How to Create an Audio Product to Sell on Your Blog

Not all writers consider themselves “techies”—even if they decide to blog their books or blog about their books. Thus, the idea of creating a business around your blog with membership sites and courses might seem overwhelming. An ebook might seem more doable since you probably consider yourself a writer.  But even those who aren’t highly techie can produce an audio readers can purchase as a product.

Creating an audio product uses fairly simple technology, and the end result can be fairly easily uploaded to your blog. Let’s look at how this works.

Produce a Recording

This requires that you produce a recording of yourself speaking. Here are four methods you can use to do so:

1. If you have a digital recorder, you can record yourself speaking into it and then upload the recording onto your computer.
2. Your computer probably has a built-in device recording device you can use to produce audio.
3. You can use a free service like www.freeconferencecall.com or www.freeconferencing.com. Have someone interview you using this service or simply call in and record yourself. The service will allow you to download a wave or MP3 file.
4. Download a free version of Audacity from soundforge.net, and use it to record your audio. It offers easy editing tools as well.

I’ve used all of these methods, but there are plenty more free audio programs (and paid ones) out there. All you have to do is Google “free audio editors or programs” and you’ll find plenty of lists and suggestions.

Upload Your Audio

To upload your audio to your blog you will need an audio plugin or player of some sort. There are many to choose from—both free and paid. I used PB oEmbed HTML5 Audio – with Cache Support, which is free, to upload the audio below, which I recorded using Audacity. (I’ve tried several others, this was by far the easiest plugin I’ve found to date.)

Create a Transcript of the Recording

Once you have a recording, you can easily produce written material to go with it by transcribing your audio file. Numerous experts sell products that consist of an audio and a transcript. If you don’t want to transcribe the audio yourself, you can hire someone to do so for you. Professional transcriptionists can prove expensive, but you can find cheaper transcriptionists on www.odesk.com or www.elance.com.

Create a cover for your transcription, and it will look like a little book! You could even edit it into more than a transcript if you are feeling energetic.

An audio file alone serves as a great free product. If you decide to sign up for a teleconference line, consider hosting a teleconference! Then sell that recording and the transcript. You can even add new subscribers to your mailing list that way!

Selling Your Product

As with any product you sell, you will need to sign up for PayPal or find some other solution that allows buyers to purchase your items. Eventually, you may decide to integrate a shopping cart into your site. But for one product or two, you can easily just use PayPal and password protect your products. (I’ll discuss this in my next post.)

 

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