Category Archives: Site News & Updates

The New BlogTalkRadio Portable Player Is Here!

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The BlogTalkRadio Portable Player enables you to share your show with more listeners on your site, blog and social networks. We’re happy to unveil a brand new version of this player with a  number of enhancements to help you further grow your audience of listeners. 

The player features the slick new look & feel of our recent redesign.  It also displays the images that you’ve attached to your show, just like the player on your BlogTalkRadio show page. 

Here’s what the new player looks like when embedded:

A big reason why we’re changing the player is to allow your show embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5. This means your listeners will be able to listen to shows on their iPhone or Android phone as well as their desktop computer. 

To embed your show, you just copy your embed code right from your profile or episode page (depending on which you’d like to embed):

playerembed-episode

If you need more guidance on how to embed your player, you can find information in our help center: Portable Player FAQ

A Sneak Peek at Our Shiny New Site

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BlogTalkRadio will have a fresh new look this year, and we’re giving you a sneak peek at what we’re working on. In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing a sleek new design and tons of awesome features for our listeners and hosts, making your experience even easier and more enjoyable than ever.

The new design will include:

1. Fun Browsing Made Easy

First thing’s first. The images atop the home page represent a selection of newly streamlined categories. You’ll be able to hover over them to more easily explore your favorite content right away.

Our new homepage will also highlight the best shows on the network so you instantly see what everyone’s talking about.

We’re extremely proud of our incredible shows and want the world to know about them. We’re expanding the main navigation to give hosts more exposure where it matters most and listeners get immediate access to the best of the best. The “Live” menu will display what’s live on-air, while the “Explore” menu will display what’s Popular, our Best Of, Staff Picks and Featured Hosts.

We also added new section headers to help you find your way around.

2. Cut to the Chase

We’ve made search results and show pages clearer, so you’ll be able to quickly scan and find the shows you want.

Search Results

3. Simplified, Visual Categories

Our original category list was overwhelming, making it tough to dig through favorite topics. We pared it down to the essentials: 20 main categories, with subcategories where needed. What’s more, you’ll be able to enjoy a visual categories menu for at-a-glance browsing.

Blog Talk Radio Sports

4. Faster Site
With thousands of shows live on-air each day, how fast our site loads makes all the difference. We’ve rebuilt old pages with new technology to improve the site’s speed. You’ll see how much easier it is to explore and listen to your favorite shows.

Stay tuned for the shiny new BlogTalkRadio!

Let us know what you think of the new look in the comments below and visit our community thread to tell us what other great features you’d like to see on BlogTalkRadio for the rest of 2013. Leave your feedback.

BlogTalkRadio’s New Integration With Facebook Gets You More Listens!

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Exciting news for BlogTalkRadio hosts! Your listeners will now able to connect their BlogTalkRadio accounts to Facebook and begin automatically sharing the BTR shows they are listening to on their Facebook timeline, in addition to seeing what their Facebook friends are listening to on the network.

What It Means For You

As a host on BlogTalkRadio, your show will now gain exposure to a much wider population and be more easily discovered by new listeners, in addition to boosting engagement with your current audience.  BUT for this all to happen, you need to communicate this new feature to your current listeners.

How To Get Your Listeners On Board

Let your listeners know that they can now easily share their love for BTR hosts like yourself with their Facebook community and discover new hosts from their friend’s Facebook timelines by connecting their BlogTalkRadio accounts to Facebook.

Instruct your listeners to go to BlogTalkRadio.com and click on the “Connect using Facebook” button at the top of the page and follow the prompts.  You can encourage your audience to do so when you are on air, through your social networks, your blog or even by email so they can easily share your show with their Facebook network.

Read up on this FAQ we prepared and share it with your listeners so they have all the facts.  Then, sit back and get ready to be discovered by a whole new audience of listeners!

Why We’re Excited

It has been amazing to read the recent successes of other companies such as Spotify, Pinterest, Vevo, Fab.com, Foodspotting that have integrated with Facebook to drive significant traffic increases and engagement with content on their site.  We are very excited to be working with Facebook on this update and help our hosts get the exposure they deserve!

Need More Info?

We did a special BlogTalkRadio University show all about our new integration with Facebook. You can listen to the archived show here.

Recent BlogTalkRadio Site Improvements

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Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to improve the site experience for our hosts and listeners and we’d like to share some of these exciting updates with you.

Our Site Loads Way Faster Now!

We’ve made some major upgrades to our hardware and are using new database technology in order to speed up the page load time on the site.  Right now content and images on our site load faster than ever before.  These improvements will allow our hosts to give their audience a much better listener experience!

Find Shows Easier & More Quickly Than Before

We’ve switched to an entirely new search engine technology to increase the speed and accuracy of our content search, meaning your search results will return much faster with the most relevant content.  It will now also be easier for listeners to find relevant hosts to tune in to!

More To Come!

These updates for the most part will benefit our non logged in users, but we are also busy at work on improving the speed of the site for our logged in users in addition to further enhancing our search engine capabilities.  Stay tuned for some more exciting developments on the site!

BlogTalkRadio + Facebook = Awesome!

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We just released a brand new feature on BlogTalkRadio that integrates Facebook commenting on all of our show pages.  Now, when a listener leaves a comment on a BlogTalkRadio show page, they have the ability to post that comment right onto their Facebook wall in order to continue the conversation here at BlogTalkRadio or on Facebook.

Try it! Just go to your favorite show on BlogTalkRadio, click on an episode and leave a comment for the host.  Check the box that says “Post to Facebook” and just like that, you’re opening up the conversation to all of your friends on Facebook.

We’re really excited about this new update because it increases the interactivity between our hosts and their listeners and also gives our listeners the ability to promote their favorite hosts to their Facebook network.  We hope all of our hosts will encourage their listeners to use this new feature to help spread the word and give their content an extra boost to be heard across the Internet!

Now You Can 1+ Your Favorite BlogTalkRadio Shows!

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We are really loving Google+ over here at BlogTalkRadio.  So much so, that we’ve added a 1+ button to all of our profile and show pages. Now our listeners can share what they are loving on BlogTalkRadio on Google+ with the click of a button.  And to top it off, now our hosts will be reaching a whole new set of people through their 1+’ing listeners!

And if you haven’t added our Google+ page yet to your circles, get to it here!

Promoting Your BlogTalkRadio Show Just Got Easier

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We are happy to announce that you can now promote your show to all of your email contacts in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. right from your episode page.  You just have to click on “email” at the bottom where all of your other sharing icons live.  We are very excited about this new update because it’s going to make it so much easier for you to share your show with those in your personal network.  Give it a try and see the results for yourself!

Best Practices for Messaging Your Followers

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Leveraging the BlogTalkRadio messaging feature can be a powerful tool when used correctly. Before you send your next communication in the system, consider these best practices. Following a few simple rules will help get your message across to more of your audience.

What To Send
Be sure that you are crafting the right kind of message for this format. For instance, an email message is a great avenue to communicate a new and exciting upcoming guest to your show and maybe a little bit more about their background and achievements, but it may not be the right channel to send minute by minute quotes from a live interview on air (that’s what Twitter is for). In other words, look to an email message for conveying longer form content, rather than short snippets of information.

Frequency
Send your followers messages when it makes sense so that your communications come across as fresh and not repetitive. For example, send an email message the day before a show so your followers can mark it on their calendars and then a follow up one with the link to your archived show in case they missed it. Think about if you received too many messages or repeat messages from one individual, wouldn’t you just start to tune them out? Take frequency of your communications seriously to ensure that your messages are not ignored and more followers are reading them.

A Complementary Communication
Email should be viewed as a complement to your other communication channels like Twitter and Facebook and a means of reinforcing your overall message. For instance, if you are live on your show and you have already sent out a message to your followers, it may be more effective to tweet out that you are live, rather than sending out another message. And say, you found an interesting article on a guest you just had on your program, Facebook would be an optimal place to share that information rather than an email message.

We hope these best practices will make your messages more relevant, timely and effective and help you to garner more followers and listeners for your program.