile devices for both streaming and downloads and how to make sure that we also reach things like television sets. These days, with the standards that have emerged, it's very easy to create one piece of content that can then be re-shared to many devices. If you know that this is possible, you can design it so that it's going to meet the highest requirements and then all of the derivative requirements for things like mobile or older computers can also be easily achieved. We'll talk about the importance of branding. Because your video and audio content is going to be distributed to multiple websites, it's very important that your brand is strongly presented. These days, your content is going to show up in a lot of places. And Facebook, YouTube and others are often more interested in promoting their brand rather than yours. But if you know how to brand your content, both using the existing tools that are out there as well as using things like color palettes and a strong presence of graphics in your content, it's possible to create something that's easily identifiable and leads people back to your main website. And we'll explore a few tools that are essential to keep your hypersyndication network running. And I'll share with you just a few final thoughts on where to go next. I've been publishing video to the web since 1996. So, more than 20 years at this point. And as an early adopter, things were quite challenging. But, I've picked up a lot of lessons through the years and a lot of practical advice I'd like to pass on to you. Let me just give you a little bit about my background. I was the founder of a media production company called RHED Pixel, that's based in the Washington D.C. area that produces full service content for a wide range of clients. I've also been developing new web technology with a company called Piqsure that allows you to stream high resolution photography to any device. I publish content daily through Photofocus with a team of more than 20 authors that create text, multiple audio podcasts and many videos to share. And my formal training is as a director, editor and a photographer. As a professional, I've been hands-on creating content for many years but I started in the field of broadcast news where it was very expensive to distribute content. I saw the rise in web technology very early and was fortunate to be publishing to the web for more than two decades. With this knowledge, I'm going to try to pass this on to you. Some of the clients that I've had a chance to work with through the years include many technology companies as well as non-profits. And I've also authored two editions of the book, Professional Web Video. All right, now that you know a bit what this course is about and a little bit about my background, let's jump in and start to give you some practical knowledge that you can put to work right away.