As of June 2022, over 500 hours of new videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube.

With a massive amount of content being uploaded at lightning speed, it’s clear that YouTube has become a hub of creativity and information.

Now, suppose you are a video-first content creator. You’re comfortable recording YouTube videos but don’t want to miss out on the SEO benefits of blog posts.

Or perhaps you are running out of blog post ideas.

How do you create blog posts that engage your audience?

It’s simple: transcribing a YouTube video to a blog post using AI tools.

This blog post will help you easily repurpose your videos into blog posts.

The first step in repurposing your YouTube videos to blog posts is transcribing them.

Transcribe the video

When it comes to transcription, OpenAI’s Whisper model offers the best accuracy. It has both a cloud model and an open-source local model.

You can use apps like MacWhisper for Mac.

Or, if you are on Windows, you can use Whisper, Transcribe, or any other apps.

If you prefer cloud apps, try AudioPen or VoiceNotes. You can even use meeting transcription apps like Otter.ai, which offers shockingly good accuracy for transcription.

Improve with AI

Once you transcribe, I personally use MacWhisper.

I just paste in the YouTube video URL, and it takes a while to transcribe the entire video accurately.

Now that I have the transcription, it’s just the spoken text. It needs a lot of refinement for it to be called a blog post.

Now, you need to transform this big chunk of transcription into a blog post.

Just provide a prompt to convert the original content into blog posts.

Here’s the prompt (for you to copy paste):

CONTEXT: You are a skilled content writer and an expert in [NICHE]. 

ACTION: Convert the video transcript into a blog post of [WORD COUNT] words. Your goal is to make the content easy to read, informative, and approachable to your readers. Provide additional context within the blog post to help readers understand the content. Additional context is necessary because video scripts may lack context as they often rely on visual elements to provide additional information. It can be in the form of supplementary details, explanations, and examples.  

SPECIFICATIONS: 
- Write in first and second person tone. Use short sentences. 
- Write in a friendly and engaging tone as if you're talking to a friend. 
- Break up large paragraphs with line breaks and use sentence fragments to keep the text easy to read. 
- The blog post should be well-organized with clear headings, subheadings, formatting, and bullet points where appropriate. 
- Use varying sentence structures and lengths to mimic the natural flow of human writing. Feel free to use parenthetical statements or asides to inject additional context or alternative viewpoints. 

If your transcript is around 2000 words, instruct it to keep the blog post within 1700 words.

This avoids filler words or repetitions.

Also here are some things to note:

• Clarity and readability: Instruct AI to make content easy to read, informative, and approachable.
• Additional context: You need to instruct it to provide additional context within the blog post. In videos, the B-rolls and graphics provide context. These visual elements will be there, but in blog posts, additional context may be necessary.
• Visual elements: You can ask AI to add additional context by prompting it to include other supplementary details and explanations. Explain that those visual elements are not present in the transcript.
• Specifications: You can provide various specifications like writing in the first and second person tone, using short sentences, line breaks, proper subheadings, formatting, bullet points, and whatnot, as you see in the above prompt.

This is what the blog post looks like after ChatGPT processes the transcript.

Large language models like GPT-4 can easily handle one-shot blog post generation.

🤔 However, sometimes it makes sense to instruct ChatGPT to convert your transcript into a detailed blog post outline. Then, ask it to expand the outline one section at a time based on the transcript.

You can use the below prompt for this:

Please organize the video transcript into a clear and succinct blog post outline. 

Once you generate the outline: 
- Review the outline to ensure that it flows logically and that the main points are clearly presented. 
- Group related points together and create headings for each section of the outline. 

And ask user if they're not satisfied, you can generate some more variations. And ask exploratory questionsin assisting them.

This is what it looks like.

Based on the length of the transcript you are converting, first ask it to create a detailed outline.

👉 Once the outline is created, group related points together, then work forward to expand it to a compelling blog post.

You can ask – “Based on the above outline, write the blog post one section at a time”.

This yields amazing results and makes your blog post more coherent without missing any points.

If you are aiming for a well-crafted blog post, check out this guide on blog post structuring.

Add more value

While AI can retain key points and add supplementary details to fill gaps from the lack of visual elements, manual input is sometimes necessary to enhance the blog post’s value.

Ask the AI what additional context is needed to make the blog post more comprehensive and understandable for readers.

As shown in the above screenshot, including a prompt like this helps you a lot and prompts AI to suggest things you can add to the blog post to bridge the gaps.

Again, some manual work is needed here. Otherwise, your pieces of content will just be a video summary.

Add images

Converting a transcript to a blog post is straightforward with AI tools, but adding images can be tricky.

👉 While some AI tools can take screenshots from the video, their results are often inconsistent. That’s why I don’t recommend using fully automated tools for this purpose.

Instead, I recommend you manually select key parts of your video and take strategic screenshots to include in the blog post.

Best thing you can do is, while editing your video or delegating it to an editor, instruct them to include graphical content, animations, or B-rolls; keeping in mind that these visuals will be also used as images or graphics in the blog post.

Optimize for SEO

Now that you’ve converted the transcript to a blog post and included images, you need to optimize it for SEO.

Consider pasting your entire blog post into SEO optimization tools like SurferSEO.

These tools benchmark your article against other articles on similar topics on Google and suggest topical entities or topics you may have missed. This makes your blog post more topically rich and includes all the concepts Google expects.

💡 Along with this SEO topical optimization, focus on internal links. You can ask ChatGPT to scan your sitemap URL and suggest internal links to add to the blog post.

Another way is if you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins like Link Whisper to suggest internal links automatically. This saves you a lot of time from opening your sitemap and blog post content side-by-side and looking for opportunities.

Once this is all done, it’s time to publish your blog post.

Make sure your main keywords are present in the introduction, subheadings, and throughout the piece of content.

Also, embed the original video at the top of the blog post so that when readers come to the webpage, they can watch the video content while scanning your blog post.

At the end of the day…

It’s all about making it convenient for people to consume your content.

When people search for a keyword on Google, they have a specific intention in mind. They need to accomplish a specific task.

The easier you make it for people to accomplish their tasks, the more you will be rewarded by Google.