Unlocking the Power of Visual Podcasting with Pod2Vid – PCI 417

Welcome to this episode of Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry. And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist at Blueberry. And I'm Todd Cochran, founder of Blueberry Podcast. Today, we're gonna talk about our new pod to vid service that easily creates a video version

of your audio podcast. You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting. With all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in.

With YouTube ranking as the 2nd largest search engine globally, we know there's a shift towards video content that is really undeniable. More and more consumers are increasingly tuning to YouTube for entertainment, information, and podcasts. And by converting their audio content to video, podcasters can access a wider audience, opening door to countless new listeners and viewers. But many of us don't want to do a full blown video podcast where we're in front of a camera.

I do, but it is a considerable amount of work, and I've been doing it for a long time and I kind of got a a plan. But today, the way YouTube handles the ingestion of your podcast, if you allow them to do that via RSS feed, that audio gets converted to a video and then there is a static image of your show basically, your show art that basically is there on a YouTube page for people to stare at with no interactivity,

and I think we can all agree that probably is okay if you're washing the dishes and don't wanna look at the TV or if you're however you're consuming where you're not actually in participating. But we've come up with this new pod to bid service that allows you the ability here to have a more visual appealing piece of content that's put online.

What Pod2vid is, and I guess maybe, Mackenzie, I'll let you explain exactly what it is so that folks will get a little insight into the product if they haven't used it already.

Sure. So Pod2vid is essentially in the name. You were taking your audio podcast. Blueberry is changing the format, and we're turning it into a video. It is the opposite of what we released earlier this year, where we are taking your video and turning it into an audio podcast. We figured, just like Todd said, video has video content has taken everything by storm, so we are focusing on allowing you to effortlessly create a video that you can share on

your favorite platforms. So you are uploading your audio file to us, your episode, or we're taking it after it's already been published. You're able to design it a little bit, what the video is gonna look like. You can do an image, obviously, title, change the colors, add add another image or 2, add some chapters. Those, I think, really make the video look good. Overall, it's just another way for where people to And what's cool about your content. Yeah. What's cool about it is it's not just a

static image. It's it follows your chapters with chapter images and and all that, and we help you generate those images if you want. With AI, you can pick from we have a bunch of artwork that you can pick, and I can't remember the name of the service that's Unsplash. Yeah. There we go. Unsplash. So you can choose images that way, and and that way it's kind of a slideshow.

So there is something visually going on instead of just the static image of your episode artwork or your overall show artwork.

One thing to remember here is that if you wanna do a full blown production, there's there's obviously much better tools out there. We've got Headliner that has a full blown process as well, maybe using cap cut. There's a variety of great tools, but what this is is I like to refer to as this is for me good enough. And, basically, good in what is good enough? Well, good enough is if I have covered 10 topics in the episode and we have 10 chapter files that have been created and segmented by the AI,

I then can go and say, okay. Here's the title of the chapter I was talking about. Let's just say the recent Apple launch. Don't necessarily wanna put an Apple logo on the page, but I was able to do some searches and find something that was, I guess, for a better word, it's a little more entertaining It makes you go, what is that on the screen? And, of course, the conversation's proceeding, but you can have a little fun with

this. And that's what I've been trying to do is is find images that spark a little bit of a moment, and you can put Easter eggs in. In one of my latest shows, I basically said if you find the Easter egg, I'm gonna provide you a link to a special piece of content. So I had a little fun with it in putting the images into the content. So when we create the file, what's gonna what you're gonna get is you're gonna get you're not touching your audio.

We're going to provide you the ability to have, as Mike said, every few minutes when the information or the content changes in your show, you can have a different image on the screen.

And we provide you the metadata so that when you go to put that information into YouTube, when you publish it, you can copy that data and then what will happen is people actually then be able to jump from spot 1 to spot 3 or chapter 5 in your content so they can find exactly what they're looking for within the description of your YouTube episodes. So it's a lot of fun. And, again, this video can go up to any of the platforms. It could go to X. It could go on Twitch. It

could go on Rumble. It just doesn't have to be for YouTube. It can go wherever you want it to go.

But, you know, what this really does, in my opinion, is it allows you to cater to both audio and visual content consumers by offering this dual format availability with very little work. Now my show that I do, my tech show, I end up with, like, 30 chapters. You think, oh my god. That's a lot of work. And what it what I found was it took me about 10 minutes to get through and put images and some links because you can also carry

links into this content as well. About 10 minutes to do 30 chapters, and I ended up with a much better product as if I had not done a video podcast where I'm doing true in person. You see people moving around in background, all that. This just really kinda sped the process up and gave a better output than what app than what YouTube does now by just sucking your audio in, creating, an MP 4 on their side, and then or creating a video on their side and

then just dropping in your album art. It's a lot more interactive and probably well, I think it's worth the investment of time. And, again, this is quick, fast, easy, not designed to be a headliner and not designed to be cap cut. This is something that is something that we want to be able for most people, I would say for 90% of folks, this will be enough of a solution for them to have a great interactive Yeah. And what's nice about podcast.

The way we implemented it as well is if you're using our AI system to create your chapters, those chapters also work in the podcast 2.0 apps that use those chapters, and you can even build your own chapters. So if you're building your chapters for the audio side, you can those use those same chapters for this video. And that cuts down. You don't have to make the chapters 4 times. You just do

it once, and you make the video. You make the goes into the feed for the audio, and it all kinda works the same. But I think to

go ahead, Mackenzie. I I hear you're gonna say something. Yeah. This is exclusively available to our Thrive Bundle customers, and that's one of the reasons why we think it's a good solution for a lot of podcasters who don't wanna fully get into the video content creation. Like you said, you're very interested in doing a video podcast. I am interested in reaching video listeners, watchers. I don't necessarily wanna create that content

with myself in it. So I think this is a really good way for people to be able to do that, and it is available exclusively to our thrive bundle customers who already receive a bunch of enhanced tools, enhanced blueberry tools, and extra stats, and our pie, our podcast AI tools. So overall, I think it's a really good package for people. Yeah. Instead of having to go to these other places to to make a more involved video, this this is, like Todd said, good enough,

and it's built right into the system. So you're not adding a whole lot of work to get roughly the same product. And I I just think YouTube is, like I said or like we say, is the number 2 search engine out there. And maybe someone finds this video and then later on decides, oh, I wanna subscribe to an Apple Podcast or Spotify or whatever. It it gets a little bit more discoverability out there.

And one thing that you'll see, and we're actually from our free offer that we had in August that we got a lot of feedback on Py, and you're gonna see an update to the Py platform as far as the UI goes soon. But what's really gonna speed the process up too is if you've already created a chapter file for as part of your production in the in the platform,

when you go to use the pod to vid product, what you're gonna find is that we're not gonna rerun the transcript. We're not gonna recreate the the chapter files. It's just gonna be there. You're gonna load that page as and you're basically gonna be able to modify the chapters if you want. Or if you've already modified them, those modifications will carry over in this new production. All you really then have to do is link to images that you want or images that you get from

the from our our integration with Unsplash. Now the only AI image that we create is kinda like your lead image. We don't have the AI creator for each of the 8, 9, 10, 20 chapters you may have. Those are basically ones you can upload yourself if you've got images you wanna upload and

or work with Unsplash. And all that information is credited so that when you carry that media over and you copy that metadata over, we make sure that we are are basically honoring the the the copyright of the image orders, and you're you're good to go. So I'm really excited about Pod2Vid and basically being able to boost your visibility.

And, again, it's affordable. Our the Thrive package is is $10 additional to your hosting, and we've offered so much now that the Thrive package itself is almost at a point for us where we're not making any money on it. It is a lot of products and services that we've added to the basically your hosting plan, and I I hope you're taking advantage of it if you're using Thrive, all the different

features that Thrive offers. And if you haven't looked at Thryv yet, make sure that you visit the link in the in the show notes today to go over and look at what the Thryv package completely encompasses. But, I'm excited for folks to use this. I really am.

Yeah. And if you do give it a try, make sure you let us know what you think of it and what improvements we could make maybe in the future. But that should be, as Todd said, good enough. And have fun with the images. If you do a search and it doesn't come up with the exact image you wanna use, go ahead and ping around a little bit and try some different search terms and, yeah, I'm sure you're gonna find something that'll be

fun. But, again, it's it's a lot more engaging than just having your your your album art, your your album art from your show that shows up in the way it's being done now on on YouTube. And, again, minimal amount of time to invest to get a a much greater product. We're excited for people to use Pod2Vid. And, please, when you do, share them, tag Blueberry wherever whenever you're posting them on social or just taking people over to YouTube. We'd love to see how people are using this on their own.

Absolutely. Share those links with us so that we can, we can share it with the rest of the community as well. Alright. Make sure you check back next week or subscribe, follow, whatever your app says to Podcast Insider, and everything can be found over at podcastinsider.com. Catch you next week.

Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. To check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the e's. We couldn't afford the e's.