I turn one YouTube video into 44 Shorts, Reels, and TikToks

Hey guys, hope you're well. Been a little while since I got to publish any kind of automation or workflow related stuff. Mostly I've been putting out OnlyFans content, so I wanted to share a content repurposing automation that I built out. I've been using this on my own YouTube channel to automatically cut down videos into shorts and then republishing them automatically onto YouTube Shorts, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram Reels and so on.

First off I'll start off by sharing a little plugin that we actually built out ourselves that will automatically try to generate shorts for you. If you just provide a long-form video like a YouTube link, it will try to grab the highlights automatically for you. So you can go and just plug in any video URL. Before I was doing this manually, which is fine, but I was trying to optimize the process for me a little bit. Of course if you do it manually you can get exactly what you want, but it just takes a ton of time.

Instead I can literally just add a link. It's going to take a couple of minutes to run through. It has to extract the whole video, then it has to understand all of the text, but it will generate about 30 to 40 short clips I can just download at the click of a button. Then I can just go ahead and republish them, or I can make any edits I want to them. This works really well on long-form content. You can see a few that I've done already. These are both my videos. That one I input, it's a 20 minute video and it generated like 44 shorts.

That's currently being processed and pending. If I come in here I can come in and view the shorts. These are transcribed. It gives me the subtitles and the AI tries to understand what is the subject that I'm talking about. These are all social networking. This is talking about OnlyFans — it actually misunderstood there — but in all of these cases it understands that I'm talking about Instagram. Here it understands I'm talking about content and video production. So it's really quite good. I can literally just click download. That's going to download the MP4 which will give me the short form and I can go ahead and just upload that straight away.

It depends on how much involvement you want in it. The way that I actually do it is I will come in here, I will add in subtitles. Here we can do dynamic text. We'll make that blue. This is a tool called Descript. Descript is just going to go ahead and I want to change the format, I want portrait mode. I just quite like the animation of Descript, it's really quite clean. Then I can just go and highlight all of this text, just click share, export as video, and I've got a YouTube Short done with subtitles and it looks pretty professional. That took me like, what, two minutes to do. You could easily assign this to a VA or just do it yourself.

Basically I will skim through the text here just to understand the subject that I'm talking about, download the videos. Perhaps there's going to be a few here that I'm not interested in at all. For example I noticed it picked up the welcome. I'm not going to make a YouTube Short out of that. Otherwise most of the other ones are pretty good. I'll download them, turn them into shorts, and then I will put them into a tool called Repurpose.io.

This is really quite interesting actually. You can build out automations for publishing on multiple different social media platforms. You connect all of your accounts once. So I've got a secondary YouTube channel and Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn connected. All I will do is whenever I put a short into Google Drive it will automatically be posted on these platforms. This is in beta and early stages, so I actually had to build an automation here that moves each video over every three hours just to make sure that there's no delays built in here, which seems quite basic to me but they haven't built it in. Anyway I just built an automation very quickly. This will publish one video every three hours into the Google Drive folder that Repurpose is listening to, and then they will go ahead and publish it onto YouTube Shorts, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn.

So in that two minutes it took me to create that short video I can go ahead and publish that onto five different platforms. Perhaps anyone who follows me on Instagram has noticed the sheer number of shorts I've been publishing recently. It's because I've been playing around and testing out these automations. But the results have actually really been quite good on YouTube as well. YouTube is very hard to get subscribers on in the early stages. It's really very slow. And on an account that's got zero — well now it's got seven subscribers — I picked up 2,300 views in the past seven days off of about one hour worth of work, which is actually great. I was very happy with that. Plus I've also done TikTok. Some of them are getting like 15,000 views. And this is just off content that I've already made. It's literally just being republished onto these platforms. It's a completely missed opportunity if you're not doing so.

So yeah, I'm going through the process of plugging in all of my videos. In fact I'm going to hire a virtual assistant to do this. Plugging all the videos in, downloading all of the shorts, putting them into Descript, adding the subtitles on there, putting them into Google Drive, and then Repurpose handles publishing them onto all of these different platforms essentially. Yeah, that is that workflow that's working pretty well for me. That could also work with any other form of long-form video content that you've made. Just plug it into the software, it will try to pick out the most interesting parts, and then just go.