Podcasting has become a main form of online marketing for businesses. It seems to have accelerated in the last year. Many celebrities, unable to film movies and other works, started podcasts and had some interesting guests. There have even been others that have gone back and watched a television show they were on decades ago and watch it one by one while providing commentary and publishing it as a podcast.
Is a podcast alone a great marketing tool? Yes.
But you don’t have to stop there. You can reuse the podcast episode as a blog post to use the content to attract people that prefer reading to listening.
We do this at Ghost Blog Writers, but here are a few considerations and steps for doing it on your own.
1. Create A Blog Post, Not A Transcript
Transcripts don’t seem to work as blog posts. Some post them. Services like YouTube seem pretty good at creating transcripts for audio and video. And these transcripts can be very useful for searching audio and video content.
But it’s weird. Listening to a person speak is different than reading. When we’re reading we don’t necessarily want all of the words that a person speaks.
So with a podcast you’re looking to take the content that was created in the podcast and repurpose it to fit the blogging world. That means breaking it up into an article with an intro, headings, paragraphs and conclusions. You’re looking to create posts that have how-to and list titles.
2. Focus On The Questions & Answers
And speaking of those titles, a good strategy for any blog, including a podcast that accompanies a blog, is to focus on the questions that reader likely has and the answers likely provided in the podcast. You may have to start with the answers provided in the podcast and use those to create the blog post(s).
For example, some podcasts are interview format. The host asks questions of the guest and the guest provides answers and stories. Focus on one or a series of related answers that the guest provides. Use that to form a blog post that answers a question for a reader that is looking for that information online. Probably via Google or social media.
Say you’re listening to a football podcast. The host interviews a quarterback coach. In the interview they discuss maybe five different topics. One of which is about how to throw a football. The coach goes into detail on the topic. This can turn into a blog post title How To Throw A Football.
3. Focus On Timeless, Not Timeliness
Some podcasts are timely. They talk about current events. They talk about trends. They talk about what’s going on now. These can be very successful podcasts. But they have a shelf life. It’s like the news. The news provides valuable information, but nobody really wants to watch news that was on yesterday or last week or five years ago.
Your podcast may have a more timeless aspect to it. You alone or you and your guests may talk about topics that have been relevant in the past, are relevant today and may likely be relevant in the future.
Some of the most successful blogs are those that focus on timeless content. Like that How To Throw A Football example. That is something people wanted to read about 50+ years ago. People also want to read about it today and it’s like they will want to read about it in the future.
4. Give Credit To Guests
If you have a podcast that has guests and you use information they share to create blog posts, make sure to give them credit.
Back to the How To Throw A Football blog post idea. Make sure you mention the coach. List their name and qualifications. Make sure to link to their website if they have one along with their social profiles or YouTube channel or whatever they have that they would like you to share.
When your’e going through the list of information about how to throw a football, write things like, Coach is very adamant about making sure you have tight, bouncy steps when getting ready to throw the football…
If the information came from someone other than you, make sure to mention them. You both benefit from creating a blog post like this and so do the people that are interested in reading it.
5. An Hour-Long Podcast Could Be Multiple Posts
Podcasts can vary greatly in length. Some might be 10 minutes. Others might be over three hours. But quite a few are falling right at about the 45 minute to hour length. That might become some kind of standard. They don’t take too long to make. And if there is a guest it’s not too long of a commitment during the workweek. And it’s pretty comfortable to listen to an hour-long podcast while you have your lunch break, eat breakfast or have your coffee in the morning.
A podcast that lasts an hour could have the potential to create multiple blog posts. For example, in the football coach discussion the coach could talk about his or her backstory for 5-10 minutes. Then they might talk about throwing a football for 5-10 minutes. Then they might discuss quarterback mindset for another 10 minutes. Then maybe they discuss physical traits in great quarterbacks for 15 minutes. Then discuss another topic or two and wrap it up and you’re at an hour.
Each of the topics could become its own blog post.
Conclusion
Creating a blog post or posts from a podcast episode takes more time than creating a podcast transcript. But it’s important to create a blog post that is in a format that readers want to create. Blog posts have basic formats. You want to match that so that when someone discovers a post via Google that they don’t even know that it was a podcast episode.
If you’re already creating a podcast, consider using the same content to create blog posts. It takes time, but you don’t necessarily need to do additional research like you would if you were creating a podcast from scratch. And instead of trying to turn blog post readers into podcast listeners, you’re using the same content and giving blog readers what they want.
Hopefully these tips can help you get started.