Turn Your Blog Posts into Podcasts

This is the fifth article in a series of How to Turn Your Blog Posts into Books.

1. Here’s the first article that introduced the idea.
2. Here’s the second article on simply sticking a title and a cover on your posts.
3. Here’s the third article on using your blog categories.
4. And, here’s the fourth on creating story arcs.

Blog Posts into Books

Now, I know the original title of this post says ‘Turn Your Blog Posts into Books’ and turning them into a podcast or audio file first might be a useful intermediate step.

Recently I did a couple of mini podcast episodes that were only 20 minutes long.

• Why You Need a Product
• Eight Steps to Profitable Products

Both of these were updates, extensions and reworking of material that I had already published as single blog posts.

The first advantage of doing this is to be able to re-purpose your content and present it in a new way for your audience. Some people like to read blog posts, some people like to listen to podcasts on the move and others like both modes.

The second advantage comes in helping you turn your blog posts into books. The number one challenge for doing this is to provide flow and connection between your posts so they read smoothly. That is, so they read as a book and not as separate articles jammed together.

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Three Steps to Turn Blog Posts into Podcasts

1. Record your blog posts as a podcast or an audio file – you don’t have to publish it as a podcast. The key is simply to record it to link your thoughts together.
2. Transcribe your podcast. Unless you’re good at this, I recommend you do this on Odesk or Elance. This will save you a lot of time and only cost a few dollars.
3. Edit your transcript to turn it into a finished book. You’ll need to do this anyway.

* What started out as a single article has now become five long ones. I think I’ll demonstrate this principle by turning into a podcast to expand on a few of the ideas, share it in a new way and link the key points. Who knows maybe I’ll go as far as putting it into a book also.

Tip: As an intermediate step talk about a number of your blog posts in a podcast and have this transcribed to form your basic book.