Harnessing the power of an email list is unmatched. Email is a push channel, not a pull channel. Rather than relying on platforms to bring an audience to you, you can push your message directly to people that have opted in to hearing what you have to say.
While many acknowledge the importance of an email list and regular communication with that list, not everyone prioritizes email as they should. We've experimented with turning long-form content, such as classes, lectures, and seminars, into newsletter posts for our clients. The results have been great – audiences appreciate the digestible format that arrives directly in their inboxes and each newsletter send results in more visits to our site and to our other content.
When we first started doing this process, it was a very manual process of finding the right piece of information and then painstakingly typing out what the speaker was saying. Over time, we experimented with transcription and AI tools to make the process quicker and now we’re able to produce a newsletter in under an hour. Here’s our process:
Step 1: Identify Standalone Content
Watch the long-form content and identify a segment suitable for standalone content, akin to a one or two-minute Instagram Reel or YouTube video.
Step 2: Transcribe the Video
Ensure the long-form video is on YouTube. Visit youtubetranscript.com, paste the video link, and generate the transcript. This tool pulls the auto-generated transcript that YouTube does for every video uploaded to the platform. It isn’t perfect - not even close - but its a good starting point and will save you a lot of time compared to listening and typing out yourself.
Step 3: Select The Portion of the Transcript You Need
Locate the one/two minute segment in the transcript and copy it.
Step 4: Clean it Up with ChatGPT
The problem with the Youtubetranscript.com transcript is that it will not have any punctuation and itll likely get certain words wrong. On top of that, the spacing and line breaks in the transript will take you forever to fix. Luckily, you can paste the transcript into chatGPT and it generally does a pretty good job of cleaning up the spacing issues, grammar/punctuation, and spelling mistakes.
Step 5: Final Cleanup
Although YouTube Transcript and ChatGPT do a pretty good job, its not 100% - probably closer to 80 or 90%. That’s not the fault of the transcript or ChatGPT, its just that oftentimes things that make sense when we speak may not translate so well to the written word. The last step in the process is to clean it up so it all makes sense and sounds good as a standalone written piece.
Now, you have a polished piece of content derived from long-form material. Executed well, readers won't be able to tell that the content was repurposed.