Turning Blogs into Videos: The WHY
At its core, the idea is simple yet remarkably effective: transforming your written blogs into videos involves repurposing your existing content into visually appealing video formats. This process retains the essence of your written material while adding a dynamic and engaging visual layer. The video format allows you to convey information through a combination of visuals, animations, graphics, and narration, providing a multi-sensory experience to your audience, which stands a better chance of holding their attention and setting up rent-space in their minds.
Enhanced Engagement
Videos offer a unique advantage in capturing and retaining audience attention. The blend of visuals, audio, and motion creates an immersive experience that is difficult to replicate with text alone. By adapting your written blogs into videos, you provide your audience with an engaging format that can resonate more deeply, leading to increased time spent on your content and a higher likelihood of sharing.
Expanded Reach
The popularity of video content across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram is undeniable. By converting your written blogs into videos, you tap into a broader audience base that prefers consuming information in video form. This expansion of your reach can introduce your content to new followers, subscribers, and viewers who might not have engaged with your written blogs.
Visual Explanations
Certain concepts and ideas can be complex to explain through text alone. Videos enable you to visually demonstrate processes, concepts, or tutorials, making it easier for your audience to grasp the information you’re conveying. Visual explanations not only enhance understanding but also foster a stronger connection between you and your audience.
SEO Benefits of Turning Blogs into Videos
Search engines value diverse content formats. By incorporating videos into your content strategy, you can enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Videos hosted on platforms like YouTube, which is owned by Google, can contribute to improved search visibility. This means your content has a better chance of being discovered by users searching for relevant topics.
Social Media Appeal
Social media thrives on visual content that captures attention within seconds. Videos are inherently shareable and are more likely to be shared, commented on, and engaged with on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Converting your written blogs into video snippets tailored for social media can help you create a buzz around your content and drive traffic back to your main platforms.
Turning Blogs into Videos: The HOW
The process of transforming your written blogs into videos involves several key steps:
- 1. Content Selection: Choose blog posts that have performed well or cover evergreen topics with lasting relevance.
- 2. Script Creation: Craft a compelling script that condenses the main points of your blog while allowing room for visuals and narration.
- 3. Visual Storyboarding: Create a visual storyboard outlining the scenes, animations, and graphics that will complement your narration.
- 4. Narration and Voiceover: Record a clear and engaging narration that aligns with the tone of your content.
- 5. Visual Production: Utilize video editing tools to combine visuals, animations, and the narration into a seamless video.
- 6. Optimization: Ensure the video is of high quality, paying attention to visuals, audio, and overall presentation.
- 7. Distribution: Publish your video on platforms such as YouTube, social media channels, and your website to maximize its reach.
AI Tools: Turn Blogs into Videos
These tools utilize AI algorithms to automatically generate video content from your blog posts, making the process efficient and user-friendly. It’s recommended to explore the features and capabilities of each tool to determine which one best fits your needs and preferences.
- Synthesia offers an AI-powered script generator that can transform transform your blogs into videos. You can either use their built-in AI script generator or write your own script to create engaging videos without the need for advanced video editing skills.
- Lumen5 is a beginner-friendly tool that converts blog content into videos. It offers customizable templates, AI-driven text-to-speech technology, and the ability to add visuals and animations to create engaging videos.
- Steve.AI‘s AI-powered technology repurposes existing articles and blog posts into videos. Their video editor takes your raw content and transforms it into professional-looking videos either with stock footage or animation.
- Fliki provides an AI-driven solution to convert blog articles into engaging videos. You can choose an AI voice from over 800 neural voices, select the language and dialect, and easily create videos in just a few steps.
- Elai.io’s blog-to-video technology helps you turn blog posts into videos quickly. It offers templates, presenters, and a simple rendering process, allowing you to create videos from your blog content in less than 5 minutes.
- Pictory.ai is a tool that aims to simplify video marketing by helping you convert your blog content into videos. It offers features for bloggers and YouTube creators to easily create videos without needing advanced video editing skills. It allows you to convert blog content into videos, add music and voice-overs, choose video themes, and more.
- D-ID’s Digital People Text-to-Video technology, which empowers users to create dynamic and lifelike avatars that deliver messages in a compelling manner. By simply entering text, users can generate videos where the avatars speak and interact, providing an immersive experience for viewers.
- VEED.IO offers AI tools for converting written blog posts into videos. It includes text-to-speech capabilities, allowing you to convert your written content into voiceovers. You can also add video clips to enhance your video content. VEED.IO also offers text-to-speech conversion and the ability to incorporate video clips to create engaging videos from written content.
- HeyGen is a tool that provides article-to-video conversion services. It helps you turn your blog posts into videos with voice-overs. The tool allows you to determine which content will appear as text and as a voice-over in your video. HeyGen helps you transform blog posts into videos by adding voice-overs to your content.
- FlexClip is another online tool that allows you to easily convert your written blog posts into videos. It offers a simple process to transform your content into engaging videos, suitable for various platforms.
Turning Blogs into Videos: Doin’ it My Way
As you can see from the above list, there are certainly tools out there to get you on your way to creating a video from your blog in a fraction of the time it would take to build it from scratch. But I have yet to try a tool that still didn’t require a bit of lift to modify, edit, and customize the output before the final video gets rendered. Many of these tools will generate voiceover scripts, adding images from your blog and amplifying them with stock content from their libraries. With services like Synthesia, D-ID, Elai.io and HeyGen, you are even be able to add in AI presenters who contribute a “face” to your faceless video content. These tools are all worth exploring, and depending on your needs.
Additionally, here’s a way I like to produce my blog videos using some of my favorite AI go-tos. The general process is the same: choose the right content first. Blogs that are How To’s or listicles often make for good written-to-video conversions. But instead of trying to adapt to a new learning curve every time you need to execute a new task, my first stop is ye ol’faithful: ChatGPT.
The Script:
ChatGPT
I’m going to do this in a very meta way. I’m going to create a video about a blog that’s about creating a video from a blog…. I think I wrote that right. Here is a useful prompt to feed to Chat:
Paraphrase this text into an engaging short form video script. Make sure to keep the most important points intact, but make it as concise as possible due to the time constraints: [paste your blog text here].
Once chat generates the script, be sure to edit the output down to just the dialogue bits. If Chat gets a little too inspired in its language, you can prompt it to “revise for a temperature of .1” and that should take the flowery bits down a notch.
Chat also likes to add stage direction sometimes, helpful when building storyboards but not for generating a voiceover unless you want your narration to read the words: Exit, stage left. Of course, it is always best practice to add your own substance to anything you generate from AI. I love these robots, but they do have their nuances that can hinder your end results if gone unchecked–certain turns of phrase, occasional hallucinations, etc. Always be sure to vet and edit your content and to add that human touch. Remember the Golden Rule: AI is you assistant, not your replacement. The Terminators aren’t out of the gate yet.
HARPA.AI
An alternative method to generate your script is to use HARPA AI. HARPA is a Chrome extension tool linked to ChatGPT with plenty of functionality built in. One of which is its video script writer. While both HARPA and the free version of Chat are limited to 2021 in terms of their learning, HARPA does have page-aware functionality. In generating your script, instead of prompting HARPA blindly, navigate to the page you want to generate from, launch the HARPA extension, prompt for /video script writer and select “page-text.” Then follow HARPA’s inquiries and watch it produce an outline. If you’re happy with the outline, you can ask HARPA to write the script.
As with any AI tool, you are not married to your immediate results. Mix and match, revise and re-prompt. Carve out your content until you’re satisfied with your script. And then proceed to the next step.
The Voiceover: ElevenLabs
Once you have your dialogue script, head over to ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs is one of the leaders right now in speech synthesis. You can choose from a variety of accents and languages, and unlike some of their competitors, ElevenLabs has a real ability to convey emotion in the voice output. There are stabilizer settings to assist with this, and you can prompt the voice in the text to generate certain emotions. But the tool intuitively understands based on the context of the words how to read your dialogue. For instance, if you want excitement, including something like “Says excitedly” before your text will help ElevenLabs get you there. (And then you clip that part out in post production.)
The Storyboard: Filmora 12
I use Filmora 12 for video editing. It’s a great tool that is adding more and more AI functionality with each update. You can also edit in Adobe Premier, DaVinci or any other video editing software. Here’s where the most time-consuming part comes into play, and this might be where you have the most success using one of the above tools like Pictory.ai, Steve.AI, Lumen5, Fliki or Elai.io, which will automate your visuals based on your script.
A program like Filmora 12 comes with a library of stock image and video assets you can plug and play. If you already have your own visuals, images from your blog, screen recordings, etc, that makes things easier. There are, however, plenty of AI image generators or video generators to help you create your content. If you need ideas for how depict your script, return to Chat’s generated stage instructions and see where it leads you.
Next, add your ElevenLabs audio track to your project and then mix and match your visuals to pair with the narration. You can add animations and effects depending on your editing program, and background music if you so desire. (If you need to generate music, we’ve got you there too.)
The Captions: Filmora 12
A whopping 75% of video-viewing consumers watch online videos with their phones on mute, so if your design is to impart insights and information with your blog video, you stand the risk of losing 75% of your audience if you don’t include captions. In Filmora 12, I can generate captions in my project as I’m working. Other programs like VEED will add captions after the fact, or generate SRT files you can upload in a social media platform.
Once you have all these elements refined to your liking, you’re ready to finish your video and upload it to the masses. Use it as short form content on social platforms, a way to drive traffic back to your blog, or to increase time on page by embedding it in the blog itself. If you’re of the advertising sort, you can use the video or the highlights from the video (check out Opus Clip, no really) as video ads on Facebook, Google, Insta, TikTok and any of their friends. Go ahead. Go to town.
The Who, When, and Where of Turning Blogs into videos
The Who: Content Creators and Businesses
So whether you’re an individual content creator or a business looking to connect with your audience, the strategy of converting written content into videos can work wonders. It’s especially beneficial for those aiming to diversify their content and appeal to a wider audience demographic.
The When: The Time Is Now
The digital landscape continues to evolve, and the demand for video content remains strong. Embracing this transition sooner rather than later can give you a competitive edge and position you as an early adopter in your niche. Turning your blogs into videos is an ideal way to do this.
The Where: Platform Diversity
Videos have a home across various platforms, from YouTube and social media to your own website or blog. Tailor your video content to suit the platform’s audience and preferences, maximizing engagement and sharing potential.
Closing Thoughts: Do What Works for You
Converting your written blogs into videos is a strategic move that aligns perfectly with the modern content consumption landscape. By embracing the 5W1H approach—understanding the What, Why, How, Who, When, and Where—you unlock a myriad of benefits, from increased engagement and reach to improved SEO and social media traction.
There are a myriad of AI tools that can help you automate and expedite the process of turning blogs into videos. And while we’re not quite yet at the point where the immediate output will be perfectly-ready-to-publish the minute the AI spits it out, I think we will probably get there eventually. For now, pick the process that works for you and is best for your results.
Now is the time to leverage the power of video and transform your content creation efforts into a dynamic, visually appealing experience for your audience.