Odiogo Problems Solved

So a few days ago I decided to podcast the posts on this blog. And as I said in the post on how to convert your blog posts into podcasts, there were several free options open to me.

I decided to go with Odiogo simply because I liked the range of options and the feel of the service

Problem was the podcasts were rather short.

The point of adding audio was to get the ENTIRE blog post into audio format!!

So I contacted Odiogo and the long and short of it is THE PROBLEM IS SORTED

A heads up if you use blogger as your platform. Before you set up Odiogo, you must make sure that your feeds setting in you blog is on full feeds and not short.

To edit the URL feed,

• Log in to your blogger account
• Select the blog you want to put audio on
• Click on settings
• A new page will open up
• Navigate to the "site feed" tab and click on it
• The feeds setting page will load
• Change the setting under the allow blog feeds tab from short to full and click save

To add audio to your site

• Go to Odiogo.com
• Submit your blog's feed URL to Odiogo
• An Audio of all your blog posts will be created
• You will also be given the option of adding the Odiogo gadget to your blog
• Copy the code
• Go into your blogger account
• On the layout page, add the html code you copied as a gadget
• Save
• An email will be sent to you confirming your feeds have been generated and giving you the link to your control page

That's it.

If you have already added Odiogo to your blogger blog before editing the feeds setting from short to full, No worries.

The Odiogo feed is updated a few times a day so the full version of your podcast will be available to your blog visitors before the day is done

Till next time

How To Convert Your Blog Posts To Podcasts

The ability to turn your blog posts into podcasts has many obvious advantages


Advantages of having podcasts of your blog posts

• Visually impaired. Makes your blog more user friendly and perhaps increase the pool from which you can draw an audience


• Convenience. The type A personalities who just cannot stop for a second to read your blog posts may think again if they can listen to the posts while getting ready for work


• Portability. Again the convenience afforded to your blog readers by having a downloadable podcast is tremendous. They can download it to their ipod or other mp3 player and listen to your podcasts while driving to work or wherever


• Podcast RSS. Syndicating your podcasts i.e getting the RSS feeds of your blogs podcasts and submitting it to podcast feed directories is one great and easy way of generating traffic to your blog

Available options to help turn your blog posts to podcasts for free


I had to do a little testing with this one and decide on 3 options to share with you here. Now there are several other programs on the Internet that you can use to turn your blog posts to podcasts but these 3 were what I thought were most appropriate for people who are mainly bloggers and not podcasters



Odiogo

Definitely my favorite.

Pros of Odiogo

• Really easy to use. Just submit your blog's RSS feed and your email address and your blogs content is converted within a couple of minutes to audio format


• Embed on Blog. Again you can embed your podcasts on your blog and the appropriate podcast is associated with the relevant post automatically. All you need to do is add the odiogo widget


• Versatility. Odiogo has widgets for a wide variety of blogging platforms including blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Blogengine. And they are developing more!


• Control page. Here you can preview your audio files before loading onto your blog. The control page contains the links for iTunes, Juice and Zune users to subscribe to your feeds. The control panel also has tabs to help bookmark your podcast feeds easily


• Choice. You can select a male or female voice, language and accent
• Statistics. These are emailed you from time to time. It's a log of the download requests for your podcasts

Cons of using Odiogo

• My podcasts stop prematurely. It may be because of the feeds setting on my blog which was not set at full. I have altered this but am still waiting for the audios to go to full length

Talkr

Been around since 2005 and another really good service.

Pros of Talkr

• Easy to use. Just submit the blog RSS feed and email
• Similar to Odiogo
• Allows embeding of your podcast on your blog
• Earn Money. You can earn money with Talkr by allowing adverts to be included in your RSS feed and your podcast
• Stats page. Allows you to monitor the performance of your podcasts

Cons of Talkr

• Personally I preferred the feel of Odiogo. But that's just personal preference
• Talkr asks for more personal info than Odiogo e.g address
• Again my podcast was for shortened to 10 seconds but perhaps the same RSS feed formatting problem applies
• Reports page: Date ends 2007. Still trying to figure that one out

Read The Words

Another blog post to podcast converter. I have to admit that I just found the voice too artificial. And there seemed to be a problem with pronouncing the word blog. Hmmm

So get podcasting