How to start an audio blog: a step-by-step guide

An audio blog is a blog whose posts can also be listened to. Not a podcast — you're not producing episodes, booking guests, or maintaining a separate feed. It's the writing you already publish, with a play button on it.

This is the whole process, in the order you should actually do it.

Decide what you're building

Two things get called "audio blogging" and they have almost nothing in common.

A podcast is original spoken content. Separate production, separate distribution, separate audience. It's a second publication and it costs what a second publication costs.

An audio blog is your existing posts, narrated. Same content, same URLs, same audience — one additional format. The work is close to zero once it's set up.

Most people who say they want to start a podcast actually want the second thing. It's the one with a return that doesn't depend on you sustaining a recording habit.

Step 1 — Check your writing survives the ear

Before any tooling, read one of your posts aloud. You'll find the problems immediately:

• Sentences with three subordinate clauses that are fine on the page and unfollowable by ear
• Bulleted fragments that sound clipped
• Parentheses, which vanish entirely in audio because there's no visual cue
• "See the table below", which means nothing to a listener
• Headings that are jokes rather than signposts

You don't need to rewrite your archive. But knowing these patterns changes how you write the next post, and that's most of the benefit.

Step 2 — Choose narration: your voice or synthetic

Recording yourself gives genuine personality and costs 30–60 minutes per post once you include retakes and editing. Be honest about whether you'll still be doing that in three months. The graveyard of abandoned audio blogs is full of people who could sustain it for four posts.

Synthetic narration takes seconds per post and never gets tired. Modern neural voices are genuinely good — see the guide to how TTS got here — though they still stumble on proper nouns and homographs, so you listen to the first thirty seconds before publishing.

For a blog, synthetic is almost always the right answer, because the deciding factor is whether the audio still exists in six months.

Step 3 — Pick a voice and stick to it

Your voice is part of your brand; changing it per post is disorienting.

The real choice is neutral versus expressive. A neutral voice reads like a calm narrator and disappears behind the words — right for explanatory or technical writing. An expressive voice performs, which suits storytelling and opinion and becomes tiring across a long guide. Full comparison here.

Step 4 — Put a player on the page

This is the part people expect to be hard. It's one script tag:

<script src="https://butter-reader.web.app/widget/AudioPlayerWidget.bundle.js"
        data-player-id="YOUR_PLAYER_ID"></script>

Style the player once — colours, shape, whether it carries a visualizer — and use the same player ID on every post. The widget reads whichever page it's on and narrates that page, so one snippet covers your whole archive. Restyling later updates every post at once.

Platform guides: WordPress, Wix. Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace, and hand-built sites take the same snippet.

Step 5 — Make sure it reads the right text

The one genuinely technical detail. The widget finds your article by looking for the first <h1>, then the nearest <article>, <main>, [role="main"], .entry-content, or .post-content around it. Inside that container it reads <p>, <h2>–<h6>, <li>, and <blockquote> only, and strips navigation, headers, footers, and anything whose class contains sidebar, comment, share, related, and similar.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Text inside bare <div>s is ignored. Page builders that render paragraphs as styled divs will produce empty narration.
• One <h1> per page. If your theme marks the site title as an <h1> before the post title, the audio will announce your site name as the article title.

Both are worth fixing regardless — the second is basic on-page SEO.

Step 6 — Put the player above the fold

Directly under the title. A player at the bottom of the post is for people who already finished reading, which is exactly the audience that no longer needs it. This single decision affects listen rates more than any styling choice.

Step 7 — Watch the right numbers

Play rate (what share of visitors press play) and completion (how far they get) tell you whether the format is working. Also watch time on page — audio's real SEO contribution is engagement, not keywords, and if nobody presses play, nothing else follows.

A realistic first week

Day one: add a player to your best-performing post and listen to it end to end. Day two: fix whatever sounded wrong — usually a name, an acronym, or a heading. Day three: put the snippet in your post template so every future post gets audio automatically. Then leave it alone for a month and look at the numbers.

That's the entire project. It's smaller than it sounds, which is the point.

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