Creator Help Series

Greetings wingding™ current and future creators! Now that we’re attracting creators like yourself, we wanted to begin a “Help” series for lack of a better term. It is our goal to help you reach the maximum audience possible. That goal is advantageous to both of us. Some of you don’t need our help….some of you do (no offense). If the consumer doesn’t click “Play” we both lose.

In this article, we will focus more on the assets needed to make each episode stand out, rather than the content within the episode. That’s a great subject for a future article.

Our Background

We’ve been fortunate to have developed an extensive background in digital marketing that began with distributing our own podcasts. We’ve created thousands of podcasts and other types of video and audio content over the years…some was awesome and some royally sucked. It happens. Over the years, we had to become experts in website development, social media marketing, and SEO. All things we did not initially expect. We’ll cover all of these topics and more in future posts/articles. The basics contained within this post will apply to any type of content, whether it is a podcast, documentary, advertorial, reality show, training video, live stream, or commercial.

wingding™

Our wingding™ platform can distribute both audio and video content to a variety of platforms and there are some basic things every file needs to include to be able to get the most views or listens. They’re just common sense things that many either overlook, rush through, or just don’t see as being important. The details…are ALWAYS important. A very wise mentor told me once, “There’s not a single thing you can do that will make you successful, but the combination of many little things will.” Let us focus on the “little things” first. EVERYTHING included in this post is designed to get the consumer to click the “play” button. Worthwhile goal…don’t you think? Yes,

Basics

Unique Title

Each episode needs to have a unique title. It will be most helpful if the title “briefly” tells us something about the content contained. At the very least, each episode needs a title that lets the consumer know it’s not the same one they have already consumed. It is not ideal, but an episode delineation is acceptable. Such as: Joe’s Show – Episode 23; or Joe’s Show – July 2022. By the way, if your name is Joe, and you have a show called Joe’s Show, this is NOT about you, it’s just a random name that came to mind.

Simple Title

Each episode title should be easily read by the consumer. If you just copy the URL and use that as your title, you’ll lose folks immediately. joes_show_6-22_with_john_and_mark_funny_stuff might be unique, but Joes Show with John and Mark – June 2022 – Comedy is so much better. You will also create a situation where our staff has to try to figure out what the show is about in effort to properly title it. FYI…at this time we don’t have the luxury of listening to, or watch each show before posting.

Description

Each episode uploaded to winging™ has “Meta” area for a show description. This is great place to let consumers know what is included in this episode. It doesn’t need to be extremely lengthy…probably best if it is not…but it needs to entice them to click the “play” button. Example: In this episode of Joe’s Show, Mark and John get into the the discussion of “worst dates ever”. This is without a doubt the funniest show we’ve ever done. Who knew these guys were so freaking smart? Please do not overlook the importance of this detail!

Keywords

On the wingding™ platform keywords play a couple of roles. The first role has to do with the mobile apps. Keywords allow the consumer to thumb through all your episodes to find the one they want to consume first. If you have not downloaded our app from either Google Play or Apple store…shame! Now that I have that off my chest, please go to the app and see how tis works. A great example is in the Golf Category on the “Pro Tips” Channel. Consumers can thumb through the episode to chose the pro, or the tip.

The second role of keywords will be covered later in this post under “Show Notes”.

Images

The wingding™ platform requires three image files….four if you have a branded channel. Each branded channel needs (what we call) a “channel card”. The channel card needs to be a 1920 x 1080 pixel (size) image with your logo or Channel name on it. The other three images are:

Podcast Image. The podcast image has to be square and exactly 1400 x 1400 pixels. The podcast image can be the same for each episode, or you may provide a unique image for each episode. Up to you.
Custom Gallery Image – This image is more for developing a presence on our website (covered below in “Show Notes”) than for the wingding™ distribution. The image should be 1920 x 1080 pixels (size) and include your logo / show name.
Video (or Audio) Thumbnail. The wingding™ backend software will auto-select a video thumbnail during the encoding process. Our staff will either use the auto-selected image or select another from 16 possible images provided by the wingding software. You may provide a unique image here if you want, but it isn’t necessary.

Do not skimp on image choices. Remember, we’re attempting to get the consumer to click “Play”. A good visual representation will help.

Show Notes

In addition to attracting consumers who are already on the wingding™ platform, we need to attract consumers who are searching the web for content relative to yours. The best way to do that is with written content. Google indexes images and video, but text is the primary way to utilize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to attract consumers. SEO can seem like a very complex topic, but is really just common sense. For the purposes of this “Basics” post we’ll cover SEO basics and will get into more detail in a later post.

Each episode should be “written”. We call the written version of the show “Show Notes”. It doesn’t have to be written verbatim, but there should be several hundred words (750 to 1200 preferred) to be properly indexed by the search engines. FYI: This article is just over 1300 words. We provide a Channel page on the wingding.tv website for all Branded Channel owners to display the Show Notes for each episode. For those who have not yet acquired a Branded Channel, we will include your show notes on the appropriate “Variety” category.

Each episode’s Show Notes should include:

Title – A title that matches the title of the episode. See Unique Title and Simple Title above.
Keywords – Focus on a specific keyword or phrase that represents the gist of the show. You should not “stuff” this article with a bunch of keywords expecting Google to index your article for all of them. It won’t happen. Each article (Show Notes) should focus on a single keyword or phrase. For example…using Joe’s Show above, a good keyword phrase could be “worst dates ever”. It is a good practice to use that keyword phrase in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the article. Feel free to use it in additional paragraphs.
Topics – Be sure to breakdown your Show Notes into topics….just like this article. Try to imagine reading all this without the topic breakdown I’ve included.
Images – Adding images inside your Show Notes can create additional indexing opportunities if properly done. Send us any additional images you may have along with your show notes. Images of your host, co-host, cast, etc are great things to include. We will include them and properly tag them for image indexing.

We sincerely hope this article helps you to understand the basics related to content consumption. Please always feel free to reach out to us at info@wingding.tv. We greatly appreciate your interest in our platform.

All the best,

Jeff Gilder

Executive Producer,

wingding™