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Transcription - More Content, Less Time
Transcription services are becoming more popular as outsourcing and other automation techniques are being explored in depth. Bloggers, internet marketers, content creators, and copywriters alike all see the vast potential for using transcription services to create more natural, realistic, attractive-sounding text for use in their products.
Let’s talk about some of the potential uses for transcription services, and where to find the best deal.
- Bloggers need to generate a huge amount of content daily and do so in a very conversational, straightforward kind of a tone. Typing all of this information and formatting it consumes a huge amount of time, in addition to the original amount of time it took to research this topic.
- For those that are involved in Highly Technical or highly detailed subjects, Documentation is another huge area where transcription can ease the burden on the writer. As a programmer myself, I regularly have to send one out of every three hours in documentation, especially for extremely sensitive or highly technical projects.
- Copywriters need to generate a lot of ideas off the top of their head in a conversational tone, in a compelling, salesman-like way in order to appeal to their prospects. We can see that transcription helps in all of these cases because it allows you to speak instead of typing.
- Sales Letters are typically extremely long, detailed, conversational pieces, sometimes 15 or 20 paragraphs long, for use with internet marketers and direct mail. Using transcription services, a copyrighter creating a new sales letter can get a rough draft going in maybe one to two hours with only a basic outline to start with
- Product Reviews are another popular type of content on the internet nowadays. With new products coming out, people want to hear from an expert how it works and what features are attractive, and what should motivate them into investing in a product.Reviews of products are often very simple. Sometimes there is some technical data that needs to go inside of those, but that consumes a minimal amount of time for the review process. Most of the time is spent typing, formatting, and arranging conversational and natural speech on a keyboard.
- Finally, one of the newer sides on the Internet, is MicroBlogging. A great example of this is Twitter tweets or Facebook updates. All of these services encourage person-to-person communication and reward those that speak to their users and their readers in the most conversational tone.
Effectively communicating to the reader in a way that they can understand is the one of the most important things, second only to content. Once you have a topic that you would like to discuss, a transcription service can help you get that data entered onto the computer for easy formatting and publishing.
Investment
The costs of transcription services vary according to the quality. We’ve seen published rates from major, mainstream American companies as low as $1.50 per minute to $2.50 per minute. There are additional premiums if your text contains highly technical legal or medical words as these slow down the transcription process immensely and require a specially trained transcriber.
Of course, you can find less expensive transcription specialists on eLance, but the quality varies tremendously.
What I have found is a wonderful flat rate service called CopyTalk.com. For a flat rate of $79.95 per month they allow you to make an unlimited amount of transcription pieces. The only catch is that each one can only be four minutes long. That’s no problem! All that happens is you get cut off after four minutes and you can continue right where you left off. I’m using it right now as we speak and it’s incredible.
At $1.50 per minute for some of the less expense transcription services, you would rack up a bill of approximately $90 for one hour of transcribed text, just to start off! To go through your first and second drafts, your revision, and other extremely busy times such as particularly busy news day or a release of it for a major product that you’re reviewing, you can easily accrue an hour worth of transcription time that will hit your pocket book pretty heavily. $90 for one hour is what we’re up against.
In comparison, $79.95 for Copytalk.com gives you an unlimited amount of transcription time but it needs to be cut up into four minute pieces. This was originally introduced to me or suggested to me by Tim Ferriss, the author of the best selling novel book, The 4-Hour Work Week.
Right now I can see on their website that they’re offering a one week free trial, you can try out the services and see the quality. Normally they deliver to your e-mail inbox within four hours as per their website SLA. I hope this helps all of you would-be entrepreneurs, bloggers, Internet marketers, and other content providers to generate more content quicker and build up the power on your side - easily.
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