The Real Estate Marketing Blog team just got back from an excellent panel discussion on “Podcast & Audio Search.” There are still a lot of great opportunities to get your word out there via streaming audio; people who visit your site will not only check them out, they may actually drive more traffic to your site when they rank well on the search engines.

Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit) first gave a detailed presentation on the things you should consider before getting into the podcasting game.

• Decide whether you want a stand-alone podcast, or a series of podcasts.
• Series of podcasts need to be scheduled and given a specific programming direction.
• Naming your show: make sure it’s not already in use! Unfortunately, podcast names are not as easy to check as domain names.
• Changing the name of a show is difficult once you have an audience.
• Develop a keyword list for the show and determine how you will brand it.
• Get your album art ready - even for non-musical shows.
• Optimize ID3 tags (metadata for audio files) for the search engines - you can include images, text, and other things to help any audio player ID the audio file.
• Essential ID3 tags: Title, Album, Artist, Year, Track, Genre, Comments
• Comments should include site URL
• Optimizing the file name is also important - it needs to be identifiable to whoever downloads it, not just a random set of numbers.
• Put links to all your audio files on the same page (a landing page), then create a separate landing page for each audio episode, optimizing that page for the specific episode.
• Consider adding a transcript on the page. There are a number of transcription services that are available for this.
• Use Feedburner to manage your RSS feed.
• Submit your podcast feeds to a bunch of Podcast sites.
• Track and monitor your Podcast submissions.

Daron Babin (CEO of Webmaster Radio) then gave more helpful suggestions when incorporating podcasting into your overall marketing plan.

• Hosting constraints are a concern - make sure your series is hosted somewhere reliable and somewhere that has adequate bandwidth.
• Be careful what you say; it just might rank!
• Feedburner can be used to make all your podcast feeds compliant with iTunes.
• Don’t play music on your podcasts at all! It can cost you a lawsuit! If you absolutely have to have music, you must pay for licensing (often a time-consuming process).
• Don’t make getting into podcasting a haphazard decision; it’s not easy to do, and it will require significant commitment, creative programming, and technical ability to succeed with it.

We feel that podcasts are obviously a great way to supplement your other real estate marketing efforts. There’s probably no better way right now to consistently put your personality out there and directly connect with people in your area than to set up a regular podcast on a series of different issues regarding the real estate industry as it pertains to the specific community you’re targeting. You’ll have another great resource on your site, and those podcasts will show up in the search engines eventually, especially if people find them valuable.