A friend of mine, Matt Bacak, told me about a student of his who is currently making five figures a month. Now this is normally not a topic for discussion as a great many of Matt’s students make much more, but the reason this is noteworthy is that this man is blind. This is important for two reasons, one, it kills any excuses you may have as to why you cannot succeed online and, two, it made me realize that I needed to make my content available to the two million plus visually impaired people using the internet.
Yes, visually impaired people use the internet too. So, you do the math, would you like to reach an extra two million plus people that many sites are currently ignoring. Add to that the millions of iPod, iPhone, and Mp3 users that would be able to listen to your content instead of reading it.
Your content is no longer limited to screen or printed output. Millions of iPod, iPhone, and Mp3 owners can subscribe to your feeds and get the audible version of your content uploaded automatically every time they synchronize their device. You can promote your content on the multitude of podcast directories, another stream of traffic for your content.
I can hear you now; I cannot afford to set up a system to do all that. The good news is that it has already been done for you and the better news is that this service is free. You like free, I do. Just to set the record straight, I do not make a dime promoting this service.
The service is called Odiogo. It converts dynamic web pages into high-quality audio files. They use sophisticated algorithms to filter-out the non-content items (links, ads, etc.) from your web pages. It is then processed by advanced text-to-speech technology and the result is nearly human quality audio output.
Anyone wanting to receive your content can subscribe to your podcasts through iTunes, iPodder, or similar services. They will get updated feeds every time they synchronize their device. The files can be easily uploaded into an iPod or MP3 player, listened to on a mobile phone, or played on a PC or Mac. If a visitor is on your site, all they need to do is click the ‘listen now’ button and the content is read to them.
Odiogo is compatible with all blog engines that publish RSS feeds such as Typepad, Blogger, WordPress or Overblog. The generated MP3 files are stored on their servers so there is no need to worry about technical integration tasks or bandwidth.
It took about eight minutes to install and setup this service on my blog. If you do not have an RSS feed on your site the whole process can take about twenty minutes or so.
Allow the visually impaired to access your content and open your website to millions of visitors you never had before.
