5 brilliant ways to use your YouTube show transcripts

If you think making short clips is all you can do with your YouTube show or podcast, think again. If you’re just starting out as a creator or host, you’re probably totally focused on finding guests and nailing your setup. 

But before you know it, you’re going to be sitting on an amazing library of unique content. You should have some smart ways to use not only the videos you put so much time into, but also the written content you can get out of each episode.

I’m going to organize these 5 ideas from smallest to largest in terms of the amount of content you use. Each step is a building block for the next.

This creates a logical system to build both frequency and depth of your show promo content. 

Let’s get started.

1. Post those amazing one-liners

Even if it’s just you on the show, you’ll have one or two or dozens of moments of clarity and brilliant thought in each episode. I like to save these as I’m editing — you’re right in the moment, watching and re-watching sections as you slice together each episode. 

It’s the perfect time to stash away those perfect quotations. Here’s my advice:

• Start a system early — use your note-taking app of choice or even a spreadsheet and add topical tags to group quotes from different shows over time.

• Put them on blast on social media — you don’t have to wait til the show is released to build hype. You can start sharing on X or slap up a story as soon as you finish recording. If you have guests, they’re likely to re-share whatever you tag them in and appreciate you sharing their words.

• Highlight trendy hot takes — the web moves fast, so even if you talk about something super current in the show — it might be collectively forgotten by the time you edit and release the full show. You can capture momentary engagement by publishing that hot take right now.

• Create a visualization system — make re-usable templates that match your branding in Figma or Canva so you can quickly create and post your quotes. Here’s a setup to get you started in Figma.

2. Craft totally swipeable carousels

A lot of the above applies here, just extend the idea and workflow out to multiple slides and a bit more context around the topic.

If you have an interview style show, you can start by simply making a carousel with a question as the first card and craft the guest’s answer transcript into 2-50 more slides — you’ve seen 50+ slide carousels on LinkedIn haven’t you 🤪

The design templates you’ve made above can be quickly adapted to use here to save you time. Just like a good YouTube video intro, the first slide + first few lines of the post are the scroll-stoppers. If you’re focused on Linkedin, check out our friend Luliia’s amazing tool and template site Postli.co for inspiration. 

Once you have a few episodes in the bank, you can start combining content from different perspectives on the same topic.

If you’re on X and don’t pay for premium, you can make threads instead of carousels — just use the first slide in the first post as a visual hook.

By now, you’ve got written content chunked into single quotes and longer topic-focused sections. BUT before we go further…

Warning: don’t go too broad too soon

It’s tempting to spend time crafting and re-crafting the written word into dozens of formats for every platform. But find your balance between consistent output leading to traction and keeping an experimental mindset.

You already have a YouTube show — which means you probably have shorts to publish and probably a TikTok on the side. 

With the transcript content, if you find your ideal viewer on Linkedin with Quotes and Carousels — then that might be enough for 3-6 months or even years of growth.

Don’t chase X or Insta or [insert platform here] just because you have the content. Go where your listeners engage and convert and put your effort there.

3. Expand to long-form content

At this point, a ton of diverging paths open for you — newsletters, blog posts on your site, viral Reddit rants, Medium & LinkedIn long-form articles, guest posting — the written world is your oyster.

What path you choose depends a lot on the niche of your show and how your audience likes to read about topics in this niche. Here are some general observations:

• Medium readers love articles about productivity, creator economy, business / startups and lifestyle stories. But there’s almost nothing about sports there.

• Check keywords around your topic — if there’s decent search volume and not a lot of high domain-ranking competition, you can land readers straight to your website with blog posts.

• Collect emails from your show, social posts and website and launch a newsletter. 
  

The cool thing about pairing a YouTube show with long-form content is that you keep getting fresh material. So blog posts that get decent search traffic can be refreshed and move up the rankings, content clusters can be expanded and you won’t suffer looking at a blank page.

4. Go exclusive 

You’re already creating unique shows and sharing them for free, now the transcript content can be repackaged as gated content. You can name a price or create a Patreon paid community or simply offer it in exchange for a newsletter subscription.

Think state-of-X reports, ebooks, etc. These can be once or twice a year mini-products that may not fill up the bank account but will give you a signal of what your audience is willing to pay for (and how much.)

5. Finally, be creative

I think we’re in or entering into a golden age for writers, and especially for writers who have hours of quality insights to work with. AI tools are expanding the types and scope of what we can do with words. 

These ideas will come to you over time if you have steps 1-3 in place and operating efficiently. You’ll see trends, see what resonates with both your YouTube viewers & content readers, and simply follow your own curiosity down new avenues. 

Want to make a graphic novella, pull together a directory, print a daily calendar of quotes, or make memes? Go nuts.

Play to your strengths — if you’re the type who will set a goal to write a post every week for a year and that drives you to stick to it. That’s awesome. Some folks will burn out on writing along that schedule and need to change things up.