5 Simple Strategies to Make Your Articles Consumable with Audio
How to use Audio to increase accessibility and consumption of your articles.
Writers often spend countless hours crafting articles, but very few actually care about making their articles easy to consume.
In a world where content is king, consumption and accessibility of your content matters more than you think.
People don’t always have the time to spare to read an entire article. More often than not, they look for more easier ways to consume content. A good example can be an audio or video clip right at the beginning of an article that sums it up into 3–5 mins.
Due to its inherent nature, audio is easy to consume.
Very much like video, audio or in other words — listening, for many, is a much more efficient and convenient way of consuming content. In fact, audio now stands as the second highest form of content consumed online, right after video.
This growth in the consumption of audio content you see above mainly comes from Podcasts and Audio books.
According to Edison Research, the monthly podcast listeners grew from 24% to 26% year over year in 2018, and are expected to grow more in 2019.
Audio books are also up about 20% year over year in 2018.
Unlike reading that demands complete attention, listening can be passive and perfectly suited for a busy, on-the-move audience.
Not just that, audio can actually offer a more engaging user experience.
Research shows that people listening to Podcasts spend extended amounts of time listening. Podcasts are the number one audio source by time of consumption among other forms of audio.
Articles can be converted into Audio.
Written content too can be converted to audio and made available as podcasts to tap into this growing set of listeners.
Making your articles accessible with audio and offering them alongside written content will increase the probability of your content being consumed, in one way or another.
Some of the biggest publications have started doing just this. Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and even Medium have started offering audio versions of their articles to cater to their audience’s need, with many more publications following their lead.
“Audio is particularly interesting for our audience because of that multitasking utility, that is a real use case,” said Julia Beizer, global chief product officer at Bloomberg. “The delivery of journalism is changing to meet this moment, audio for a multitasking audience is a huge tool in our toolkit.”
But, creating audio content can be quite challenging, especially if you don’t have the time. In this case you can either hire voice actors or use a service like ours to automatically convert your articles to audio using artificial voices.
Here are the 5 simple strategies to increase the consumption of your articles using audio —
# 1 — Embed an audio version in every article.
Give people an option for people to listen when they land on your article. Your article pages serve as important touch points for your content that people interact with. By offering an alternate way to consume the article, you walk the extra mile to give them the option to choose whatever is convenient for them in that moment.
If you write on Medium, be sure to check our Chrome Extension, which makes it super easy to add audio to your articles.
# 2 — Publish your articles as podcasts on iTunes, Soundcloud & Spotify.
These platforms have millions of active users. Being present here enables your content to be re-purposed into a completely new dimension and allows new people to find you and your content, potentially helping you build a following on these platforms.
# 3 — Add a ‘Listen’ button in your email newsletters.
Newsletters are one of the most powerful ways of letting people know about your new content. More than 50% of emails including newsletters are viewed on a mobile device. Adding ‘Listen’ buttons in your newsletters will give people an option to consume information directly from the email while they are on-the-go.
# 4 — Create a playlist of your audio articles.
Create a dedicated page that hosts your articles as audio so people can listen to them as a playlist. A page like this can serve your content exceptionally well for providing discover-ability and share-ability. You can even make multiple pages around specific topics and curate them to get people binging on your content.
Pages like these also serve as a great way to re-purpose your older articles, and an opportunity to re-share them with your audience.
Here’s a web interface you can use to create pages like these.
# 5 — Add a floating ‘Listen’ button to your blog or website.
Floating buttons are powerful components that are always visible to the user. You can use them as an engagement tool to deliver audio content.
If your website or blog is on WordPress, then check out our WordPress Plugin for adding a floating button like the one showed above.
Summary
Making your articles accessible with audio matters more than you think. Creating audio versions of your articles is a great way to create audio content that you can embed on your website, blog or even publish as Podcasts on iTunes and other platforms.
When you offer audio along with written content you are effectively increasing the chances of your content being consumed because there will always be a segment of your audience who would prefer listening over reading.
If creating podcasts is not your thing, you can hire professional voice actors or use a service that can create the audio for you.
Once you have the audio content, share it with your audience, embed it in your articles and make sure to publish it on audio platforms to make it as accessible as possible.
