How to turn videos into written content

 

Using your existing video content to create blog posts is an excellent strategy to massively increase your online reach, and helps you to market to a whole new audience. And it’s easier than you might think!

Believe it or not, blogging is far from dead – in fact, blogs continue to be the most searchable form of content on the internet. Converting your video into blog posts allows you to grow your audience and grab tonnes more traffic to your website.

Grab a cuppa, and let’s get started!

2 easy methods to transcribe your video content

The first step is to turn your voice into text. Here are 2 of the most popular methods of doing this easily and quickly.

Using Rev

I’ve heard plenty of YouTubers and videographers – including a few of my own clients – swear by Rev.com. It claims a huge 99% accuracy rate and doesn’t cost an awful lot to use. There’s a simple PAYG option, and at the time of writing, their most basic plan costs $1.50 per minute (which roughly translates at £1.25). You get an actual human being for that, or if you’re happy to trust AI, it’s a bit cheaper, although perhaps a bit less accurate.

In my view, you’ll be putting some work into editing the piece anyway (sorry), so the AI option might be enough. Your call.

Once you’ve registered with Rev.com, it’s simply a matter of uploading or linking to your video, and choosing your tariff. The website states that there is an average 5-hour turnaround for a human to transcribe, or 5 minutes for AI transcription. That is obviously somewhat dependent on the length of your video, though.

Using YouTube

In case you didn’t know, YouTube has its own free transcription feature. In order to enable it, you need to select the automatic captioning option, which will allow you to download the full transcript.

If you’ve ever actually watched a YouTube video with the captions turned on, you’ll know that although they are fairly accurate (most of the time), there are quite often some errors, which is understandable with any automated software – we all have different accents, dialects, and turns of phrase which is near impossible for every piece of computer software on earth to decipher perfectly.

But like I said – you’ll likely be editing this script quite a bit, so don’t let that put you off. It’s still saving you a lot of time, and will serve as the backbone of your finished article.

And it’s free. What can be better?

Creating your blog post

Now that you’ve got your video transcript on-screen, it’s time to format it into something that has some kind of order and makes sense. I’m guessing that seeing it there now and reading through it, you’re having a tough time reading it through all the ‘um’s, ‘ah’s, and other nonsensical words we all tend to chuck into our conversations, right?

In truth, the old advice of ‘write as you talk’ doesn’t really work – we don’t speak and write in the same way. So, now we need to do some serious editing so that our text is easier to digest.

Split up your paragraphs

No-one wants to read great blocks of text, so your first job is to go through the document and make sure that all of your paragraphs are in the right place. Start by splitting up the text so it reads nicely, and take notice of capitals, commas and full stops etc as you go.

If anything doesn’t make sense, or is repeated, take it out now.

Use sub-headers

Sub-headers are good to have for 2 reasons – they help your readers to find the information they’re looking for more quickly, and they are really useful for SEO. Look through your text and see how you can break it up further by subject - like I’ve done in this article!

Take out the waffle

When we speak, we tend to have a habit of saying stuff that’s irrelevant, repeating ourselves, and mixing up words and phrases as our brains think about what we’re saying and come up with bits of information that we believe are important to the subject – but often isn’t! If you’re anything like me, you’ll go off on tangents as you speak – and then have to come back to the original subject wondering where the hell you left off.

When you see all this waffle as written text, it most likely won’t make a lot of sense and will be confusing to read. It’s a bit like a jigsaw – your job is to put the pieces back in order so that your readers can see the picture and make sense of it.

Don’t forget to link back to your video

For those readers who have found you from searching for info, remember to insert your video into the blog post – it will allow people to have another way of getting the information, and might even grab you a new subscriber if you have a regular channel!

How I can help

If you like the idea of having your videos written as blog posts, but think it all sounds like a bit of a faff, I’d be more than happy to do it for you. All I need is that initial transcript, and I can make it look lovely – just get in touch.

 

About me

Tereasa Hedges, freelance copywriter for creatives, designers and makers.

I’m a freelance copywriter who specialises in writing content for creative people, helping you to reach larger audiences through blogging, web content, email marketing, and a little bit of social media for good measure.

Want to work with me? Contact me for a chat via shirecopywriting@outlook.com