Turning podcast episodes into blog posts is a smart way to grow your audience and fortify your brand.
It extends the reach and lifespan of content you’ve already created and creates a new platform for audiences to find you. An active blog can attract readers through search, engage your audience through comments, and create a home base for your content.
You have to create high-quality posts for this strategy to be effective. Content on your site should add value for the reader, not just promote your podcast. A blog post should be able to stand on its own, even if you write it based on a podcast episode.
Transforming audio podcasts into well-organized, informative written posts is a great way to double your content output and reach audiences in different places. Doing it well can be quite time consuming, but we’re here to shorten your learning curve — based on our experience of doing this more than 1,000 times!
How to repurpose podcasts into quality blog posts
Here are 10 tips from our team at PodReacher for turning your podcast episodes into high-quality blog posts to help a new audience discover your brand.
1. Get clear on your goals
Blog posts can boost discoverability in a lot of ways, but each post you write should choose one main goal to focus on one, such as:
- Search engine optimization (SEO): helping readers find your site and podcast through search.
- Guest promotion: highlighting guests’ best ideas and quotes so they want to share the post.
- Thought leadership: highlighting your brand’s best ideas r to encourage fans to engage and share.
Podcast episodes lend themselves easily to the second and third goals (depending on whether you have guests).
SEO requires a more comprehensive dive into a subject than you’ll usually get with a single interview. Ideally, you’d want to do keyword research before you even sit down for an interview if SEO is your goal. But you can optimize a post by expanding on the topic and using quotes and ideas from the podcast as support.
2. Use a transcript
An automated transcription tool is a life-saver for repurposing audio and video. They’re not nearly as accurate as manual transcription, but they’re cheaper — or free! — and help you follow along and grab the main points of an episode quickly.
Some transcription software to consider:
- Otter: This is our preferred tool at PodReacher. Get 15 40-minute recordings transcribed for free each month, or pay $8.33 per month for up to 6,000 minutes of transcription. The transcription is glued to the audio, so you can easily check quotes for accuracy.
- Temi: This popular tool costs $0.25 per minute (no subscription), and starts with a free 45-minute transcription.
- Descript: This app transcribes audio or video, and lets you edit and mix audio by editing text. You can try it free for one project, and get unlimited projects for $12 per user per month.
3. Don’t overwhelm your reader
Podcast interviews can include a ton of information — too much for a single blog post.
Especially if you publish interviews mostly unedited, fama they’re bound to include tangents that would make written content feel incohesive.
“For most interviews and other episode formats, you probably only want to include about 40% to 60% of the content,” says PodReacher’s founder Jaclyn Schiff.
A blog post isn’t a transcript or show notes. Make it valuable on its own, and link to the podcast episode for readers who want to hear more (including the unwieldy details that didn’t make it into text).
4. Use quotes selectively
Your writing should feel like a conversation with readers — but not always resemble how people speak in conversation. Speakers tend to be way less concise and clear than writers, so direct quotes aren’t always your best route.
When searching for good quotes, watch out for awkward speaking habits, including:
- Relaying a train of thought as a direct quote. “Guests often use a lot of scenario-based examples to make their point, so don’t be afraid to paraphrase and water down their analogies to relay their message in a clearer, more concise way,” says PodReacher writer Farrah Daniel.
- Interrupting your own sentence. We do this all the time in conversation fema. A speaker might complete an idea later in the conversation, so listen for it!
- Using acronyms or jargon without context. Don’t leave readers in the dark! Define industry terms and acronyms in written content.
Only quote lines that pack a punch. Otherwise, feel free to paraphrase.
On the flip side, don’t force even the best quotes into an article if they don’t fit.
“Sometimes when I’m listening to an episode, I hear a gem of a quote, but it doesn’t always fit into the article I’m writing or support the points I’m focusing on,” says PodReacher writer Carson Kohler.
5. Don’t get hung up on the Q&A
Hosts usually head into a podcast interview with a set of questions, but you shouldn’t restrict your written content to those topics.
“A lot of great side conversations come out of interview podcasts, and those can often include the best bits of content,” says PodReacher writer Lisa Rowan. “It gets past the Q&A vibe and to the truth of what’s on the mind of the person being interviewed.”
No need to force a blog post to fit the structure of an interviewer’s questions. Sometimes guests offer incomplete or surface-level answers that don’t translate well to text.
6. Reorganize the conversation as needed
The great thing about text is your ability to restructure. Your blog post doesn’t have to follow the order of the spoken conversation in the episode.
“You might listen to a podcast titled ‘4 Ways XX’ and notice that the guest only clearly explained two of them,” says Farrah. “The other two are there, just buried within context and require some decoding on your end to pull out the main points.”
Often, nuggets come up later in the conversation that fit a theme talked about earlier. Or the last point made is the strongest one and should lead the article. Don’t be afraid to mix and match and move things around to create a strong, cohesive post.
7. Implement the ‘Huh!’ test
As you listen to an episode, jot down three to five main ideas it covers. That’ll form an outline for your blog post, which you can adjust as you go.
To home in on key topics, pay attention to what makes your ears perk up while listening to the episode. Those will probably catch a reader’s attention, too.
“What parts of the interview make you stop and go ‘Huh! that’s interesting’?” asks Jessica Lawlor who previously worked as PodReacher’s Managing Editor. “That’s a good guide to what will also be interesting for the piece.”
If those interesting chunks aren’t the most valuable pieces of insight for the reader, you can use them to add color and creativity to the blog post.
“Look for any cool, funny or surprising anecdotes guests tell that can function as mini stories within the article,” says PodReacher Senior Writer Audrey Mast. “You can use them to illustrate key themes or as an engaging introduction.”
8. Fact check!
Interviewees might not have all their facts straight during a conversation, or they might just misspeak or misremember.
Fact check any name, company, job title, year or date, or other obvious fact mentioned. LinkedIn is a great resource for getting names and work experience right.
Even fact check anecdotes when you can. If someone mentions they spoke at a conference in 2016, did the conference happen that year? Were they scheduled to speak? Was it in the city they named?
Don’t amplify a guest’s mistake by printing it without checking first.
9. Get the tone right
To keep your brand consistent across platforms, match the tone of your blog post to the tone of a podcast episode.
Your podcast might have a general voice — informative or entertaining, funny or solemn — but the tone probably changes slightly from episode to episode if you have guests.
To guide the tone of a blog post, PodReacher writer Alli Hoff Kosik says, “I really like looking for the unique, colorful details that a person shares about themselves or their story in the conversation.”
10. Find the advice no one else is offering
Your blog post may stand alone, but its ultimate job is to drive interest in the podcast and your brand. To do that, it has to make an impact on the reader.
Weed out any mundane content from the episode to make sure the blog post focuses on the strongest, most unique details or advice the episode offers.
To “deliver maximum value to the reader,” PodReacher writer Kenza Moller recommends considering the audience and what they’ve probably heard a million times before. Pull out the details or bits of advice from the episode that don’t come up in every other piece of content in your space.
Dana Sitar has been writing and editing since 2011, covering personal finance, careers and digital media.
