How to Convert Your Blog Content into a Podcast [2021 Guide]

If you are looking for ways to shake up your website content performance in 2021, look no further. Podcasts are in fashion and people can’t get enough of them. Podcasting gives a personal touch to the classic plain text formats we are used to. It makes information more accessible and easy to comprehend, and shows your customers you are ready to answer their needs.

Converting blog content into a podcast will make your brand more relatable and recognizable. Your customers, just like everyone else today, have no choice but to multitask. And podcasts give them that extra flexibility to explore content on the go, while managing other day-to-day tasks.

A lot of businesses are still reluctant to dive into podcasting. But with modern technology, good planning, and expert advice, it can be a successful strategy that makes your business stand-out.

So how to convert your blog content into a podcast like a pro? Here are some simple steps and tips you can follow:

1. Sort Out Your Strategy

Before getting down to business, make sure you construct a strategy, weigh your resources, and plan ahead. There are different approaches in the podcasting world, and once you make a choice you should follow it through.

Structure and Organization

A coherent course of action in producing and organizing your content makes your podcasts more recognizable to your customers. Knowing what to expect helps people get in the right mindset and lets them focus on the information at hand.

Ways to structure and organize your podcasts:

• Convert all content. The easiest and least resource-consuming way is to simply make audio recordings of your blog posts and add them to the article page. This will save you the trouble of content reorganization and if you work in bulk, your blog will be audio-friendly in no time.
• Concentrate on a selection of topics. Designating a new section of your website to your audio content will make browsing easier for your customers who are only interested in podcasts.  You can focus on the most popular topics on your blog and organize them in easy to access categories. Make sure to add a description to each podcast and provide links to your relevant articles.
• Make it a series. The most entertaining way to present your content is to start a series. Producing a quality podcast series may take more preliminary planning and a larger investment, but it will guarantee you the best results.

Here is an example from Semrush’s Marketing Scoop Podcast:

Presuming you settle on the series approach, your podcasts should be organized in seasons comprising a set number of episodes. Each season will follow a certain development arc and will end with a wrap-up season finale. You can make it more entertaining by interviewing experts, recording holiday specials, inviting guest-hosts, and featuring guest-star appearances. Depending on your business, seasons can focus on deconstructing popular topics in your industry, discussing trends, expert know-how, tutorials, etc.

Presenting Your Content

How to present your content largely depends on the general strategy you choose to follow and the goals you set for yourself.

If what you are looking for is to quickly convert your blog to audio, consider using a computer-generated voice app. This might seem impersonal but it will provide quick audio accessibility to all your articles. Furthermore, with the development of technology and AI, computer-generated voices are now far from unnatural and robot-sounding.

There are free online tools such as Spik.AI that generate speech out of text and sound pretty convincing. You can choose from different “voice fonts” depending on your preferences for gender and accent. And if you want your computer-generated voice to be unique and sound just like you, that’s possible too. Microsoft has developed a nifty set of online tools called Custom Voice that allow you to use a recording of yourself to create a one-of-a-kind voice font.

Opting for a real person’s voice will, of course, require additional resources and the conversion process will be more time-consuming. However, it will make your podcasts more personal, provide better quality, and allow for a more solid connection with your audience.

A recent study by Yale University shows that people have a stronger emotional response to human voices than to any other form of interaction. A human voice is associated with storytelling and stories are what we, as humans, crave.

Mastering data-driven storytelling in your podcasts will increase your audience engagement and help build your brand’s image.

2. Cast Your Brand’s Voice

Whomever you select to host your podcast will become the person your audience identifies it with. Even more, they might become your brand’s poster boy or girl, so choose wisely.

Presuming you decide to have a human host, rather than a computer-generated voice, to find the perfect match you’ll need to do a casting.

Voice Аctor

Hiring a professional to do the job, will ensure the good quality of the final product. They have perfect enunciation and are easy to listen to. If you’ve already constructed a vision of your perfect host persona and the general feel of your podcasts, you’d only have to describe your ideas and the voice actor will deliver.

In case you still haven’t put your finger on the right style of voiceover, you can work together with your voice actor, try different approaches, and choose the most appropriate one for you and your brand.

Celebrity

Casting a famous person will certainly be more expensive, but it is worth considering if you are a larger enterprise and can afford it. A house-hold name in your trade, an influencer, a well-known journalist, or a public figure, can bring a fresh audience to your content, and generate an immense amount of leads.

However, to secure a higher ROI, it is important to look for someone who is relevant to your industry or whose fan-base might be interested in your products. Even if your celebrity of choice is not fully versed in the subtleties of your company’s business, they can work with your team to prepare more intricate topics. Even better, they can interview professionals and let them do most of the talking.

The Blogger

If we’ve learned something from the reality TV era, it’s that given a stage to perform on, everyone can become a celebrity.

Choosing your business’s content writer or blog manager to be the voice of your podcasts will show your brand as more down to earth, and genuine. Your customers will find it easier to identify with a “real” person.

Real people have imperfections, just like everybody else, and that makes them more relatable. Furthermore, the untrained voice shows raw emotion, sounds more earnest, and provokes a greater emotional response.

Making your podcasts more human and personal can attract a loyal audience that longs to hear more.

When considering your options think of your customers and your buyer personas – and who they might identify with, who they look up to, and who they respect? Make a list of potential candidates and investigate who might be up to the task. Consider which topics you’d like to cover and decide whether adding a pinch of humor would add comic relief, or be considered in bad taste. Think of your brand’s current image and how it might be reshaped.

Answering these questions will help you identify your host and give you a clearer concept of your podcast.

3. Find the Platform That Suits You Best

Once you are done with preliminary planning and organization, you’ll have to pick a hosting platform. This is where your audio files will be stored and managed. You can think of it as your podcasting workshop.

Podcast hosting platforms feature tools for episode recording and editing, user behavior analytics, text notes and transcripts, player customization, etc. Some platforms also have SEO tools and a variety of features, like email opt-in integration and social sharing, that can help you generate leads.

The pricing of hosting services varies. Most platforms offer a few plans with different sets of features to choose from depending on your goals and the purpose of your podcast. Make sure to check the pricing sections of the websites for free trials, and evaluate whether an annual or a monthly plan suits you better.

Many popular podcast providers support WordPress integration. By downloading a plugin, you can start making podcasts directly from your website in no time.

While listening to your podcasts, users can discover your website and your business. Choosing the right hosting platform is a step not to be taken lightly. Carefully consider your podcasting approach and strategy, your target audience demographics, and the overall goal of your podcasting endeavor.

4. Make Quality Podcast Content

Converting your blog into a podcast should always start with repurposing old content. The articles accumulated on your blog over the years provide you with endless opportunities for creation.

Adapt Your Articles to Audio

You can simply do a voice-over of old articles or you can rework them from a different angle. Make sure you include a note about the original article in the podcast description and interlink the pages.

While you are at it, why not update your old article and republish it as well. This way you can promote your new content channel, bring fresh traffic to the old one, and improve your ranking.

Repurpose Video Content

Repurposing old video content can make great podcasts. As we have already mentioned, video might be an awesome content format, but it is more demanding than audio. You have to stop everything you are doing and focus your full attention. This is one of the reasons videos up to 5 minutes have the best performance. However, podcasts don’t have to be that short.

The episodes most favored by users are on average 25 to 45 minutes long and this gives you plenty of time to develop a topic. Some subjects, however, might be harder to explain without visuals. If you still feel that talking about it is not enough, providing a link to your video in the podcast description will both supplement the information in your podcast and promote your different content channels.

You can even repurpose your online streaming sessions into podcasts and build strong connections between different platforms – your blog, podcast, and social media.

Invite Guests

Guest stars are always a hit and bring a fresh breath of air to every form of content.

You can choose your episodes to revolve entirely around guest interviews, thus making your podcasts more entertaining and engaging. Your audience will be looking forward to finding out who will appear on your show next and what this person has to say.

This approach requires a larger investment and pouring more resources into the preliminary planning and the execution of each season. What’s more, you have to be certain there are enough prospective guests to invite (and that are of interest to your audience), and of those, who will be willing to appear on your show.

If you don’t have the resources to make a grand podcast, or it isn’t the right option for your business, you still can invite interesting guests to entertain your audience.

Both courses of action are fine and can be beneficial towards promoting your brand. They can also bring new leads and fresh traffic to your website.

Convert Your Podcasts into Articles

Once you’ve started your podcasting journey, it won’t be long before you are producing your own original audio content. We’ve already discussed repurposing old articles, but it’s worth mentioning that conversions go both ways.

Make sure to always have podcasts available as transcripts. These can be adapted into articles with added links to relevant sources and to other content on your website.

Try starting out with a short description of what’s discussed in the podcast and continue with the transcript. Guest appearances can be presented as interviews, and parts of those may serve as expert quotes in blog posts.

Providing your content in various formats is not only convenient for your customers, but it shows them you care. It also helps search engines and can boost your ratings.

Research Competition

If you are running out of ideas on what topics to cover in your podcasts, do your research. Checking out what your competitors are doing and what they are talking about, as well as what their customers are looking for, will give you new ideas. Even if the other businesses in your niche are not into podcasting yet, you can find inspiration in their articles, videos, and products.

Why not even invite some rival CEO for a debate on your podcast? Beware, however, this will grant you attention from both companies’ customers, so before you send the invitation, be sure you are prepared to do your best and outmatch them.

5. Distribute Your Content on Streaming Platforms

Producing awesome content and keeping it only on your website can be a missed opportunity to reach out to a broader audience. Distributing your podcasts across streaming platforms can help you attract listeners that might otherwise never have found your business.

Streaming platforms are organized into categories so users can browse for exactly the type of content they want to listen to. As a podcaster, you’ll obtain insight on your listeners’ demographics, what episodes they favor the most, what parts of them they prefer, and other important data. Analyzing this information will help you improve the quality of your episodes and focus on what sells.

Some of the streaming platforms you can choose from are:

• Stitcher
• Spotify
• iTunes
• Google Podcasts
• Overcast
• TuneIn
• SoundCloud

Choosing the right platforms for your podcasts depends entirely on your preferences. You can browse what’s already available in your field’s category and decide whether you want to outshine the competition with unique content or be one of the few in your industry streaming on a certain platform.

Recap

Diving into the podcasting world might seem like an intimidating idea at first. But with the rapidly evolving market and increasing demand for audio content, it is, no doubt, a step in the right direction. Modern technology allows more and more businesses to easily convert their content into audio, therefore reaching a growing audience of podcast listeners.

If you are already maintaining a successful business blog, one can say half of your work has already been done. So what are you waiting for?

Share your favorite podcasts in the comments below, and tell us what you love most about them!

Images: Unsplash