315 | Stop Creating From Scratch: Turn Every Video Into a Content Engine with Ryan Robinson

0:00Ryan Robinson:Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I've got an incredibly fun, useful, helpful, productive episode for you today with an awesome guest as well. And we are going to talk about how to take videos, in this particular case, YouTube videos, and turn them into incredible other assets, in this case, blogs that will overall increase your exposure and provide you more traffic and will lead to more business. Now, while this is the specific use case we're going to show you, we're going to show you different ways on how to do this with AI.

0:41Ryan Robinson:The key thing here is actually a much bigger picture than that. What we're going to show you is a little secret on how to take an unstructured piece of information that you have. This could be a video. This could be audio. This could be other text. anything that is just a random input and turned it into a well-structured, well-researched output that actually drives business value. So beyond the immediate use case that is extremely valuable of taking existing videos you have and turning them into text that drives more traffic to your website, you're going to learn how to do something that you can generalize to a lot more other use cases.

1:16Ryan Robinson:Now, our guest today to help us through this process is Ryan Robinson. Ryan is an absolute ninja when it comes to online presence. He has a highly successful YouTube channel. He has an incredibly successful blog. He has over half a million people that are learning from him how to write blogs effectively. He's been doing this for a very long time. He was a very successful podcaster in the past. He's a contributor to some of the biggest online magazines in the world. So he knows a lot about how to properly and effectively have successful online presence that actually leads to business beyond just, yeah, I'm famous and people like me, which is awesome, but it doesn't really pay the bills.

1:54Ryan Robinson:And so he's going to walk us through both structured tools that he is going to give you access to, as well as how you can rig these things on your own using Chachapiti or Claude or whichever other tool that you want. As I mentioned, just having better blog and a better online presence is awesome, but learning how to take unstructured data that you have and turning it into structured, effective data is at least as important. So I'm very excited, humbled, and honored to have Ryan on the show today. Ryan, welcome to Leveraging AI. Hey, thank you for having me. This is one of my favorite topics. Been doing this for years, learning the hard way, and it's been working well too.

2:34Ryan Robinson:Awesome. Yeah, I'm really, really excited. Again, we spoke a week ago, and I told you I have a YouTube channel, but I haven't really promoted it in any effective way. I have a blog, but I haven't really done anything. So what you're doing from my perspective is magic, right? Because it allows me and millions of other people to use assets they already have but actually do something productive with them. That's exactly the point. And this was literally born out of my own head banging against the wall about this topic too because I was like, oh my God, I'm creating videos. I'm making podcast episodes.

3:11but what am I doing to put those assets to work for me in other formats too? So we'll go through blog posts. We can talk about newsletters, socials. Basically the key takeaway is how do you repurpose the content you're already making, the hard stuff, the videos, the audios, the long form, and then turn it into things that can also work for you in other formats.

3:30Ryan Robinson:Yeah, I love that. And I think that applies to literally everyone because solopreneurs produce content, but large corporations and enterprises produce content. And usually that entire process is 100 % or 95 % manual. So figuring out ways to do this effectively while taking into account all the relevant considerations of SEO and best practices and keywords and structure and all these things is jet fuel. Yeah. That's the hard part. The details, the nuance where all this stuff actually comes together. Yeah. Because listen, anybody can take a transcript of a video, throw it into which I said, write me a blog.

4:08That's exactly. It will be a blog.

4:10Ryan Robinson:It's not going to drive any traffic to your website. Like you're going to be excited that you're going to have it, but it's not going to do anything effective. You got that right. Yeah. Okay. So let's dive in. Stage is yours. Show us the magic. Beautiful. All right. So let me show my screen here. Is that going to be useful? Yeah, 100%. So those of you who want to watch what Ryan is showing and what we're talking about on Spotify, you can see the videos as well, or you can go to our YouTube channel. The link is in the show notes, but we will explain everything that is on the screen and describe to you everything that's on the screen as we're doing it.

4:43So if you are driving or swimming with your headsets on or mowing the grass or whatever

4:51Ryan Robinson:it is that you're doing listening to podcasts, you can stick around and we'll definitely share with you everything we're doing. I love it. Cool. All right, let's dive in. So first up, I got to say, you know, RightBlogger is the tool that I built for this exact purpose. And I want to tell everyone straight out the gates that you can make a free account. You can use everything we're talking about and everything that I'll show in the RightBlogger interface. You can use that for free. And so there's super generous limits on everything you can do here. So you can actually take it all for a test run.

5:20You can use it just on a forever free plan if you want. So that's a super important thing to me that tools like this that I make are accessible and available to everyone. So we'll talk a little bit about doing it the right blogger way, let's call it. And then we'll also talk about using Claude to do this stuff more manually. And so really the biggest difference of why I use a tool like right blogger, aside from the fact that we built it for my business purposes, is that it does process automation for you. So everything we're actually going to be talking about here in our session today, turning YouTube videos into these blog posts, these newsletters, these socials, this is now fully automated for me.

6:02So every single time I upload a video here on my YouTube channel, it triggers an automation over inside RightBlogger, and it adds a post to my calendar. So tomorrow I'll be uploading a new YouTube video. And over here in the automations tab, you can see I have this automation on YouTube. It's triggered by an upload, so it'll just throw it onto my calendar. And then it'll look something like one of these guys. And this is our video to blog tool inside Riot Bloggers. So you can actually just paste in the link of any video on your YouTube channel. This will also work with Spotify links. So your podcast stuff, it'll work with Apple podcast links.

6:45And so any of those like longer format pieces of content, you can just plug the link in right here or drop in a transcript from that asset. And then it'll generate a full SEO optimized blog post for you. That's got a nice little embed right here at the top. So you've got your video embedded. This is great for a blog, right? To where people can watch, they can read. It's got nice little snippets that are optimized for AI visibility and SEO best practices. So things like having a key takeaways up near the top. And then we even have this kind of SEO scoring and reporting tool that will fully optimize your content so that you're not just asking chat to write you a blog post.

7:29Like this is measured against full keyword research data that our system does. It recommends what keywords need to be included, how often they should be in the article, and it recommends specific FAQs, questions to answer, things like that. And so this is kind of just giving you a glimpse of, let's say, the Ferrari version of doing this, kind of repurposing your content. But I'd love to show, maybe before we dive into doing it just the Claude or the ChatGPT way, Isar, does this bring up any questions for you? Anything you want to drill into more deeply? About a thousand, but I'll start with one.

8:06Ryan Robinson:The first question, you said it's optimized for keywords. Is there a place for me to enter information about my business, my current website and so on? So it optimizes for that or is it trying to optimize based on what's happening in the video that I uploaded or both? Both. So you get kind of the topical optimization stuff that goes through this SEO report right here. And then on more the account level, you go to your project settings and this is where you connect your website and you can have Google Search Console also connected to this. You can connect your content planner. You can integrate your site directly to your CMS and you can do a whole bunch of other cool things including reporting inside a tool like WriteBlogger where you have all of the different data sources Google Analytics, Google Search Console, actually pulling in and showing how your site is performing.

9:04So this is kind of the benefits of using a tool like this, let's say, compared to just going straight up ChatGPT, straight up Claude every single time where you can give those tools instructions. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't. So we build in a lot of guardrails, fail-safes, and repetitive instructions, honestly, behind the scenes in something like a write blogger.

9:25Ryan Robinson:So this is really awesome. I'm going to ask a bigger question. And I don't want to turn this into an SEO episode, because I think a lot of people are less interested in the SEO details. But I will ask that. So SEO has a lot more than just keywords, right? There is the right content structure, the right place on your website, the right backlinks, like all the other stuff that will make this rank higher on whatever. like right now there's more you know it's like the whole side of of uh and the of uh sorry of like the ai tools being showing up over there and obviously google search and stuff like that does this tool does any of this that it gives you recommendations of where to post it or what else to do on the website or how to get backlinks or all these kind of things yeah in in right blogger we have a backlink exchange and so once you join something like our link exchange you will actually get links and give links to other people that are in our verified network of sites.

10:25And so we've got 50 ,000 users inside RightBlogger. And so there's always people that are in similar niches, but not with super directly competitive content. So you'll be able to like give and get links when you're in something like this. And then from like an on-page SEO perspective, the content that you make with tools like ours are much more like pre-optimized. You get the advantage of basically using all of our hyper-detailed multi-step templates that you can go recreate this stuff yourself for sure. But you know, we've been doing this for decades. We're constantly maintaining, improving, and pruning the ways that we prompt the AI behind these tools.

11:03And so use our workflows. That's kind of what we always recommend people take it for a spin. Compare a free thing you generate in a tool like this with something that you generate with ChatGPT and see if you like it.

11:14Ryan Robinson:Awesome. I love it. So let's see what's behind the curtain, right? So now we understand there's a tool. It does it out of the box. You drop the link. It does all the sing and dance capabilities. If I want to learn the process, if I want to do this myself, and again, I see only one good reason to do this, right? You said the tool is free, so I don't see why not use it. But the only reason is what I said before. Let's say your process is not YouTube videos into blog, but something parallel to this that takes your internal training videos and turn them into a SOP for people or something like this that knows how to take a video and turn it into a structured written output.

11:54Ryan Robinson:There's a gazillion use cases for that that do not necessarily require SEO, but requires to know how to do the process. And that's why I think this is really interesting to do this the other way. Yes, cool. So I like to take this example too, like let's just say you have a video. Doesn't need to be on a public YouTube channel, but for the sake of people watching, listening, where you can grab YouTube transcripts for free. So YouTube will pretty much always automatically generate a transcript for any video. You can grab your transcript many other ways, right? But transcript is usually down here towards the bottom in the video description.

12:31Click the show transcript button and then you get your transcript over here. You can just kind of highlight everything, copy it, paste it. Now you've got something to work with. There's also a free tool on WriteBlogger that you can use 100 % free that you just plug in the link to your videos and it grabs the transcript and like nice formatting for you. So lots of things that could save you time here. But let's say we want to make a blog post using the transcript of this recent video. And you could take your example too, producing internal SOPs, something along those lines. Maybe you want to make some sales collateral to create an ebook or something that you can reach out to your prospects for.

13:08All of those same principles apply. I think the one thing that I want to really drive home talking about here today is that I don't recommend ever giving AI a one-sentence prompt and asking it to do something huge. But what you can do is you can ask tools like Claude, ChatGPT, to walk you through the process of improving your prompt as you're creating something with it. And so that's the example that I wanted to do with you, Isar, was say, take this YouTube transcript and generate an SEO optimized post. That's 1 ,500 words minimum. Walk me through improving this prompt by asking me questions. Here's the transcript, right?

13:55So let's paste this all in and let's get Claude going. I love asking Claude to ask me questions. Do you do this yourself too when you're using AI?

14:04Ryan Robinson:I do this all the time. And I have like 11 best practices principles that I teach in my courses. And this is one of the top five. You're the master. You're the master. And I even have more detailed versions of this that generate specific outputs that already has the right categories. It's not the exact questions because you wanted to kind of figure it out based on the topic, but it has the right categories of questions to ask. So I do this all the time. I think having AI interview you, and I'll explain why. Like the most important for AI to be successful in helping you in an effective way is context.

14:35Ryan Robinson:The more it knows about you, about the subject, about the topic, about the industry, about the specific use case, the better the results are going to be. And what you're basically doing is you're allowing AI to generate the specific context it needs for the specific task that is at hand by asking you questions. So I absolutely love this. Beautiful. And Claude, I think, elegantly does this. I don't know if chat GPT will do this in kind of the same way. But for me personally, like I love Claude for this purpose. I just feel like Claude handles these types of things better. And Claude asked me three like really simple questions here.

15:11We could drill down in another layer. But for the sake of this example, right, I want to keep it kind of quick and snappy. But what I would be doing if I had the 20 minutes to really work with this is I would be asking multiple rounds of questions. I would have Claude prompting me based on like guiding this towards a really specific direction rather than just giving it kind of a simple prompt to get started. But this is essentially the manual process that I use when I'm tackling something that doesn't conform to more of like a preformed tool output.

15:43Ryan Robinson:I will say one more thing that is very helpful to me. And I know other people work in different ways and wired in different ways. I love voice typing and you can do this in either your built-in Mac interface or there's like a lot of other tools that you can install today. Many, many people use Whisperflow and then you can just ramble away and you're like, I want to do this and here's what I know and here's what I'm trying to do and here's what I'm struggling with and here's the thing I need you to help me with. Like literally just explain as if you think you're talking to the best consultant in the world and you're trying to explain to them the situation to get their help in a very specific thing and I find it a lot easier to do this with voice versus with text.

16:21Ryan Robinson:But if you're doing okay with text, do it with text. But just give it more information about what you're trying to do. Don't try to make it like a prompt. Literally just explain the situation. Here's what I'm trying to do. I have a video. I want to turn this into this. I don't even know how to prompt this. Here's the kind of output I want. Here's the link to an output, that example I found somebody else doing that I want to mimic and help me create the prompt and the process. And it will. Yeah, it's remarkably good at this. And then when you really get something that you like, then what I'll usually do with Claude is I'll say, hey, this was really good.

16:53Turn this into a standard operating procedure that we can refer back to and use every time I come to you for this particular type of task.

17:01Ryan Robinson:Yeah, and those of you who don't know, these are called skills, and they're available on all the different platforms. And people think, oh, you need to be some kind of a wizard or a magician or a programmer to create skills or agents, and the answer is you don't. You literally just ask Claude or ChatGPT now as of last week and say, hey, I want to turn this entire process into a skill that we can use every single time. And it will do it. Maybe we'll ask you a few follow-up questions, which is even better. And it will package it for you. And now you say, oh, I want to use the same process we used to create the blog post from the video.

17:32Ryan Robinson:And it will do it. Incredibly simple. And then you can even set up, are you using routines, workflows in Claude? Yeah. This is the real good one. And I use this in Claude code for tasks that I run super repetitively, stuff I just come back to every day, every week, and know that I want it done in a super formalized way. You work with Claude on what that process looks like, and then you can set up the routine so that every weekday or every Monday, it generates your report, your briefing. It takes whatever's new on your YouTube channel and runs it through this recipe you've created. It's pretty awesome at time-saving.

18:06Ryan Robinson:And again, you don't need to know anything about how to set it up. You literally just explain to Claude what you want to do, and Claude will actually go ahead and do the thing that you wanted to do. So if you don't know what routines are, you don't need to know. Said, I want to set this up to run every other Monday at 4 p.m. in the afternoon. And done. It will do it for you. Yeah. Claude's been really impressive at removing the illusion of secrecy or the need for crazy knowledge or skills. You literally just ask it and it walks you through everything. It's amazing. so what's the final prompt that he gave us after we asked it to help us write a better prompt we've got now so now it created the deliverable here and we can do a little qualitative check on this just to kind of see like did this hit the mark or not now based on what it did here this is the point of the juncture where i would say you know either this needs some refinement so So we'd review this article.

19:04We'd see, oh, there's no internal links here. And that's the first thing that jumps out at me. And so I'd say, hey, there's no internal links. You know my site already. Add internal links. Minimum five, maximum 10. Add three external links. And so I'd spend probably five to 10 minutes with this actual draft. I'd cruise through it based on what I know works well. I'd say, hey, there's no key takeaways at the front. Create a key takeaways with bullet points. and then towards the end, let's see if we have any FAQs. I don't think we have, oh, we've got some FAQs. But the FAQs heading is not optimized for AI visibility.

19:42This is not the kind of section that's going to get questions swooped up by, you know, ChatGPT or something. So I would call this frequently asked questions about WordPress speed optimization. And that kind of, these little subtle signals when you stack them up over time and you consistently execute on this stuff across your entire portfolio of content on your site. These are the types of things that add up and help you increase your relevancy and thus get more visibility over time. But looking at this real quick, this is a workable draft. There's a lot of formatting elements I like. It did well with the header titles.

20:19It's got a lot of bullet lists, bold formatting, but it's missing some of those things like internal links, external links, and some of those more SEO optimization elements.

20:28Ryan Robinson:That's a few things to add. First of all, to connect the previous two dots that we mentioned. After you do this, you're like, oh, I need to add whatever in the beginning, and I want to have internal links, and it needs to be between five and 10, and a few external links. You can add that to the skill. If you go back and say, oh, now I want the skill that we created that write these blog posts to also do these things every time, that will be the last time you have to mention that. Moving forward, it will always have an FAQ in the end. It will always mention the FAQ for whatever the topic. It will always have the information up front, what you're going to learn.

20:59Ryan Robinson:It is also going to have the links. It will do all of these things. And you don't have to think about them up front. You can keep on improving the skill literally just by asking. I want you to add this to the skill. And it will. And now it will give you a new save button. And you save it and you have the newer version of the skill doing this. The other thing that is very helpful. So Ryan is an SEO ninja. He knows all these things in his sleep. You don't. So if you want to do something like this on your own, you can go to Claude and say, hey, I want you to go online and do a little bit of a research on what are the best practices on how to write a SEO optimized blog post because I don't have a freaking clue.

21:36Ryan Robinson:Both what kinds of SEO I need, how does it link to my existing website, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you want to go really crazy, you do this in deep research, which is like in the little plus button, and then it will run for 35 minutes and we'll come up with an amazing summary of what you need to do. And then you add that to the scale. So now the scale has all of that knowledge built in. And Ryan is showing you how to do this. So you write the prompt, you add research and you click go. And we're not going to do this now. It's going to sit there for 45 minutes or 20 minutes. But this is another way to, again, give the AI context that you don't necessarily have, but it can find on its own way better than you can find on your own.