If it’s your first time coming to my website, my name’s Sal and I’ve been podcasting for nearly a year at the time I’m writing this.
Originally, I was going to do my own podcast transcriptions, but (big surprise), it was very labor intensive and far more work than I could handle.
I transcribed one or two of my early podcast episodes, but after that I basically stopped offering a transcription for my podcast.
That is, until I started to grow my podcast and got a bunch of sponsors for the show. I’ve been getting more readers asking “Do you offer a transcript for the show,” and, unfortunately, I had to keep saying “no, not at this time.”
Finally, I decided to offer a transcription for popular podcast episodes at a very low price. It costs money, after all, to have your podcast transcribed.
I don’t know if this will be received well by my audience, but I do know that the transcription service I used was pretty good, which is what this review is about!
I found on google, simply because they rank well for key terms.
I couldn’t really find any good reviews on them, aside from those on their website, which you can never really trust, so I just decided to try it out.
The Submission Process
Basically, you upload your mp3 from their website, provide your email, and after they receive it and look it over, they’ll send you a paypal invoice. After you pay it, they say they’ll deliver it in 24-48 hours. The one thing I liked about this was there was no going through the hassle of “creating an account” to use the service.
After I submitted the mp3 file, I got an email saying that they had received it and then a little bit after, they gave me a quote in terms of how much it would cost to do the transcription. I’ve shown those two below.
Note: This transcription service seems to be a subsidiary of Vanan Services.
It ended up costing $39.60 with a transaction fee of $1.98, or total of $41.58.
I approved the cost and then they sent me a paypal invoice for that amount, which I paid.
A day later, they sent me the transcript of the podcast, and it was pretty accurate, which impressed me. I was expecting (but hoping there weren’t) a lot of misspellings.
They asked for feedback, so I sent a message back saying that I wish there were spaces in between the paragraphs, even though it was double spaced. They wrote back pretty quickly with an updated document with spaces between the paragraphs!
So, I was happy with my experience. I would . Hope they maintain this price, level of quality, and customer service as the podcasting industry continues to grow. Please share your experience with them as a comment.
Also! I ended up formatting the text that they delivered with iBooks Author, which I’ve found to be a great way to create a high quality looking PDF. I’ll attach a screenshot of the PDF that I made below.
Thoughts on including a transcript for your podcast
I do really enjoy podcasting, but I’m not an expert at podcasting by any means. I’m a regular guy figuring out this whole podcasting business.
Ideally, I’d love to offer these transcripts to my audience for free, but at the moment, I can’t justify the cost of transcription unless I charge a bit. I don’t know if I’ll continue doing that going forward, but for now that’s what I’m testing out.
Don’t forget to leave a comment telling me about your podcast!
