Something I’ve always wanted to do, like the other nearly 8 billion people on the planet, is start a podcast. Because it seems fun. But more importantly, I wanted to do it to begin getting comfortable with my own voice and more confident. I’ve been publishing posts on WordPress since 2013 through this blog and I didn’t realize until posting my latest last night that WordPress and Anchor have an integration available for turning our blog posts into podcast episodes. What?! From Googling, this seems like something that’s only been possible since the beginning of the year, but still, I just now noticed!
Have any of you tried this yet?
For those who don’t know, Anchor is one of the podcast platforms a lot of podcasters use to create and upload their podcasts to Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts and so on. It’s free and user-friendly.
If integrating your blog with Anchor is something you want to do, it’s really easy to start. First, make sure you don’t already have a pre-existing Anchor account because that won’t work with the WordPress integration. If you do and want to start over, you can delete that pre-existing account easily, as I had to do.
To begin the integration, go to your blog’s web address and click on “My Site.” From there, you will see under “My Home” four featured articles. Since I’ve already selected the option, I can’t take a screengrab of it, but there should be an article among the four to connect with Anchor.
Click the button to start, create your account with your email and go from there. It’ll take a few moments to import your blog into Anchor and then you will see all of your blog posts show up! From there, you can either let Anchor turn whichever blog post you want into a podcast episode by using their word-to-audio system (they have a male and female option) or you can record the post yourself. Anchor gives you the “script” of the post to read.
Again, the whole process is super user-friendly and intuitive.
How cool is this? And of course, just like with WordPress, if you so desire, you can try to monetize the podcast after you get so many listeners (I believe it takes 50 listeners to be able to then monetize it) and do ad reads and such.
Again, like with WordPress, I don’t actually expect to make money blogging or podcasting, but it’s both catharsis and confidence-building. My main issue, though, is trying to select a category for my blog as a podcast because I sort of do everything. It’s Milam’s Musings! I do food reviews, movie reviews, TV show reviews, general musings, life musings, philosophical musings, political musings, poetry-writing, fiction-writing, creative nonfiction writing and so on. I just selected “philosophy” for now.
My first one was my blog post yesterday; one of my original five-line poems, “Stumped,” which you can now listen to here:
Milam's Musings 
Good luck to you, I’m halfway through my first season, I echo your sentiments.
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Thank you! And good luck to you as well!
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You don’t need better audio equipment, you need to learn how to use a few basic (virtual) tools.
Another observation is using the robots will do nothing for your confidence or your work. Like an instrument, the quality of your work and communication is dependent on inflection. A good practice is to read without headphones. Take your mic into a clothes closet and shut the door to record. Listen and evaluate. As I told several decades of mic wielders, the worst thing about your voice is self-consciousness. After that you can learn about compressors and signal processing.
One last thing – cut the background music except for intro and outro and remember that music will define you to your audience. Good luck!
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You’re so right — I especially struggle with inflection and self-consciousness! Thank you for this thoughtful feedback!
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You’ll get there. I did audio clinics for 20 years. It’s not rocket science, just practice. And the thing about a closet full of clothes? It kills that I’m a newbie room ring. All you want is your voice and you’ll be surprised how much better you sound without the hollow room effect. Turn it up!
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