Putting Audio on a Wordpress Blog 

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As people move aggressively into multimedia marketing, you can increase your following by putting audio versions of your articles on your Wordpress blog.

I’d been looking for ways to add extra pizzazz to my blogs and sites, and have only just got into audio and podcasts. I started by reading a couple of my articles (using Audacity shareware) and LAME as the format converter to .mp3 . It was all easy to set up.

The results were passable, and I quickly learned how to edit/splice the sound files using Audacity (after getting tired of umpteen re-takes).

Then I looked more closely at Wordpress and discovered that I couldn’t just load and go.

I dug around and came across a number of articles referring to Wordpress plugins such as Cool Player and Anarchy Media Player. I didn’t feel like setting up yet another plug in, with the attendant danger of the software becoming unsupported and so on (lorelle’s Wordpress blog was very informative).  

So, I got to thinking. I’d just posted a podcast on Podbean and wondered whether I could make use of that. And I did!

Here’s how:

• Log into your Podbean account and locate the required podcast under the My Dashboard/Manage tab.
• Below the ‘Play Now’ buttons you should see the rectangular Audio MP3 button. Alongside this is a list of options underlined with dashes. Select the ‘Embeddable Player’ option and
• copy (ctrl+c) the script code in the box. There is currently a choice of two button colours - green on grey and green on black. I had a look at the html code and couldn’t spot a way to change the button theme colours.
• OK, create your post in your Wordpress blog, with some suitable introductory text - just a brief summary of what is in the Podcast. Alternatively, my preference is to include the full text of the article/post and offer the Audio option:

‘In a hurry? No time to read this great post? Hit the Podbean button and listen in while you do something else!’

• Then paste in the Podbean script where you want it (make sure that you have the html view of the post). That’s it - just publish/update your post and the button is live.

A refinement which you can add is to

• go back to Podbean and hover over the Download link (next to the ‘embeddable player’ option mentioned above).
• Then, right click and copy the shortcut.
• Paste this shortcut as a link in your post next to the Podbean button with anchor text such as ‘CLICK TO DOWNLOAD PODCAST NOW’ . Simple, this link takes you right into the Podbean download screen (and yes, it is an extra button to press).

The great thing is that both the button and download link go out on the rss feed and are accessible on the feedreader (I use feedburner, so I have not tested any others).

So, that's how I add audio to my Wordpress blogs.

Have fun!

© 2010 Phil Marks

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