Personalize and Localize By Andy Meadows

The main reason a lot of on-air talent don’t regularly create content for their station’s websites and social feeds is because they simply don’t know where to start. Just like figuring out your voice and personality on air, figuring out your voice as a blogger or content creator is difficult. Similarly, it can be just as challenging to select online content as it is to choose the content we’re going to go on-air with each day. That’s part of the reason I’m a huge advocate of incorporating digital into the show prep process

The easiest place to start is by simply personalizing and localizing other people’s content. For years we’ve all been doing this on air. We read, see or hear about a story, change the headline into an on-air hook, craft a compelling on-air tease to that hook, localize and reword the meat of the story to make it relevant to our listener, inject our personality where appropriate throughout and end with a nice hook that’s either funny or simply brings it to a close. 

That same exact approach works well online with a few tweaks. If you’re a writer those tweaks could be expanding on the story to add even more color and depth. If writing isn’t your strong suit you could instead include on-air audio and listener audio, you did and didn’t use on air, along with a web poll and solicitation of comments for additional engagement. Either way, remember to include a credit and link to the original article as well as related videos, social posts and pics. 

Another hold up some on-air talent have that keeps them from posting blogs or articles is not knowing what pic to use as a feature image. Sometimes that’s because they don’t know what size it needs to be on their site, or how to crop the photo, and what program to use to do so. In house our graphic designer uses Photoshop, but I all also use Bannersnack.com to create a lot of our feature images. Plus, sometimes I utilize remove.bg to quickly take out a background. You can also simply use Paint to crop the pic by imputing the exact size you need, locking the aspect ratio and dragging it until it looks right. 

In addition, I’ve often heard air personalities express fear over using a licensed pic and getting the station sued. A good rule of thumb with artists and other celebrities is to stick to press photos put out by their label/management and always stay away from celebrity wedding or baby photos because there’s a 100% chance somebody paid big money for the exclusive rights to those photos. We regularly use www.freepik.com, shutterstock, and pexels  to get royalty free and affordable stock photos, but there are a multitude of other great sites.

Here are a few reasons why its important that on-air talent blog as well as a few blogging idea starters.

Pic designed by rawpixel for www.freepik.com.

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