One of the tools I talk about all the time for blogging, one that I used to type this post, is Evernote. You can use Evernote to tap out your ideas and great content for blog posts wherever you’re at, even if you’re sitting in your car in a parking lot, waiting for your wife, as I was.
What do you do, though, if you have an idea for a topic, or even some significant thoughts you want to put together, and typing into your iPad or iPhone isn’t convenient? This idea actually comes courtesy of my Pastor, Greg Holder. Pastor Greg is the lead pastor for what most would call a Mega Church. The Crossing in St. Louis has three campuses and serves thousands of Christians. Even pastors from smaller churches have to spend a lot of time driving around to visit and meet with people, so I can only imagine what it’s like with three campuses, construction going at on your main site, and everything else Pastor Greg has going on.
Because he spends so much time driving around St. Louis, Pastor Greg has gotten into the habit of using the Voice Recorder on his iPhone to record ideas and messages.
Business owners can take advantage of the time spent in their cars to record ideas for their blogs.
I am not an advocate of texting or emailing or any activity which might take your attention and eyes from the road. Voice Recordings, though, can be done without distracting you from the road and can even be hands-free, particularly if you have a Bluetooth headset.
Every iPhone comes with an app that you can certainly use to get started, and which will probably meet all of your needs. It’s called Voice Memo. Simply open the app, tap the red record button, and begin talking. You can pause the recording, or tap the stop button to end. Once finished, you can tap the button in the lower right to view all of your recorded memos. You can play, delete, or share via email or message.
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When you’re ready to take your recording to the next level, I recommend a different app called Voice Record. With Voice Record, the controls for creating the recording are just as simple, but your options after recording are far more sophisticated. You can email the recording, attaching it as a standard mp4 file. You can also share it within the app to Photo Album, Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive and Sound Cloud. You can send it to another device via Bluetooth, post it to Facebook, download via WiFi or send it to another app. Within Voice Record you can also edit and trim the recording, append it to another recording, convert it to mp3, copy it and rename it.
Not only is this a great tool for business owners that find themselves in their car a lot, it’s also useful for busy CEOs who don’t have time to write their own blogs, but need to pass their thoughts and ideas to their marketing team or consultant. Whenever I’m asked to blog on behalf of a business executive, one technique that we use to transfer thought content and thought leadership is to have them send recordings, either ideas they have on a particular topic or answers to specific interview questions. The CEO can record themselves whenever it’s convenient, email the recording, and watch as their thoughts are turned into a great new blog post.
One final benefit that we will just touch on today is that, by getting into the habit of recording yourself, you will be “training” yourself for future podcasts! Podcasts are simply formal recordings. Rather than the random ideas and messages that we have been talking about up until now, you would create your complete blog post offline first, and then use your voice recorder to record you reading your blog or talking about your blog. You can then upload your recording to your website and submit it to iTunes for syndication as a podcast. Audio and video recordings are becoming increasingly popular methods for content marketing, and are topics we will be delving into more in the future.
I know we’ve just scratched the surface of using voice recorders to take notes, draft blogs and share ideas. For those of you who have been using their voice recorders for a while, what other tips or uses would you share?
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