Let Them Hear You

Here are a couple of promo clips concerning the Let Them Hear You contest that Dancing With Elephants (among others) is running. I mentioned it in the latest podcast episode. I don’t know if I will be getting an episode out this week, so wanted to post these before it is too late.

Contest ends on Friday at 11:59 pm Central time.

The first is from Dr. Steve from the Dr. Floyd podcast.
[audio:doctor_floyd.mp3]

The second is from the people who are running the contest.
[audio:let_them_hear_you_2.mp3]

Check out the contest website and write some reviews for your favorite podcasts and be entered into a drawing for a nice prize package. Right now the prizes are as follows:

1st Runner Up:
3 Blind Mice’s Good Grief
Jonathan Coulton’s Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
A Large comedy4cast Coffee Mug donated by Clinton of The Comedy4Cast Podcast **NEW**

2nd Runner Up:
A $25 iTunes Music Store Gift Certificate donated by Jen and Alan of The Dinkycast **NEW**

Grand Prize:
3 Blind Mice’s Good Grief
Jonathan Coulton’s Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
Seasons 1-4 of The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd donated by Grant and Doug of The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd
A 1 Year Membership to Dr. Floyd’s Imagination Nation donated by Grant and Doug of The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd
A Marware USB Travel Dock for the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle donated by Steve of The Lifespring Family of Podcasts **NEW**
An Apple iPod Shuffle

I have submitted almost 30 reviews so far. I am going to win something here. Hopefully part of what I win are some reviews for Missionary Talks over at iTunes. I got one new one this week, but could really benefit from more.

Grammar Girl in the NY Times

Grammar Girl has been in the newspaper a lot recently. She also appeared on Oprah not long ago. I have seen video clips of her on local and national news shows. She is getting around.

The point of this post is to show how that podcasters are being heard. I know some of our productions are only being listened to by family and friends. And, if you are doing it because you want to produce content, then that is perfectly fine. Others are producing shows to be heard or seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Grammar Girl is one of them.

The New York Times article is about her audio book that she released a few weeks ago. It really has nothing to do with podcasting, rather about how quickly an audio book can be produced.

I think it is a good thing that the article does not focus on her as a podcaster and what a podcast is. That is certainly necessary at times. But, in this case, the article gets beyond the “how” and focuses on the “what” she is doing. Or, as it is here, on the fact that the content can be produced by an author in a short period of time.

Even better would be if the article was just a straight promotion of her book. It essentially is that, but it is shrouded in something newsworthy.

Congrats once again to Grammar Girl for putting podcasters in a good light.

Is it hot, or is it just you?

Our daughter came over to me today and wanted me to hold her. She is not normally the cuddly type who just wants to be held. But, it was hot and she was probably just tired (I thought). We ate lunch at church and she asked to be allowed to lay down for a nap. She is 3 years old and actually does ask for a nap sometimes voluntarily.

Since it was 102 degrees outside today, that did not seem too odd. We don’t have air conditioning at the church.

We finished church and came home this afternoon. I was lounging (napping) in my hammock pretending to watch Tiger beat the rest of the field for his 57th career win. While sleeping through the last couple of holes, my wife came in and said that the day was not just hot, but the baby was hot. She had just deposited her lunch on the furniture downstairs. My wife was bringing her up to the bathroom to hose her down.

Fortunately it took me too long to figure out what was going on to be able to help much with the clean up. I got the duty of making sure the water got turned off in the bathtub while my wife got the messy job downstairs.

Good thing I can fake being asleep real well.

Something good happened, but I am not sure what

Less than a month ago I had posted that Missionary Talks had its 4000th download/listen. That was an increase of 1000 from the previous 2 weeks. Since I did not want to seem too excited about it, when I hit 5000 downloads, I did not shout it from the rooftops. Well, yesterday we went over 7000! That is just under 1000 per week for the last 4 weeks.

All of this was helped by something strange that happened this weekend. I am still a bit baffled about what caused it. I assume some big podcast played my promo or said something about me. But I have not heard anything from them to know who or what happened.

My normal daily downloads have settled into a nice 80 per day. That is after the spike it took a few weeks back to 100 per day because someone promoted my show. I was swimming along at 80 a day and am very pleased with that. Then Saturday hit. I got 324 downloads that day! That was quite exciting to see to say the least. But, it was nothing in comparison to Sunday…859!

Monday was back to normal as has been the rest of this week.

I was a bit skeptical thinking that it must just be some search engine that is cataloging my show. But it would mean about 50 downloaders taking every show to make that number happen. I don’t think it was a robot doing it. It must have been real people (though bots could account for some of it). Then today I got nice confirmation of that. I uploaded my new show this morning and already have more downloads through the RSS feed than I normally have had for any show its first week in the feed. That makes me think that I have picked up a boatload of subscribers through the event this weekend. Whatever it was.

Anyway, we are now over 7200 downloads and growing. That is just exciting to me. Since I am thrilled to get my content out there for people to hear.

If you have not heard Missionary Talks, it is nothing like the podcast here. The My Thought Spot podcast is all about me being me. Also, it honestly is a thinly veiled attempt to promote Missionary Talks. Whether people listen to MTS (My Thought Spot) is not that important to me. I am doing it for fun. But, Missionary Talks is where I am putting out content that I think can be a great help to people and promote my calling.

GO MISSIONARY TALKS!

If anyone knows why I might have gotten such a big boost this weekend, please let me know. I am curious.