Karly Nimmo is one of our featured Women of WordPress because she’s not only used WordPress as the foundation for her own incredibly popular podcast; she’s using WordPress to encourage and enable other women to create great podcasts too.
Karly has been using WordPress as the foundation for her online presence for several years, and this April she started podcasting using a combination of WordPress and Libsyn. Within two days, she’d hit number one in her category, and made it into iTunes’ “new and noteworthy” section. Since then, her audience has been growing and growing (currently at over a thousand downloads per episode). As an added bonus, the guests Karly interviewed were getting sales and new clients as a direct result of appearing on the podcast; inbound leads which essentially converted themselves, because they’d already heard the person’s voice and through that established trust.
WordPress has enabled Karly to get a really effective and efficient podcasting system going: create fantastic audio (something Karly had been doing for years as a voiceover artist and radio jock), and then upload each episode to a file hosting service synced with her WordPress site, where WordPress would create a new post and send the audio over to the iTunes store. Thanks to her use of WordPress, she was also able to get people subscribing directly to her RSS feed using other apps; capturing the Android/non-Apple market too.
As her podcast became more and more successful, she was approached by a number of women wanting to know how they could get their own message out there through podcasting; and to meet that need, she set up a six week podcasting course on her WordPress site using OptimizePress. The Radcasters Podcasting S’Cool opened its doors at the start of this month, and the number of students is continuing to increase; alongside modules on how to create great audio and figure out your topic, there’s a wealth of information for beginners wanting to use their existing WordPress site as a podcasting platform (similar to how people are using PeepSo to create a private social network on their own site, rather than paying for a completely new platform).
What we love about this story is that it’s a great example of someone with expertise in a non-WordPress/information technology field (audio recording and editing) really changing the way people use and think about WordPress. There’s a whole range of things you can use this platform for (from building your own private social network to podcasting) – it just takes one person to make those possibilities transparent and available to others (as Karly’s doing through her podcasting school, and we’re doing through our plugin).
To connect with Karly, visit her Facebook page, check out her podcast, or head to her WordPress site.
