From Podcast to Blog Post in 6 Steps

Most people might post their podcast episode and forget about it. You might promote it a few times, but other than that you’re not doing much else with it. That’s cool, lots of people like podcasts, but you’re missing out on a whole demographic of people: The Readers. You’re also missing out on some of the major advantages of written content.

Some pros to converting your podcast episode into a blog post are:

• Reaching a larger audience (i.e, the non-podcast people)- That’s right, there are a whole bunch of people out there who would prefer to READ your podcast. They don’t have to listen to the banter (which I’m sure is phenomenal), they can quickly skim and find pertinent information, or maybe they just need to visualize to soak up the information.
• The ability to include more visual information. You can paint a picture with words but for some people, it’s really in one ear out the other. For them, you’ll want to include: images, charts, and so on, which can’t be provided in a podcast. Some people really need visuals to understand what to do and it’s important to cater to them as well.
• Using SEO to your advantage and driving more traffic to your website. Good SEO practice for blog posts would be to have 1,000–1,500 words. If people spend the time to read most or all of the post, Google will deem it ‘helpful’ and ‘worth reading’ and move it up on searches. When you transcribe a 45 minute episode you’ll get about 8,000+ words, so you may actually be able to turn it into multiple blog posts if you covered a bunch of topics. Sick!
• Saving time by repurposing further. You can later break down your blog post into smaller content for Facebook posts, weekly e-mails or quote cards for Instagram. Plus, you don’t have to pull out your hair trying to think of new ideas ALL. THE. TIME.

Turning your podcast episode into a blog post is easier than you imagine. Phew. You should be able to convert it from your podcast in less than an hour.

It’s really just a few steps to get there.

1. Create an outline
2. Transcribe your episode
3. Cut out the fat and fill in your outline with the good bits
4. Pull some solid quotes to highlight
5. Find some valuable pictures or graphs to accompany your post, when needed.
6. Proofread and publish.

Let’s get started!

1. Create an outline.

If you created a talking points sheet for your podcast episode this step should be fairly simple. If you happened to just go with the flow, it will be only the tiniest bit more effort. You probably still have a pretty good sense of how you broke down the topic.

Like any outline, yours should include an introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction will introduce the topic, more than likely you did so in the episode. The body will include each talking point, and you can break that down further to include sub-points. The conclusion will tie is all together, and let’s you promote a product, website, or social media platform. Again, you likely already did this in your podcast so there is no extra level of thinking. Thank goodness.

2. Transcribe your episode.

Please don’t do this yourself. Unless you type at the speed of light it will take you ages to do this yourself. That is some precious productivity time right there. Instead use a program like Appsumo’s Happyscribe. If you’re looking for something free you can try Otter.ai. It won’t be as accurate as a paid service, but because you’ll be rewriting it into the post this isn’t a huge deal.

(Get HappyScribe lifetime deal from Appsumo here for an extra $10 off)

3. Cut out the fat and fill in your outline with the good bits.

When you read over your transcript you’ll notice all the “uh” “uhms” and “likes.” We all do it, don’t judge yourself too hard. You’ll also notice the tangents you might go on that are unhelpful to the topics. This is your chance to weed out to all the fluff and unnecessary bits and let the helpful flowering information shine.

Most of the information has already been typed out for you so you can just grab that text and paste it into the outline. Use some keywords, make it sound pretty and watch your outline turn into a well-organized, well-thought out blog post. Viola!

4. Pull some solid quotes to highlight.

You’ll notice a lot of great blog posts have pieces of information that are bigger, bolder or highlighted. These are pieces of information that are to NOT BE MISSED. If your reader were to only read these pieces of information they would have gotten something valuable from your post. When you read your transcription you’ll know what these lines can be, and you can quote yourself (or your guest) instead of some random guru on the internet.

5. Find some valuable pictures or graphs to accompany your post, when needed.

Not every blog post will need this. But sometimes when talking statistics, it is helpful to give a visual. Or when talking about somewhere you visited, an event you spoke at, a person you met, etc., it would be valuable to include a photo. Both for fun, extra visualization and as proof. No impostors here sir. It is also helpful when giving instructions to include screenshots to show what you’re doing for those less tech savvy.

6. Proofread and publish

Now that you have created a beautiful blog post, maybe even two or three. You are ready to post. But please, please, please proofread first. Silly mistakes can lose you some major reliability points. Type up your post first somewhere that uses spell check. Like Google Docs. Check out the chrome extension Grammarly for some extra assurance, as well. Bonus: you can use Grammarly on websites that don’t have spell check. Until you become fantastic at proofreading yourself, it is also highly suggested you send it to someone else to look over.

Once you are certain your blog post is error-free, go ahead and post it. You can post directly to your website if you have a blog page (if not, you may want to consider creating one once you have an arsenal of posts) Otherwise there are websites (Like Medium) where you can create your own blog and lead it to your website or include your contact info.

You’ve already done most of the heavy lifting to create the podcast episode, writing the blog post should not be too much time or effort. It’d be a real shame to miss out on the opportunity of reaching a wider audience with minimal effort.

For more tips and tricks on repurposing content check out our Facebook group: Amplify: Authority Content for Thought Leaders