Time – are you using yours properly?

I used to struggle a bit with how to show people how valuable my service was. After all, there are a million and one (or so it seems!) transcription companies out there that will outsource your precious audio and video content to various associate transcriptionists, so what makes my perhaps slightly more expensive service worth more? One word for you – time.

How long?

I’ve posted as such on my Facebook page recently, but did you know that the industry standard for transcription suggests that it can take up to an hour to transcribe 15 minutes of audio? That’s quite a long time to be spending on something you might find tedious, particularly if you have several hours’ worth of audio or video!

Of course there is no hard and fast rule with regards to this and it will depend on quality of audio, number of speakers and so on, but it’s worth remembering that this applies to professional transcriptionists with specialist equipment who are likely to be faster typists than the norm!

Are you trying to do it yourself?

If you’re a coach or trainer and you’re in the business of creating online courses or live workshops, chances are you don’t have an actual hourly rate, but I bet if you were to sit down and work it out, you might find that you’re wasting time when you’re trying to do everything else yourself.

This includes re-purposing your content!

It’s an exhausting business trying to come up with new content all the time, but if your favourite way of doing this is to record videos, podcasts, Periscopes, webinars or any other type of audio or video, there are so many ways you can use these all again, and save yourself time into the bargain.

Using intelligent transcription (i.e. taking out the ums and ers and editing the text so it makes sense down on paper) turns your spoken words into written ones, then you can turn a Periscope into a blog post, use parts of your podcast to put together social media posts or turn a video series into a paid for ebook.

But there’s a caveat here, this all takes time!

If it makes your shoulders sink with the thought of the time it will take you to turn your recordings into completely new and really valuable content, have a think about what you could be creating while somebody else takes away the pain for you.

You don’t need to be an expert in everything, so use your time wisely and do the thing that brings in the moolah, and let somebody else like me help you make your content really valuable.

I’d love to know if you already outsource things in your business, re-purposing content or otherwise – drop me an email, message me on my Facebook page or please comment below!