turn video into blog post without words you never said

search turn video into blog post and page one is a row of converters. paste a youtube link, pick a tone, and get back a post with a title, an intro, five headings and a conclusion. it is quick. it is also, very often, not what you said.

this piece is about doing it the other way: a blog post that is your video in writing, nothing added, on the same page as the video. it is what every public episode on underway now gets, without anyone pressing anything.

why turn a video into a blog post at all

a search engine reads words, not faces. a video with a good title ranks for that title, but the minutes of things you explained inside it are invisible unless they are written down somewhere it can read. a written version gives every one of those sentences a chance to match what someone types.

it also serves people who would rather read: someone at work with the sound off, someone who skims before they commit four minutes, and anyone who uses a screen reader. answer engines, the ones that write a reply and cite a source, quote written sentences too.

where most converters go wrong

the usual tool hands your transcript to a model and asks for a blog post. a blog post has a shape, so the model fills the shape: a scene-setting opening you never said, a reason you never gave, a feeling you never had, and a tidy moral at the end. we tried exactly this on our own episodes. a check of four of them against what was actually said found something invented in every one: an interruption described the wrong way round, a hypothetical told as if it had happened, a summary of the week nobody had spoken.

on a page with your name on it, under your own video, that is the worst kind of error, because a reader can press play and hear that you did not say it.

how to turn a video into a blog post that only says what you said

• start from the transcript, not from a summary of it.
• keep your own sentences, in your order. take out the ums, the false starts, the words said twice and the bits about the recording itself.
• join sentences and split paragraphs where the subject changes, so it reads like writing rather than speech.
• add nothing: no opening scene, no reasons, no conclusion. if it feels thin, the video was short, and that is fine.
• check it against the transcript line by line before it goes up, and take out anything you cannot point to.

put it on the video's page, not a second page

the other common mistake is publishing the written version as its own post, separate from the video. two pages with the same subject and the same words compete with each other in search, and both do worse than one strong page would. put the written version under the video, on the one address you share everywhere, and that page carries the title, the video and the words together.

what underway does now

every episode on your page already has a page of its own, with its searched-for title, the video and a description. now it also carries the episode in writing, under the video, written from what you said in that episode and nothing else.

• it is written by itself once the episode is on your page. there is nothing to press.
• it keeps your sentences and your order, with the filler out and paragraphs where the subject changes.
• before it is shown, it is checked against the transcript. anything you did not say or plainly mean is caught, and it is written again. if it still is not right, the page keeps the video and the transcript and shows no article.
• a short episode, under about 250 words spoken, gets no article. a thin page helps nobody.
• if you change the cut and the episode goes up again, it is written and checked again from the new words.
• the blog has a new row, from the series, with the newest episodes written up across every public series.

the article on the share tab is still there, for your own blog or newsletter. the episode page has its own, kept to your words, and the share tab now says so, on the web and on the phone.

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