Easily Create Website Content With Transcriptions From Your Audio and Video Recordings – 193

Jesse Dolan: Instead of doing creative writing, which may take you hours or even days, instead of just spinning content through something like ChatGPT, if you really want to get some good unique content from true experts in your company or for your clients. If you're an agency, think about recording discussions, having somebody record their thoughts, ask them some questions, record their answers. You can take that, turn it into transcription. Now you have a ton of text, and from there you have options of what you can do with it, how you can deploy it.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan. Today we're going to be talking about a process that we use here at Intrycks for our clients and for this podcast and YouTube show Local SEO Tactics, a process we use to capture content, and then translate that into a blog post, an article or just content for your website. And that is starting with a recording. So this isn't a new concept by any means to do something like we do here, which is, you take the video, you take the audio, you make a blog post, and kind of take that same bit of content, in this case the recording and repurpose it in different ways. But I want to specifically talk about how we deploy this tactic with our clients, where it becomes advantageous and how it fits into your content creation plan, schedule, and different methodologies.

So something here that is worth underlining to begin with is the purpose of this is to capture and create content. I am going to be talking about recording yourself, be it on video or audio, but the point of this episode isn't to put stuff on YouTube or create a podcast. That's something we'll talk about in future episodes coming in the pipeline here to kind of talk about what our process is further in those areas. But for this episode here today, we're just talking about generating written text content for your website. Now that can be blog posts, articles, just updating a page, whatever it is. Anybody out there who has sat down to write content, whether it be for your website or just anything else, maybe an email, things like that. You know it takes a while to craft a good message. And us working with our clients for SEO and website designs on their websites often have to rely on the client to be the expert on a topic.

We're really good at SEO, we're really good at storytelling. We're really good at making websites, but what we are not is experts in our client's businesses or their industry. Even if we worked in those industries before and are familiar with it, every client is different and unique and everybody has their own story to tell and what their expertises are. So inevitably we are working with our clients to capture information from them, to give us that expert information and things like that. And it can be time consuming to create this content. So something that we've leveraged is capturing it with a recording and then translating that over to a transcription.

So before I go a little bit deeper into that, I do want to say, of course, here we are in 2023. We've all probably either heard about or even experimented with at this point ChatGPT, Jasper, different AI tools to help creative writing, and those are great tools.

We use them ourselves. We've talked, I think in a recent episode about using AI and we're going to have a lot more AI related content upcoming in the show in the future. And it is just a great, even just ChatGPT, just focusing on that. It is a great resource and can really help you create a lot of content. However, as we go forward and as everybody is doing this, there's also still a need for organic human created expert content, and we don't feel like that's going to be going away anytime soon. If anything, there's going to be kind of a delta that's widening between AI generated content or pure organic, natural, fresh human being created content. And I'm not saying that we can tell one from the other things like that, but AI content is really created on that corpus of whatever it's fed into it.

Whereas human created content. I mean, how many times can we write a love song and still have a brand new song, regardless of genre even, just kind of hit us. And that's that human creative genius coming through. And when we want really authoritative and good content for client websites, that's where we have to get it from. It's from the human beings. So we still want to use ChatGPT, we still want use tools to make our jobs as marketers and SEOs easier, but there does come a time where we need to capture this. So I want to talk about what we do for the process, why we do it, what the end result is, and share some tips with you on how you can do this yourself to be efficient. And there doesn't have to be a big barrier to entry for the cost or the time commitment.

So, as a working example, if you check out one of our recent episodes, episode 192, we interviewed Villy about his business and what we've done to help transform his business through targeting and SEO and also how that has changed his personal life from being successful. That episode, I think the total runtime on that episode was 21 minutes. That's including our intro music, outro music, closing statements, a little commercial in there, I think talking about the Kyle Roof episode that's upcoming. Probably going to be hearing about that here in a little bit as we insert it into this episode as well. But total time with all that was 21 minutes and that transcription, if you go to localseotactics.com, you can check out the episode page from that episode just like all of them. And you can see the transcription itself is about 3,900, just over 3,900 words of text that doesn't include titles, summary paragraphs, and other content on the page.

I think that entire page for that episode was somewhere north of 4,400 words on that page. And so my point on that is, sitting down with Villy for about 20 minutes, we are able to grab this audio, grab this video, do what we're going to usually do with that, but we can then run that through a transcription service and generate 3,900 words of text. So that's great. We use it as a straight up transcription. If you look at those episode pages, it's a transcription. It says who's talking, what'd they say? You can just read it like an episode, but you don't have to have your output be that way. Let's kind of set that aside for a minute, kind of what that output is.

Hey, Jesse, with Local SEO Tactics, joined here by Kyle Roof. Kyle's going to be coming on in a few weeks to do another episode. It's been about two years since Kyle was on for his last interview, and this time we're going to be doing a site tear down.

Kyle Roof: The purpose of this is also to demystify and to say it's not fairy dust. It's not magic, it's actual concrete things that you can go in and do and do better with your SEO. And I know guys like yourselves and myself, that's all we're trying to do. That's the whole message is just like, let's make this accessible and let's make this doable. And it doesn't have to be magical. Let's get some SEO done and let's just do better in our SEO and do better sites. Let's go make money.

Jesse Dolan: If you want to submit your site to get in the running for Kyle to give it a review, tear it down and share some tips, go to localseotactics.com/kyle, it's K-Y-L-E and submit your site.

So we'll get back to the number of words, the length of recording, things like that. But let me actually set the stage. I got to back up a little bit and talk about why we want to do this recording. Something that we found is oftentimes an expert in a particular topic may not be somebody who is good at creative writing. If you're looking for discussions about a product or a service or whatever the topic may need to be that you're writing about for your website, oftentimes you might need somebody's experience in providing that product or service or things like that. But they're not in the marketing department or they're just not a creative writer.

And so what we've found is people who are experts in these areas, any area I should say, not these areas, can talk about what it is that they're an expert in. And if you can think about 20 minutes of conversation generating close to 4,000 words of text, let's kind of do the math on that. And for every five minutes you're generating about a thousand words. So if I need maybe just a couple paragraphs for a website or maybe for a sales flyer or whatever it is, if you can grab a content expert for whatever the type of content is you're you need to produce and just interview them for five minutes or ask them a few questions or get them to talk about a topic for five minutes, you're going to need a thousand words of text that could take you hours if not a day, to really craft a good bit of content like that if you are trying to manufacture that yourself.

And the reason that's important is because you're able to get that actual authentic information from the expert. They're not going to try to type it out, which inevitably sounds different and comes off different than if you were to just speak it, right? It's just a much more painful or arduous process for people who aren't naturally just sitting down and writing for what they do every day. So capturing that content through recording, whether it be video or audio, can be very easy for the person that needs that content and for the person producing that content, it can be a very easy way to communicate that. Another thing to keep in mind for the length of your recording here is what we've found is maybe a simple question for somebody that's about a three to five minutes answer. You can talk to that without any edits, without any redos, without any takes, something that people are kind of predisposed to if we put them on camera to start recording or even just audio is trying to get it right, you know what I mean?

And try to say it right? And the beauty of recording is you can just talk and you can just record. And if it didn't come out right, you can just say it again. You don't have to stop and do a new take and do it over and kind of get it perfected. You can just restate what you said and when all this comes out as a transcript, if you want to just put it up online as a straight up transcript like we do, that's great. But if you want to instead take those bits, maybe paraphrase them, maybe rewrite in a different way, kind of spin it around, you're able to do that or maybe take parts of the different takes that you rolled through and mash them together. But all that being said, we've found that somebody who's an expert on a topic can talk for three to five minutes front to back, no problem.

I mean, one question, could you explain blank or could you talk about blank? If somebody's passionate about what they're doing and an expert in that area, they can talk for three to five minutes on that, no problem without a lot of prompting, without a lot of scripting, without any redos and retakes. And that becomes very efficient from a content creation standpoint. So something to consider in that is, when you take that audio, let's just say it's an audio file to a service to get transcribed, they're going to charge you usually by the minute or the duration of that. And so here again, a shorter piece of content, let's say five minutes. If you use a service like Rev, which is who we use, I want to say that's somewhere north of a dollar a minute for the transcription, but it's a human edited or human reviewed transcription, which means you're going to get it and it's going to be verbatim what you said.

You can go cheaper. I think it's pennies on the dollar for AI based tools that will listen to your audio or watch your video and then provide the transcription. Those just a piece of advice you're always going to want to give those a walkthrough on your own and see if there's any typos or edits, anything that was miscommunicated. We generally find, although it's getting better every single week or month here it seems, the AI-based tools are extremely cheap compared to something like Rev, rev.com. But you're going to have to invest some labor into reviewing those. So the point on that is if you're doing a five minute video versus a 20 or 25 minute video, it can be much more cost effective to just do these short takes on these short topics and get it done. So we have found that that is very advantageous in working with our clients. Again, to get that expert content.

Something that helps to keep the pieces of content smaller is usually people when they start talking about a recording or things like that, you start thinking about a show or an episode and things like that. And that's great if you want to take this to the next level and make a show out of it and then also get a transcription. We'll talk more about that in future episodes. But for this, it's important to think about, it's just more like recording a conversation and you want to just get the information that you're looking for. People will usually default to, well, I need to do a top three of this, or a list of seven things for that, right? And what we say is don't do that. Let's just say if your idea was a list of seven things for blank, instead do seven separate sessions, episodes, recordings, whatever you want to call them, do seven separate ones, one on each topic, and maybe go a little deeper into each topic.

That's going to give you a lot more content, a lot more things that you can share, that you can repurpose, that you can do with. And it'll also allow you to talk specifically on that one thing. Again for five minutes, whatever it's going to be, very intentionally and very directly, and you can kind of get a little deeper on that one thing instead of trying to cram through all seven or remember all seven. So that's a little tip that we found to be very effective is keep your topics simple, keep your topics on point, and then be more in depth with those topics. And again, if you're leveraging any kind of an expert and maybe you yourself are the expert, you're going to find it a lot easier to really get deep and get good valuable information on that topic. When you kind of handle it in that way, that doesn't mean you can't go wide.

The top seven this and six things to remember for that. Those are popular pieces of content and can be very attractive for people. So I'm not at all saying that isn't something you should do. Just saying challenge yourself, challenge your person you're working with, the people you're working with to get this content to not think about it in that type of a production, really more intentional for what it is that you're looking for. So now we talk about the duration, right? Kind of a thousand words for every five minutes roughly. There's a cost associated with that for the transcription, and let's talk here about how to capture this. So there's a couple different ways that we've used for ourselves and for our clients. I'm going to talk about a few different products, like I just mentioned Rev, none of this is any kind of a solicitation or endorsement on these particular products versus their competitors.

These are just the examples I'm going to use. So Loom, if everybody is familiar with that. I believe we talked about it a number of times here on this show. It's L-O-O-M and that's a screen recording software. It's very easy to use. It can be free up to a certain number of videos that you can save in your library. After that, you can pay a small amount to kind of keep them infinitely. And this is really good for two things. One, if you want to capture your screen and record it and share it in addition to the audio and the video of yourself.

So if you're going to be actually using the video here that you're going to be creating for video purposes and not just going to turn this into a transcription, if you want to share something on your screen to show a walkthrough how you might use a piece of software or a tool or kind of go over a spreadsheet, whatever it is, Loom is a very easy way to just start recording on your screen, grab the audio from the microphone on your computer, and then also if you have a webcam or some kind of external camera set up, you can show your face overlaid on that screen as well.

So that's super handy, super useful. When you're done with the Loom recording, it'll give you a link that you can then use to provide to the transcription service that they can then pull the transcription from that. You can download that video. Again, if you want to repurpose it on your website and use it, A lot of things you can do with it from there. But it's also effective to use Loom just to capture, write that audio for the purpose of getting it transcribed. You don't have to share your screen. That's kind of where the whole thing starts from and what it's designed for, but you don't have to do that. You can just record and talk and use it as a way to record your voice that you can then use that same file, that same link to get your transcription and that can be free.

So another good way to do it, and this is a little bit more applicable, especially if you're doing something remote where you're going to be recording somebody is Zoom or Teams, things like that. With Zoom, you can record your session. So if my product expert or my service expert or that expert on whatever the topic is, is maybe at a remote location or different office today, whatever it is, if I can't sit down with that person and record them face-to-face, Zoom is a great tool to be able to do that. Again, just like Loom, you can use the video if you want to turn that into something you're going to put on your website or for a show, something like that, that's great. But again, here we can just take that file and turn it into a transcription and I believe Zoom, I can't remember if this is free or if you have to upgrade your account, but Zoom will also provide a transcription off of that recording as well, right within Zoom.

Same thing there. You're going to want to make sure you cross-check that for any errors before you just publish that off blindly. Last but not least here for a third option for you that's just very accessible is your phone. The quality on your phone is just fine for any recording that we're going to be doing for the purpose of getting it transcribed. Also, nowadays, if you have anything that's been made in the last few years, it's just fine for the actual video and audio that you may use for a show or for use on your website as well. There's actually some pretty cool apps also that can act as a teleprompter. Let's just say for your iPhone, go to the app store, just look up teleprompter for iPhone. There's a lot of different ones that are there, and you can just upload your script right to that.

So you flip your phone around in selfie mode and you can have your notes and your script up on a teleprompter as you're recording, and it's extremely seamless even if you don't need to get that advanced, right? Same thing if you're not capturing the video and the audio for multimedia use, if you just want to capture this for the purpose of getting it transcribed, again, you can just record yourself on your phone, take that file and use that to get a transcription. So you really don't need to invest into any technology. Here for our show, we've got external microphones and cameras, things like that. You don't need to have any of that, especially if the end result here, which is kind of the core focus of this episode, is to just get that transcription instead of taking a couple hours or even a day or two to write this big blog post on article.

And instead of going to something like ChatGPT to kind of make one for you, you can sit down for five to 10, 15, 20 minutes, however long it needs to be, record a discussion, record a conversation about this topic, get it transcribed, and now you have an amazing piece of content that you can do a lot of things with.

So let's talk about that here. Let's take a detour, let's talk there about how to capture some of the content, what you can use for the various output types for video, for audio, how to capture what you can use it for. A lot of other solutions that we're going to talk about in the future. And you can also just do a quick Google search for competitive products. We talked about how to then take that file, be it video or audio, and go through a service like Rev where you can submit it and they'll provide you that transcription.

Now, from there, again, let's just talk further down here that we're not going to be making a show or anything like that podcast and YouTube. We're just going to take this transcription and now do some things with it on our website. A couple things you can do at this point. One, you can take that transcription and you can just post it maybe as a blog post. Maybe you want to provide some kind of summary paragraph or two, couple headlines about what this blog post is about. Here's a transcription from blank, that's fine and can be useful in that way. Another thing that we'll do is take that entire transcription and turn that into a properly formatted blog post or article for your website. For that, you can actually, something great is using ChatGPT. You can just copy and paste your entire transcription and you can tell it, Hey, I want to take this transcription, turn it into an article that's formatted in whatever, ABC way.

However you want to prompt that is up to you, and that's a very useful way to kind of convert it from a transcription into a more formalized blog post our article. And in that same way, oftentimes we'll just take individual paragraphs, a web designer, an SEO or the person responsible for really crafting the message on your company website. If you're getting a transcription from somebody that just has a lot of good raw expert information, you may not want to copy and paste it verbatim. What this does do is give you, again, this kind of good corpus of information from an expert that you can maybe paraphrase some of those sentences or paragraphs that you've lifted from the transcription. So now you can take these little snippets and use them anywhere on your webpages. You don't have to think about this transcription living as an entire thing on your website as a blog post or an article.

You can just take headlines or bullet points or individual paragraphs and sentences and use them where necessary on your website. And of course, I've been talking about website because we do SEO and that's the focus of the show. But your email newsletters, if you have printed materials, you can use this information anywhere in your marketing needs and it's extremely valuable.

All right, so I think that's probably pretty darn good, a good primer. Again, the core message here is instead of doing creative writing, which may take you hours or even days, instead of just spinning content through something like ChatGPT, if you really want to get some good unique content from true experts in your company or for your clients, if you're an agency, think about recording discussions, having somebody record their thoughts, ask them some questions, record their answers. You can take that, turn it into transcription.

Now you have a ton of text, and from there you have options on what you can do with it, how you're going to deploy it. We find it's a very efficient way to capture good, unique expert content from actual experts and give us the kind of content we need for our clients and for our show like this Local SEO Tactics here to put it out there and be unique. And I think it's really going to help you move the needle for your needs just like it has for us.

So hopefully that helps you guys and gals out. If it does. If you like the type of content we put on this show, the kind of tips and tricks that we do give you, we'd love to get a review from you. That's how we know we're doing a good job and that we're reaching the right people with the right information.

I'd like to read here a good five star review we just got from Tamara Chamberlain. I hope I said your name right, Tamara. Strong local SEO content. I'd recommend this podcast if you're looking to learn more about local SEO. They do a nice job of offering specific actionable advice in educating their audience on current SEO tactics.

Perfect.

That's what we try to do every time. Hopefully there's some actionable advice that you all can grab from this episode here today. If you're getting good value, just like Tamara, we would love to hear from you. Go to localseotactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click the button for reviews. From there, we've got links to podcasts, GBP, Facebook, wherever you want to leave us a review. We'd love to hear it and we're going to read it on the show as well. That's all for this episode. I hope you all enjoyed it. Catch you on the next one. Take care.