This week we have a guest on the blog – journalist-turned-copywriter Rin Hamburgh, founder of award-winning Bristol copywriting agency Rin Hamburgh & Co. Read on to discover her top tips for repurposing your video content into blog posts to further engage your audience.
If you’re going to invest time, effort and budget in creating great content, you need to be sure you’re making the most of it by repurposing it.
We often advise our clients to transform their blog posts into videos for social media or YouTube. But it’s also possible to reverse that process, and repurpose video content for your blog!
Start with a transcript of your video
The first thing you’ll need is a transcript of your video’s audio track. If you’re using a videographer, they should be able to provide you with this, otherwise you can do it yourself quite easily by uploading the video to YouTube. Once it’s fully uploaded you can automatically generate captions, which can then be downloaded as a transcript.
Auto generated transcripts will need a lot of tidying up, as they don’t always get the words right (in one attempt YouTube suggested that I’d introduced myself as “Ryan from Rent Ham Branco”!).
If you don’t have the time or energy for that, you can always use a transcription service like Rev.com, which is relatively cheap, easy to use and fast.
Decide on an approach for your blog
The most straightforward way to repurpose your video as a blog post is to simply tidy up the transcript.
That’s not just about getting rid of the ‘ums’ and ‘ers,’ but also about making the sentences flow better – the way we speak is very different from the way we write. Then all that’s left is to do an introductory paragraph or two to point out that this post was originally filmed as a video.
A different way is to see your blog post as a fresh piece of content that uses the video as source material. Start by listing the main points that you make in your video. Did you make them in the right order, or would you like to shuffle things around a bit? Do you want the post to be a read through piece, or will you use snippets from the video as quotes?
The latter is especially effective when you have more than one person in the video, as can be the case in a webinar or presentation setting.
Just remember that if you’re smoothing someone’s quotes, it’s worth running the final post by them before it’s published, to check they’re happy with it!
Formatting your post
A blog post should always have some sort of introduction, the main body copy, and a conclusion or ‘outro’.
The length of your post needs to be at least 300 words to satisfy Google that it’s genuine, but there’s no upper limit. Just remember that the longer your post is, the better written it needs to be in order to hold people’s attention.
It’s also worth noting that the way people read online isn’t the same as the way they read a book or magazine. For a start, they’re much more likely to scan. You’ll also have noticed that online copy tends to have shorter sentences and paragraphs, because a solid wall of text is really off-putting when you’re reading on a screen.
As a result, remember to add subheads at relevant points throughout the blog post, keep your paragraphs at no more than about five or six lines, and sentences just a couple of lines max. Shorter sentences are also more SEO-friendly, as they’re deemed to be easier to read.
Remember your call-to-action
Once your blog reader has finished the post, what do you want them to do? Share it with their friends and colleagues on social media? Read another blog post? Sign up for your newsletter? Download a lead magnet? Call or email to book a consultation?
Whatever action you want your reader to take next, you’ll need to tell them. A call-to-action doesn’t need to be long, but it does need to be compelling, and ideally include a sense of why they will benefit from acting on it.
Speaking of which, if you’ve enjoyed this blog post, why not read another? There are loads of useful posts to support your video marketing efforts right here on the Life Media UK blog.
Or if you’re interested in levelling up your knowledge of blogging and content marketing, then head over to the Rin Hamburgh & Co blog.
