Many people prefer to read articles rather than watch YouTube videos. However, the information in many YouTube videos is not available in written format. This creates an interesting opportunity for blog writers to bring valuable information from YouTube to a wider audience in written content.
Of course, you can manually take notes on multiple YouTube videos and articles, then bring this information together into your own article. The problem is that 100% manual writing can be time-consuming, and it’s often unaffordable for smaller companies.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss a process that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up your writing process.
We’ll use a technique called “spinning”, which is controversial in SEO. Many agencies claim not to use it. Many writers warn against it. But, if you work with SEO agencies as a content producer and link-builder, and not as a client, it will become clear that the vast majority of the SEO industry uses “spinning” to some extent in their workflow.
The key to spinning is to use your AI-spun content as a springboard for the final articles you produce. When you’re finished writing, it should not be clear what you used as your original source material.
With this in mind, let’s get started.
Search for videos with closed captions.
First, search for a video that you’d like to use as the basis for an article.
This process will be easier if you choose a video with closed captioning (subtitles). On Youtube, you’ll notice the CC icon underneath videos with closed captioning. If you’d like, you can also click on the YouTube filters icon, go over to “Features”, and choose “Subtitles/CC”.
Transcribe a video.
YT Scribe is a great tool that will transcribe any YouTube video for free. To use it, just visit ytscribe.com, paste in a YouTube link, and click “Transcribe Video”.
If you use this tool frequently, you can install the Google Chrome extension. After you click “Add to Chrome”, you should see the extension when you click the puzzle piece icon in the upper right corner of your Google Chrome web browser. If you’d like, you can click the pin icon to pin the extension to the top of your Chrome extensions menu.
Once the Chrome extension is installed, you should see a “Get Transcript” button directly beneath any YouTube video.
Copy the transcript and check its uniqueness.
Press Command A to select all text and Command C to copy it.
Next, paste your text into a Google Doc or Microsoft Word Doc.
You can check your transcript’s uniqueness using DupliChecker. Paste in some of the text from the transcript, then click “Check Plagiarism”. (You can only paste in 1,000 words of text, but this will give you a good enough sample size.) Wait several seconds for the checker to run. If it shows something close to “0% plagiarism”, then the content is fairly high quality.
The article spinner tool that we’ll use next will help resolve issues with uniqueness, but it’s ideal to have content that is close to unique to begin with.
Select a spinner.
There are numerous potential content spinners you can use. Chief contenders include: WordAi, ChimpRewriter, SpinnerChief, The Best Spinner, and SpinBot.
Nikola Roza wrote a review comparison that can help you choose the best spinner for your needs.
For this article, I’m going to use WordAi. This spinner is noted for its ease of use, readable content, multilingual capabilities, and free trial.
Spin the transcript in WordAi.
To start a 3-day free trial, visit WordAi.com, choose “Try It Free!”, and select the monthly or annual plan. (Just a quick warning – WordAi will only let you spin a small number of words before requiring you to upgrade. Also, if you like, an affiliate link is available here.)
After register, select “Rewrite Articles” from the main menu, then paste in your YouTube transcript. To preserve paragraph breaks when you paste, try pasting without formatting. (On a Mac, press Command Option Shift V.)
If your text has underlined marks indicating grammar issues, you can either correct these manually or install Grammarly to partially automate this process.
Next, choose the number of rewrites (I use “1”), and then tune the “conservative to adventurous” scale (I use “regular”). Click “Rewrite” and wait while the spinner processes your article.
Adjust your spin’s readability.
If WordAi distorted too much of the meaning of the source text, dial down the “conservative or adventurous” scale toward the conservative side and try re-spinning. On the other hand, if WordAi adhered too closely to the source material, dial the scale toward “adventurous.”
These settings adjust the “spintax” – the quantity of synonym substitutions your spinner applies.
Protect keywords in WordAi settings.
If you’re targeting specific keywords in your article, select Rewrite Settings from WordAi’s main menu, then choose “Enabled”. This will open a text box where you can enter specific words that you want to use in your article that you do not want changed to synonyms. Simply put a comma between each word or phrase that you want to preserve in the finished text.
If an article contains direct quotes that you want to preserve, select Protect Quotes. This will preserve anything inside quotation marks.
Custom Synonyms is another setting you might find useful. You can potentially use this feature to replace the name of a company or white label product.
Copy and paste the HTML into WordPress or your CMS.
Copy the HTML of your preferred spin using the Copy HTML button. Next, create a new post in WordPress or your preferred content management system (CMS). In WordPress, make sure the editing mode is set to Visual rather than Text, and then paste your text.
At this stage, you’ll need to clean up errors in your text. You can rephrase as needed until you’re satisfied with the flow of the content. This process can take an hour for 1,000 words, depending on how meticulous you are. Still, this process can be substantially faster than writing an article from scratch.
When you’re satisfied with your text, you can check your content’s uniqueness by copying the text into DupliChecker and clicking “Check Plagiarism”.
Bear in mind, copying someone’s ideas and structure without adding new material can still amount to plagiarism, even if a plagiarism detector doesn’t notice the infringement. This brings us to the next step.
Structure and optimize your blog post.
Take at least an hour to structure your article and add in new material to make it uniquely yours. I recommend adding all of the following features to your article.
- Headers: Add at least a few H2 headers (subheadings) to your article. In longer articles, you might need far more H2 headers. You can also add H3 headers to further break down information within each section.
- Graphics: Find a few graphics or infographics to clarify important points. You can download these to your computer and then insert them into your posts. In your graphics’ captions, make sure to credit and link back to your sources. If a content creator provides an embed code, you can also embed their graphics.
- Featured Image: Add a featured image to your post, which you can source from Unsplash. This will make your article more visually appealing whenever it displays in social media.
- Videos: Look for at least one YouTube video that you can embed in your article. A video is a great way to augment written information, and it’s proven that web pages with videos retain users better than those that don’t.
- Links: Turn some keywords into links to help readers find additional information, including sources for any facts or statistics. You can also link to your own content to help keep readers on your blog.
- Table of Contents: Add a table of contents at the top of your blog post. This allows visitors to immediately see the full breadth of your post, encouraging them to stay longer and read it.
- Conclusion: Add your personal spin to the material by adding a conclusion at the bottom of your post. You can refer readers to other articles they might want to read. You can summarize the post. You can also give a call-to-action or pose a question for discussion.
Update your title, URL and meta description.
As with any blog post, it’s important to update the information that users will see in Google search results.
On WordPress, I recommend installing Yoast. Then, in the post settings, choose Edit Snippet. In the popup, you can update your post title, slug (URL), and meta description.
To boost your article’s chances of ranking, and to encourage more users to click on your article, be sure to use the keyword phrase you’re targeting in your title, URL and meta description.
Conclusion
Transcribing a video and spinning the transcription can be a great way to start a blog post. Just remember, it’s best to use AI as a starting point – not the end of your creativity.
A stunning amount of content on the Internet is plagiarized in some form, although not much of it ranks highly in search engines. It’s important to avoid plagiarism in order to prevent copyright infringement, avoid search engine penalties, and protect your brand’s reputation.
You can produce original content by writing it manually, spinning existing content using AI, or by spinning content and augmenting it. This last option is a good way for a brand on a budget to produce consistent, quality content in a swift, streamlined process.
I wrote this article using the process described above. The total writing time was about 4 hours, which is less than it would usually take to write a similar article 100% manually. This is the YouTube video that I used as a reference:
