Building a Radio Show Audience One Keyword At A Time by Brent Leary, 13 December 2007

The majority of small businesses are not high flying tech companies or web savvy start ups. They’re largely traditional companies in low tech industries. And that’s the audience Brent Leary and Michael Thomas set out to reach when they launched their radio show, ‘Technology For Business Sake (TFBS)’. And how did they find their audience? Through keyword research, of course.

It is really hard for me to believe that for the past 52 weeks I’ve said the words “Welcome to another edition of Technology For Business Sake (TFBS)”. TFBS is a weekly hour long radio show on the first 24 hour business talk radio station in Atlanta Ga. I can honestly say I had no idea of what my co-host Michael Thomas and I were getting into when we discussed the idea of a radio show aimed at helping small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) understand all the things going on in technology didn’t have a clue as to how it would be received.

There were (and are) some well known shows that focus on consumer technology and target hardcore geeks, but we wanted to focus on entrepreneurs and small business owners. Plus we weren’t going to focus solely on internet entrepreneurs, but on traditional mainstream small business people and those not terribly savvy when it comes to using today’s technology. And contrary to popular demand, the majority of small businesses are not high-flying tech companies or web-savvy start ups. They are "traditionalists" - companies participating in low-tech industries that don't spark the interest of the media. Even though their core businesses may be low-tech, that doesn't mean they would not benefit from deploying technology to grow.

As you can probably imagine, there were a number of things we needed to do to get the show off the ground. Some were pretty obvious like coming up with a name, choosing a format for the show, lining up guests, and getting used to talking on air. And because it was radio, we had to make the show easy to listen to by having some fun with the guests and with each other, as we all know great information presented in the wrong way won’t make anyone want to listen to us for long. So our idea was to have conversations on topics of interest to SMBs, with people SMBs want to hear from, in a way that makes it fun to listen to.

Taking radio beyond Atlanta and onto the web

Although we were only on the air in Atlanta, the people we interviewed were well known all over, and the topics we covered were pretty universal with respect to small business. Like talking email marketing with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman, search engine optimization with Aaron Wall, or Wikinomics with author Don Tapscott for example. So we decided to repurpose the show as a podcast so people could listen to them on the web, or download them to their iPods.

The first thing we needed to do was to come up with a domain name that would be pretty easy to remember, and also bring some search traffic our way. After doing some keyword research, we settled on BusinessTechnologyRadio.com It’s a little long, but it contains some important terms that we thought would help us generate some hits to the site. We also wanted to include a few strategic words in the title of the site’s homepage that we couldn’t fit in the domain name, so we included “online small business radio podcast” there to help give us more opportunities to pick up some targeted search traffic.

Keyword research also played an important role in creating url text for the show pages when we were ready to post a new show. Having the right words in the url really paid off as show pages began showing up in relevant searches within a week. The other thing that helped move us up the results list was taking time to write thoughtful show summaries emphasizing strategic words for each page we put out.

Writing descriptive show summaries also proved important when putting together the RSS feed for the show podcast. Although it was critically important for us to have a solid website for the show, the majority of podcasts are downloaded from iTunes. These folks probably wouldn’t have found our site on their own, so we had to make sure our descriptions and tags caught the attention of people who’d be interested in our kind of content. In fact we even tag the audio files with keywords so that people can find the mp3s without having to visit the show site. And we paid attention to how other people tagged links to our shows on sites like Del.icio.us and Digg.

Finding guests small businesses want to listen to

But I think the most interesting way keyword research has added to the show is in how it aids us in finding interesting guests for our growing audience. For example, when we were thinking about doing a show on outsourcing IT projects, we decided to approach Elance.com CEO Fabio Rosati because there were a good number of searches for both Elance and Fabio. After talking to him we thought he’d make for an interesting interview and things worked out great. We followed that same method a number of times and have had great results to show for it. In fact one of the extra benefits coming from this approach is a number of high quality links back from people who have been on the show. So in addition to getting great guests on with us, we also start showing up in search results in some important phrases, and pick up quality links that brings us quality traffic.

It really paid off for us to take time up front to figure out what small biz types were interested in, who they wanted to hear from, and what they searched on when they were looking for information on the web. It helped us be in the top 30 search results in Google, Yahoo! and others for terms like “business radio”, “small business radio” and a host of others. And these terms have been a big factor in our little show being downloaded over 3,000 times last month.

So the radio show that started as an on-air lab experiment took the onramp to the web. And what was supposed to be a thirteen week trial on Atlanta radio has turned into 52 weeks (and counting) of programming that seems to be catching on in places like the UK…and Italy… and India… and New Zealand. Oh yeah and in Atlanta, GA.