Turn Your WordPress.com Blog into a Podcast with Anchor

If you’re a blogger, you’ve already done the hard part by creating great content — so you should share that content as widely as possible! One way is by giving your audience an audio option, as well as your written blog.

February 22, 2021

Austin Lau

Blogging on WordPress.com is all about sharing your unique voice, and starting today, you can extend that to another platform: Anchor. We previously shared some tips and tricks for getting started with a podcast on WordPress.com and are thrilled to share this new option.

Anchor, part of the Spotify family, powers 80% of all new podcasts on Spotify, with free tools to easily create, distribute, and monetize, no matter how you record — including podcasting with your WordPress.com blog!

Creating an Anchor podcast from your site is free and seamless. After all, you’ve already got a whole blog’s worth of written content to use. With Anchor, all that’s left is converting your words into audio, which can be as easy as using your blog to quickly record a text-to-speech version.

Blog-to-podcast benefits

Making a podcast out of your blog breathes new life into the work you’re already doing — you can make your unique blogging voice actually audible! By converting your blog into a podcast, you’re leveraging the power of audio to grow your brand, audience, and income — without any extra work. Hundreds of millions of listeners (and counting) consume podcasts every day, and they’re constantly looking for fresh voices and perspectives. Whether you have a built-in WordPress.com audience to bring over or not, an audio extension of your blog means another avenue for exposure — to your existing followers and new ones. And then there’s monetization: Anchor Sponsorships lets you read ads in your own voice during a break in your podcast; Anchor’s Listener Support feature, meanwhile, allows your biggest fans to support your work via a recurring monthly donation.

A podcast version of your WordPress.com blog also introduces an entirely different audience to your work, and frees listeners up to do what readers aren’t able to: multitask! There are, of course, many benefits to readers fully immersing themselves in the written content of a blog. But audio enables listeners to consume your work while performing everyday activities, like going for a walk, driving, cooking, relaxing — or simply exploring something new.

Let your words do the talking

Connect your site to Anchor and your existing blog posts will import as episode drafts

Your blog can almost literally do the talking for you with direct text-to-speech, similar to an audio transcription of an article. This is a great option for blogs less dependent on top-notch production value and more focused on the content itself — such as well-researched news, sports, essays, and wellness stories. With text-to-speech conversion, your blog can be podcast-ready in a few minutes.

Converting your blog post to podcast-ready audio and distributing your new show takes just a few minutes.

Of course, if you want to create a podcast that highlights your actual speaking voice, you can record it by reading a transcript of your blog post, which will be imported directly into Anchor for easy access.

You can get more creative, too, by using your blog as a jumping-off point to host an audio discussion about the blog topic. Or let your blog serve as inspiration for a more traditional podcast, where you host and interview guests, record scripted segments, and much more, in ways amplified by audio!

Create a podcast today

There are a number of different ways to turn your WordPress.com blog into a podcast. The amount of work it takes can be surprisingly minimal — or more hands-on if you like. Whether you just want to create an audio version of your blog, expand your blog concept to a different platform, or simply try your hand (and voice) at a new medium, there’s a podcast structure for you. Most importantly, your written work means you’re not starting from scratch.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for creating a podcast on Anchor from your existing posts on WordPress.com:

Be sure to create a new Anchor account to link with your WordPress.com account — existing Anchor accounts cannot be linked at this time. You can also convert all of your newly published posts on WordPress.com into podcasts as well.

If you’re looking for inspiration, a perfect example is TheDesignAir, whose blog covers aviation design and product news. Check out their text-to-speech podcast with Anchor:

Ready to turn your blog into an Anchor podcast for free? Get started by creating a new Anchor account. Happy podcasting!

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41 Comments

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  1. David Boles Feb 22nd at 7:04 pm

    This is super interesting! I’ve already started the process. Will there be a search feature on Anchor so we can find which episodes we want to convert? Right now, there’s barely any pagination, and that’s rough when you have more than 4,000 blog posts. Will we have an embeddable widget for our blog with the episodes? Thanks!

    Liked by 21 people

    • Austin Lau Feb 23rd at 4:14 pm

      Sounds great, David. I’ve shared your feedback/question with the Anchor team and they have already been discussing how to manage so many blogs/podcasts on their end. Stay tuned and follow along for updates over at their blog: https://blog.anchor.fm. As for the embed on your WordPress.com site, the Podcast Player block is the easiest and cleanest way to add individual episodes or your entire podcast.

      Liked by 14 people

  2. Observatoire du MENSONGE Feb 22nd at 7:27 pm

    How can I retrieve French audio? Thank you

    Liked by 13 people

  3. The Delaware Blogger Feb 22nd at 7:36 pm

    Interesting, however, I personally repurpose my Anchor podcast info onto my current DelBlogger blog on WordPress.org.

    I do also have a Podpage website for my Anchor podcast one of which I promote to my clients.

    So I will read more to be able to share with my podcast coaching clients.

    Liked by 17 people

    • Austin Lau Feb 23rd at 4:17 pm

      Sounds great. I hope the magic of automatically converting text to speech with this new feature will be useful for you and many of your clients to publish more podcasts!

      Liked by 10 people

  4. CSHQ Feb 22nd at 9:11 pm

    Thank you so much, I’m setting it all up now 🙂

    Liked by 14 people

  5. antonylusamukha Feb 22nd at 10:16 pm

    Thank you very much

    Liked by 14 people

  6. diyanaw Feb 22nd at 10:54 pm

    Super rad! I’m excited to see where this takes me as well as other bloggers around the world!

    Liked by 20 people

  7. jlp260 Feb 23rd at 1:58 am

    Wow! This is really easy to set up. Thank you! 🌺

    Liked by 13 people

  8. Gaurav Tiwari Feb 23rd at 4:56 am

    Just wow!! Thank you so much guys!

    Liked by 7 people

  9. ptb6203 Feb 23rd at 5:22 am

    Interesting and seems to be easy…. thank you

    Liked by 9 people

  10. mindmadetechnologies Feb 23rd at 10:20 am

    Thanks for the best ever useful blogs . Out of all other blogs from your website this is my favorite and user readable. Easily understandable .Keep sharing more blogs .Great work on podcast technology with anchor. Always I could see an uniqueness in your theme plugins. Hats off !

    Liked by 9 people

  11. arinaitwehannah Feb 23rd at 12:21 pm

    This is so awesome Thank You

    Liked by 9 people

  12. Kellie Feb 23rd at 12:52 pm

    Thanks for sharing this, I love podcasts so am very interested in being able to set one up. This post is so helpful 👍

    Liked by 11 people

  13. Rolfe DH Feb 23rd at 1:08 pm

    IMPORTANT: You must create a new Anchor account to link your WordPress.com account in Anchor and start creating podcasts from your existing pages and posts. Existing Anchor accounts cannot be linked manually at this time. See https://wordpress.com/support/create-anchor-podcast/

    Liked by 5 people

  14. TAOL NETWORK Feb 23rd at 1:18 pm

    More loves, l am happy to hear this.

    Liked by 8 people

  15. https://bulluckg.com Feb 23rd at 1:28 pm

    Thanks to WordPress, a few months ago, new to podcasting, I have been able to get my podcast sent out to Google, Spotify, etc. It has been a great learning experience. I have not heard about Anchor but will check it out. Thanks Austin.

    Liked by 11 people

  16. Joseph E. Breen Feb 23rd at 2:02 pm

    How does a visitor to my blog access the podcast? I recorded one as a test, and find no indication on the blog or post to connect to podcast.

    Liked by 8 people

    • Austin Lau Feb 23rd at 4:23 pm

      Once you have published a podcast, you can get a share URL for that podcast from Anchor/Spotify and easily add it to any page or post on your WordPress.com site using the Podcast Player block. In the blog post here, I embedded an episode from TheDesignAir’s new podcast created with this automated text-to-speech technology. I copied and pasted the episode URL (e.g., https://open.spotify.com/episode/4PSDZ8LEIURviewKjzofyh for the episode embedded in the post) and it will embed into your site. You can also share an RSS feed or other links if you want to share more than just one episode.

      Liked by 4 people

  17. MARIAM Ahmed saad Feb 23rd at 2:51 pm

    thank you very much I am already setting it up now!

    Liked by 9 people

  18. ceciliawyu Feb 23rd at 3:26 pm

    Thank you, Austin! Nice and easy! I was thinking I might have to do something like this as my University just allowed Blogging & Video to be included as part of my Doctorate, so now I can just send them Spotify links to my channel! 🙂 #joke

    Liked by 9 people

  19. calciati19 Feb 23rd at 5:15 pm

    Is there a way to have 2 or more different voices in the text to speech audio?
    Say I have an interview on my blog.

    Liked by 9 people

  20. Ellie Theyurtlady Feb 23rd at 9:35 pm

    Hi, how to add the Anchor podcast to my website?

    Liked by 5 people

  21. itsmontez.com Feb 23rd at 9:46 pm

    i seen this on Spotify live the other day they have a whole lot of things going on and on the up and coming. GREAT read ! and well plan to start doing this a well ! Much support !

    Liked by 3 people

  22. sacred neurology Feb 23rd at 9:51 pm

    Does it work with pages or only posts?

    Liked by 5 people

  23. E K The-writingelk Feb 24th at 12:51 am

    Hi Austin, thanks for the heads-up. Can you believe I’ve just done the reverse of that? My inky I-talk podcast is here today because I follow a notice just like yours on my anchor podcast site, only in reverse. Let’s see where it all leads.

    Liked by 4 people

  24. jabrush1213 Feb 24th at 2:50 am

    Very cool!

    Liked by 3 people

  25. curiousdavidredux Feb 24th at 3:48 am

    This was a VERY helpful blog post and your response to questions was excellent. many thanks!

    Liked by 7 people

  26. Joseph E. Breen Feb 24th at 4:44 am

    Austin, thanks for responding. I want someone to access my blog “KULTURONOMY.COM”, and be able to select a podcast as an option. I do not understand your response. Also, I accidentally deleted an episode on Anchor, but it is still on the blog. Can you help?

    Liked by 6 people

    • Austin Lau Feb 24th at 8:02 pm

      Visitors to your website can easily listen to your podcast on your website itself or you can link them to Spotify/Anchor to listen to the podcast. The easiest way allow visitors to listen to your podcast on your website, and in my opinion the best looking, is the use the Podcast Player Block to embed either a single episode or an entire RSS feed. Insert that block into any page or post and copy and paste the share or embed URL from your podcast and that will insert the podcast in the same way I’ve inserted TheDesignAir’s podcast in my post. You can put that block anywhere you’d like on your page or post: top, middle, bottom, etc. For more information on how to use that Podcast Player Block, check out https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/podcast-player-block/. For your accidentally deleted episode, I believe you can retrieve it still but I would confirm with Anchor: https://help.anchor.fm/hc/en-us.

      Liked by 6 people

  27. chrisodowd123 Feb 24th at 9:37 am

    Very good

    Liked by 8 people

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