You’ve already done the hard part, getting an article written. Your blog exists. Somebody spent an afternoon on it, proofing it, optimising it, getting it on the website and hitting publish. It went out, it did its thing, and now it’s sitting in your archive doing nothing much at all. You schedule some future social media posts pointing to it in an attempt to keep it alive, but other than that, it’s done.
Or is it?
Making an audio version of a blog post takes an article you’ve already invested in, and potentially paid good money for, and gives it a second audience; people who listen while they drive, walk the dog or do the washing up. The same people who were never going to sit down and read it. You record or generate the audio, host it somewhere that turns it into a podcast feed, and embed the player at the top of the post. It takes about twenty minutes a piece once you’ve set up the process, and the hard work is already done because we’re working with content you’ve already made.
Is it actually worth making an audio version of your blog?
A few years ago, we ran this properly for 12 months. It was at a time when podcasts weren’t as popular as they are now. At that time, we averaged around 541 listens per blog article.
Sit with that number for a second. Five hundred and forty-one people per post who did not read the blog – at a time when podcasts weren’t as mainstream as they are today. People listened to it. In today’s money, that’s a second audience you didn’t know you had, listening to content you’d already written and already published.
So why did we stop?
To be honest, it’s hard work, and we chose to follow other trends and strategies. Recording 147 episodes meant 147 sessions of sitting down, reading aloud, fluffing a line, going again, editing out the dog. Then chasing guest bloggers for audio files they’d promised a fortnight earlier and hadn’t recorded. The listens were worth having. The admin behind them ate a morning a week, and eventually it lost.
That’s the part that’s changed. The reason it was hard has pretty much been resolved. You no longer have to be in a quiet room with a microphone to turn a blog post into audio, which means the maths that killed it for us all those years ago doesn’t apply to you in 2026.
How do you make an audio version of a blog post?
Five steps. The first one is a decision; the rest are pure admin.
- Decide whose voice it is. Will you use a real voice and record yourself or someone else reading the article, or an AI voice generated from the text? There’s a case for each, which I’ll discuss below.
- Generate or record the audio. If you’re recording, your phone in a carpeted room is genuinely fine, and better than a cheap microphone in a kitchen. If you’re generating, paste the blog text into something like ElevenLabs and pick a voice. A thousand-word post takes under a minute.
- Host it somewhere that creates a feed. Podbean has a Blog to Podcast feature that pulls straight from your site. Upload the file, or point it at your blog and let it do its thing.
- Connect the feed to the places people listen. Apple Podcasts and Spotify, at minimum. This is a one-off job on your first episode, and then it looks after itself. (This is where you really start your podcast!)
- This is an optional step, you can embed a player at the top of your post. Grab the embed code from your host and drop it into a Custom HTML block, above the first paragraph. Make sure it’s added at the top of the page os its front and centre.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, repeat the process for your back catalogue. That’s where this really pays dividends. Choose twenty of your best-performing articles, publish them over the course of a month and suddenly, you’ve got a podcast feed with twenty episodes in it without having to write a single word.
Should you use your own voice or AI?
Your own voice wherever possible. I realise that sometimes it’s going to be hard to find the time, but try and make it happen! For articles that are personal, opinionated or telling a story, people are buying you, and your story, read by a machine, loses the very thing that made it worth telling in the first place.
If the post is a how-to, a list or a technical explainer, then an AI voice can work. Nobody needs your warmth to get through eight hundred words on image sizes, and honestly, the tools are now so good that most listeners won’t clock it. (It’s scary how lifelike they are!) The trade-off is this:
- AI gets the whole archive ready to publish in a fortnight
- Your own voice gets a few done and then stops when you get distracted, or things change in the business that need your attention. (That’s kind of what happened with us!)
Of course you also have the option to do both. Real voice on the pieces that carry your point of view, AI-generated voice on the other stuff. The listener doesn’t mind. The archive gets covered.
Start with one. Check out your Google Analytics and pick the blog that’s brought you the most traffic in the last year, spend twenty minutes turning it into audio, stick the player at the top of it. You’ll know within a month whether the listens justify doing the other nineteen.
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Christina Robinson is the Managing Director of Green Umbrella Marketing. She provides Social Media Training and Coaching for a range of clients throughout the UK.
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