YouTube

Podcasting: Using video to reach prospective students

I could assume a lot of things about what you might have available to you in the resources department, but I’ll just start with where I started and hope that I reach a broad audience.

I started with nothing

Ok this isnt true. I had a laptop with video editing software. But that was it. I picked up a cheapo camcorder on Black Friday for 130 and I shot some film. I also used the built-in webcam to tape a How To Apply video using the stuff on my desk. Generally, you’ll want to have a video that’s two to three minutes in length. Post the videos in YouTube to start with and you can put little video windows on your myspace and facebook sites.

Your Video next to Kanye= Big Time

Podcasting is a bit different. It pretty big time because your videos are posted in the same online store as Kanye West. Students can put school in their search term and your institution pops up there with all those old school hits. Also, a podcast is a subscription… just like if you click on the orange button on the right side of the url bar on your browser (go ahead and click on it). Your computer and ipod will be updated with the newest content. Getting here is pretty simple and you may have the resources to do this at hand.

Get a Host

Podcasting works by creating a link to hosted content. iTunes may be invincible, but they don’t have the space to store your video. You need to store your video yourself. This is what a host is for. Check out Site5 as a hosting option

Also you can use this host to house your blogs and connect them to a url (www.thefreshman15.net). This is something that your institution can provide you with if their willing to do so. If not, the link I provided provides cheap hosting and cheap domain names.

Get a blogger account

Google makes podcasting easy so go ahead and set up a free blogger.com account. Each blog post needs to have a link to the file in the body of the post.

Get a feedburner account

When you create a new feedburner account, plug your blogger url into the burn a feed field. Be sure to check the I am a podcaster field. This will create a feedburner url that you will submit to iTunes. Feedburner is great for tracking your stats down to the nitty gritty. You can also export those stats to an excel spreadsheet

You have and iTunes account, right?

If you have an account (you need one) just go into your account settings and submit your feedburner URL as a podcast. You can go into the optimize menu in Feedburner to set up the appearance on iTunes. It takes a while for iTunes to sync up with your feed, but you can troubleshoot in Feedburner to see if you podcast is ready to go. The most common problem you’ll run into is MIME types. You can go into your options in Site5 and add the mime type of .m4v or whatever movie type you’re using as a video. There are numerous sites that tell you how to do this with ease. Feel free to ask me a question in the comments section and I’ll respond like lightning.

Plugging your podcast 

Here’s an idea: Why don’t you create a url specifically for your podcast files, and then redirect the main url to your feedburner site. So say your site is called myuniversitypodcast.pp. When you email your students, you can just include a link to myuniversitypodcast.pp and when they click on the link it will redirect them to the feedburner subscribe page. The page has tons of subscription options, including itunes. You could also just ask the student to search for your school in iTunes, but this does it for them.

© 2007 Tim Cox.