Enhance Your Story and Create More Easily Accessible Podcasts with Chapters

Ask yourself: how accessible is your podcast? Can listeners follow your story, or get through your content in one sitting? Could they more fully appreciate your podcast with extra background information or references?

Accessibility isn’t just about making sure your podcast is available on every listening platform, or blowing up people’s social network feeds. It also lies in the structure of your content, how well you tell your story, and the marketing strategies you use to hook listeners in; your podcast needs to be easy to consume for listeners.

Spreaker is now giving you the ability to add chapters to your episode through our CMS. With chapters, you can delineate a clear outline of key points and favorite moments that listeners can get to easily, and create new ways to share your content.

How do chapters work?

Chapters are visual markers, taking the form of images, text, and links, that highlight different parts of your episode. Through the CMS, they can be placed along specific points of the waveform by clicking on “+” and adding all the relevant information you’d like your listener to know:

They can signal the beginnings to different segments, or acts, of your episode, lead to interviews, include links to outside articles, and more.

Once they’re set, they’ll be visible across Spreaker’s listening platforms. Chapters will appear in the embedded player, Spreaker Podcast Radio for both Android and iOS, and Spreaker.com.

Give your listeners the bigger picture

With chapters, listeners are given visual cues that invite them to engage with your content in a different way. They’re handy guides that lead to specific moments relevant to their interests, without the endless seeking and searching. Chapters are also useful if your episodes tend to run quite long; they’ll break the episode down into digestible pieces that listeners can consume at their own leisure – especially if they’re short on time.

As mentioned earlier, chapters can include not just titles, but images and links too. You can add interviewee headshots, pictures from your latest trip, and infographics, or link to specific news articles, recipes, and special offers  – anything that can add greater context to your podcast and enrich your listeners’ experience.

Chapters are especially helpful to podcasters – particularly when it comes to ramping up content marketing strategies. They’re versatile enough to lead into lots of other kinds of mediums and networks. Here are just three ways chapters can effectively boost your own strategy:

• Use them to help break down your content to tell your story and find different hooks: so if your next episode is all about five tips on how to grow your business, create chapters based on each tip. Each title can be framed as a specific call-to-action.

• They also make sharing and repurposing your content really easy, especially if you’re looking for new angles to attract specific communities or sponsors. You can use the titles of your chapters as titles to related blog posts, tweets, or even focal points of marketing campaigns.

• And speaking of sponsors, if you’re monetizing your podcast, you can use chapters as a way to do double duty with your ad reads or revenue sharing programs: add links to offers and coupons that your listeners can reach, even when they’re not tuning in.

By adding chapters to your episodes, the benefits you get are two-fold: your listeners get easy access to clearly told stores, and can take advantage of outside sources that can give them a bigger picture of your topic; in turn, your content becomes easier to share through different networks and mediums, and amp up your monetization efforts.

Who wouldn’t want all that for their podcast? Go into Spreaker’s CMS and add chapters to your own episodes now!