An interesting question came up recently from a colleague, the jist of which is as follows:

“I’m doing a 15 minute tutorial with someone to show them how to set up Adsense in their blog sidebar.  Would that be a ‘weird’ podcast?  I mean, normally I’d do this via Instant Teleseminar and have a recording available to people but the other day I signed up for BlogTalkRadio and wondered if I should use this service instead.
 
Or is podcasting really for interviewing people and / or… dunno!”

I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on this but my response, in short, was ‘why the hell not?’

“My personal opinion is that podcasting is for communicating ideas and if it’s something that you think your clients/potential clients should know or would find helpful or would enhance your expertise (or a combination of all of these things) then I would certainly put it in podcast format.
 
If the answer to the question, ‘would I blog about this?’ is ‘yes’ then you can podcast it and I think you probably would put a little blog post or even an extended tutorial blog post up about this, no?
 
Joanna Young uses podcasting to record 5 minute snippets of advice on how to improve writing skills - again, I think this is an excellent way of doing it and she’s had some good feedback. If you have a real live client with you whilst you’re being super helpful/expert like and people can hear how they’re getting on with you, then all the better. Added to that, even though, in your case, your personality comes across really well in the way you write, it’s an ace way for your potential clients to feel they know you a little better by hearing your voice.
 
So, the short answer is yes! Do it!
 
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, some would argue that you should always podcast to the same format and do it on a weekly/biweekly/monthly basis but I really don’t think there should be any hard and fast rules on this. Yes, you can set up a podcast in that way and build a loyal following etc but I don’t see that it would harm to have an occasional podcast, with varying formats, that could still attract clients into your world. Just as long as you give your podcast episodes clear titles and say somewhere in your notes/profile that it’s occasional, then people can know that they can browse through the titles (if they choose to subscribe or revisit) and they’ll get what they came for.
 
Once you’ve done the podcast, don’t forget to use it as a blog post i.e. whack an audio link into Typepad (they have a very easy way of doing it - am sure you know more about it than me) or I think you can embed your blogtalkradio episode link directly into a post. Then make sure to write in your blog post what your episode is about - the spiders won’t ’see’ the audio but they will see your words about it…”

What do others think to this? What are some of the ways other people are podcasting/thinking of podcasting?