Content creation is definitely one of the most difficult parts of growing a website.
According to a research by the Content Marketing Institute, content creation is the top challenge of online marketers.
When you start a new site, you have 2 options: write the content yourself and invest a lot of your hours into research and writing, or outsource it and invest a lot of money.
How much money you pay to a writer depends mainly on the complexity of the content. The more specialized content, the more you have to pay.
For general info content or content where you provide most of the data, you can pay significantly less.
According to a survey by ClearVoice, a leading content marketing company, here’s what freelacne writers charge for content creation.
Let’s assume you hire a slightly experienced writer to create general info content for your site.
The average price for a decently written 1000 word article is $20-$30. At 100 articles written over the long-run and that’s $2000-$3000 spent just on content.
It’s expensive, but then again if we were to write it ourselves, a 1000 word article might take us anywhere between 2-5 hours to research, write, edit, and publish. It’s a huge investment of our time.
Today, I’m going to show you a content creation method that’s working amazingly well for me. It takes me less than half the time to publish them, and requires half the amount of research per article.
Create Content By Curating YouTube Videos
You know YouTube as the world’s biggest video streaming website. But it’s also the second largest search engine on the web.
Every day, people around the world collectively spend more than 1 billion hours consuming content on YouTube.
Every minute, more than 500 hours of new video content is uploaded to YouTube.
That’s a lot of fresh, unique, well-researched content we can simply use to create content for our blogs.
What we’re going to do is find these videos, embed them on our site, and then write about them. We’re curating videos through YouTube and using them as the subject of our articles.
This will benefit you in two ways.
- The video creator has already done all the research on the topic. You just need to use it to create a weritten piece of content for your site.
- Embedding videos on on your blog will also help you increase the average time a user spends on your site. This has a direct impact on several website performance metrics, reduces your site’s bounce rates, drive more clicks to your internal links, and ultimately improves your site’s rankings and revenue.
This is so much easier than going out and doing all of the research yourself from scratch.
Instead of spending hours researching and compiling resources to write your articles on, you use one source (the video) and simply summarize the main points.
The video creators have done the research for you.
I have niche sites where 90% of the content was created using YouTube curation.
It’s such an easy way to produce high quality articles.
Let’s Go Through An Example
I’ll show you step by step how I create content with YouTube curation.
Step 1: Search For Videos In Your Niche
For our example, we’ll use home improvement as our niche.
Now imagine that we’re going to write a tutorial on something like how to replace a kitchen cabinet.
If you were to write this completely on your own from scratch, you would have to do a fair bit of research digging through various sources online.
Then you would have to decide what sub-topics will form your content body and what information you will expand upon.
After you’re done, you’ll have to go out find some stock images to spark up your content.
Let’s see how much easier this can be with YouTube curation.
Let’s check out what YouTube has to offer.
Okay, so doing a search for “home improvement” on YouTube brought back a bunch of results with clips from the old TV show with Tim Allen.
Not what we’re looking for here, so let’s adjust our search.
I decided to add DIY at the end of the search and that brought back some better results.
Awesome. That’s a giant list of content ideas for our niche site!
Just by skimming through the results, we can see that there are hundreds of videos that we can use.
The opportunities are endless. With all the related searches you can make and all the suggest videos in the sidebar, you have an overwhelming amount of content ideas for your site.
Let’s choose one from the list.
I choose the videos that are the most relevant to my niche and also have a lot of views.
To do tht, sort your YouTube search results by view count to see the most popular videos.
I rarely do separate keyword research when writing articles through YouTube curation. I don’t care if it says 0 searches in the Keyword Planner.
It’s clearly a topic that’s perfect for my niche site’s audience, and one that’s getting a lot of good reviews on YouTube.
The 4th one down only has 6000 views, but it was posted only a month ago and it has great reviews with no downvotes.
The video is only 4 and a half minutes long, but a minute into it and I can tell this is going to turn into a 1000+ word article.
Using The YouTube Video To Write An Article
Optimizing The Article Headline
The first thing we’re going to do is re-write the title into one that’s a little simpler and more search engine friendly.
YouTube’s Title:
Building Simple Box Columns – DIY Front Porch Home Improvement!
Our Revised Title:
How to Renovate Your Front Porch By Building Simple Box Columns – A Tutorial
I left only the main keywords in while targeting other essential keywords like “tutorial,” “renovate,” and “build” which are more likely to be used in a search query.
Creating An Outline And Extracting The Main Points
The best part about YouTube curation is that we don’t have to sit there and come up with a rough outline for our article. That’s one of the most dreadful parts of the writing process: figuring out what to write about.
Here, we already know what we’re going to write about: whatever’s being explained in the video.
For our home improvement video, we’ll watch the video and list out all the required equipment and supplies. Then, we’ll list out step by step the process of fixing these porch columns.
Don’t forget to see the comments on the video. Most YouTube video comments are crap from a content creation perspective. However, the popular videos that describe different products or ste by step guidelines often have comments full of questions, feedback, and other valuable content.
Study the commetns on your video and see if there are any pints that you can include and answer in your article. It will make your content much more valueble for the readers.
For example, I opened a popular video about DIY kit hen improvements and scrolled through the commetns section.
Look at the comments in the screenshot below.
All three comments have feedback or question that I can include in my article and make it more valuable than the video.
It hardly took me 2 minutes to find these comments. You can find dozens of them if you spend 30 minutes on this activity and should give you tons of material to induce in your article.
Turning The Video Into A Proper Article
You need to make sure that your article doesnt sound like the transcript of the video you’ve embedded.
You need to format it properly like a blog article to get the maximum value from it.
Dont’ worry, it’s quite easy. Just follow these steps
- Write a proper introduction of your article that’s different from the video.
- Write in a coversationa tone using I, You, & Me frequently.
- You can reference the video in your content but don’t write as if you’re in the video.
- If the video has step by step instructions on doing something, turn them into a bulleted list or if its a long process write it under several sub-headings.
- Use screenshots and images wherever necessary to make your article more engaging.
- If the video mentions any stats or research, try finding the original source and link to it in your article.
- Don’t limit your content to just the video, try expanding on the points and make them more comprehensive. Your article should add more value to the video and not just rephrase what it says.
You should be able to pour out 500 words easy doing just that.
This method of content creation is a HUGE timesaver, and allows you to crank out high quality articles in less than half the time you normally would.
On top of that, it shows you what people are actually interested in using metrics other than a keyword tool.
View count and up-votes are a pretty awesome indicator to tell you what’s popular and what’s not.
If you’re stumbling with your content creation, give YouTube curation a try.
Thank you for this comprehensive article on YouTube curation. I hadn’t thought of using video for niche research!!!
Thanks, Hugh. Yeah, it’s been a big time saver for me to produce content like this. Glad that it helped.
That is a completely brilliant strategy! Curating content from anywhere is a ton of work, but taking a 4 1/2 minute video and writing what they say is genius. Thanks for the post. Just signed up to follow your site.
Awesome! Thanks, Bill.
Good tips Chris. This does take the pressure off of a new writer from coming up with fresh content ideas, which I think stops them from even trying. The other thing is as you do more of this you will get your own system in place which speeds up the process even more. Doing one of these a week, and then promoting your new post for the other 6 days, will give you a lot of backlinks, improved rankings with Google, and increased traffic.
Thanks, Jeff. Great point about spending more time on promoting than creating.
You’re right, once you do this a few times, it becomes a lot easier to spot the main points and decide which areas to expand on.
Hey Chris, I’m the author of a WordPress plugin that can automatically pull in videos from YouTube and other video sites for you to curate. Was wondering if you would check it out? Cheers.
Looks cool, I can see it being useful for other types of content, but the type of curation I talk about here requires manually searching for videos. Auto blogging would defeat the purpose of the whole method.
Hi Chris,
Are you using this strategy on your main content site which earns you 75% of your income? What percentage of your posts on that site use this strategy?
Hey David, I haven’t been doing this strategy much on my main niche site.
Coincidence! My wife told me about this curation, and here I am on your website searching about it. I don’t like writing article at all, but this process should ease out everything for me.
Coincidence indeed 🙂
Hi Chris,
Is it okay to curate videos from anywhere and post it on your site ? Will there be copyright issues? When a video on your site is clicked (and there are ads in the video itself) who gets the adsense earnings, you or the one who uploaded the video? I’m new to this online marketing thing and hope you don’t mind my asking. I have a website myself but its low traffic at the moment.
If they have embed enabled that’s giving permission for people to embed the videos.
If any ads show up inside the video player, that’s for the video creator.
Thanks very much Chris.
No problem, Robert 🙂
Maybe it’s time for me to start again. Thanks mann
Hello Chris, and thanks for this great tip.
When using video curation plus some text, there will be 3 items in the post, the video. the text, and the Adsense Ad.
Question: in what order do you recommend to place theme?
Options:
(A)
Video
Ad
Text
(B)
Text
Ad
Video
(C)
Ad
Video
Text
(D)
Ad
Text
Video
Thank you very much in advance for your replay 🙂
Hey J, I normally put the video at the end and treat the ad placements like a normal post.
Fantastic post Chris… Really innovative idea…
Just a query… How it would be if we do the video curation and post the curated text only on our niche site without embedding the video?
Thanks
Thanks, San 🙂
You could do that, but I don’t really see the point in doing that. Having the video there makes your content make more sense.
Great idea Chris. I tried this recently and paid someone on Fiverr to transcribe a 8 minute YouTube video. With a bit of editing on my part, I got a unique 2000 word article for $5.
Nice!
Chris,
This is an awesome idea! I can’t wait to give it a try!
Cool, thanks Wylie. Let me know how it goes for you.
Hi Chris. i am a first time visitor.curation from you tube is a very creative idea from you.
Thanks man!
Actually i had tried to use Google web voice recognition which is free combining with voicemeter which also free to Transcribe videos.Though its pretty accurate but the pitfall is usually very short article. bout 500 words.
So whats your 2 cents on this?
By the way i just learnt 2 tips from you Chris.
Searches null is not that important because 6000 views within a month means demand for the keyword is there.
Second, add screen shots. Cooool idea
Oh can i contribute a bit here?
If monthly searches for your keyword is null or 10 20 very low volume, but you think its a good keyword to generate useful content for your audience, then visit you tube like your example above,tweak it a bit then see the number of views and whether its recent or not.
Amazon suggestion is also a clue if your long tail keyword appears but no searches in GKP.
Thanks Chris.
Thanks Jeff. Yeah, the key is to not to transcribe the video but use it for research purposes so you can write out the content in your own words.
This is a really, really good idea. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful 🙂
Hi Chris, I just wanted to ask – do you recommend putting the video before the article or the other way round?
Hey Sasha, it doesn’t really matter. I prefer to put it after though.
I love the content idea posts. This is a good strategy that I have used for a while, It also works really well with slideshare and visual.ly as they both have easy embed links too. Hard to find good slide shares but the infographics at visually are always a hit.
Definitely! Thanks for adding that, Troy 🙂
Good read Chris, actually Jake from NichePursuit just recommended you. I like your mention about “investment of our time” as it’s really important. I spent so much time writing, linking, building etc, you name it, and all that on my own. But then I realised that I have to outsource small jobs to Upwork guys and focus on a strategy, and it is absolutely different way of work. Most online marketers tell you that you should treat your website like a business and every business needs investments and professional people involved. So time is the most valuable asset what we have and I prefer now spend $20-$30 on an article than spend 2-5 hours or a day writing myself.
So true, Roman! Content creation consumes the most time. Great to hear you’ve started outsourcing and can now focus on more important tasks.
This is a great tip, Chris.
Upvotes and views are an amazing social proof whether a particular topic works or not. Converting a great amazing video to a blog post is a great idea as many video bloggers create videos about popular topics but never write about those….
Cheers!
Definitely 🙂
Hi Chris
Thank you for a really good idea and I would like to say that comment from Frank above is also brilliant which is paid someone on Fiverr to transcribe a video for $5, edit some of it and publish unique 2000 word article.
Great post & I look forward to your next post.
Imer
Thanks Imer!
Hi Chris, Thanks for this very informative article. I love the strategy and will be using it. I am now beginning to focus on driving traffic to my site in a big way. I have decided to incorporate Adsense into my site’s monetization plan and am so glad I found your site. I will be visiting often for new tips and strategies to get my site to $10k per month in passive income by the end of 2017.
Thanks Michelle. Great to hear that 🙂
Hi Chris,
You mention you don’t care about the monthly search of the keyword, but how about the difficulty of a keyword to rank for.
In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. If it’s helpful content that you should have on your site, then the difficulty shouldn’t stop you from creating it.
Thanks for checking it out Kay!
Hey Chris
Just a quick one. On all my posts, I tend to follow the conventional idea of an image at the top, then content.
For adsense sites, do you tend to do this, or just keep the title and above the fold area of the page clear, ready for the ad.
I just curated a YT video, enjoyed doing it actually. I put the video at the bottom, created a featured image but didn’t add it to the top of the page.
I often thing that walls of text aren’t great. I could add an image a little further down.
Also, on another note, for this article there was a good opportunity to add some amazon products. I assume that mixing amazon with adsense doesn’t throw up any issues?
Cheers
Steve
I usually put the image within the article and not at the top. I try to keep the ad in the top, anywhere around the first paragraph.
Good,, I started curating content on the web but it gives me headaches,,,
Maybe i should try your way.
Thanks.
Hope it helps 🙂
Hi Chris, can I embed nursery rhymes’ videos from youtube on my app for school children?