Using ChatGPT to optimize YouTube content for WPwatercooler

I recently started using ChatGPT to try and optimize the YouTube content for my website, WPwatercooler. In the past, I struggled with writing descriptive text for the “in the description down below” section of my videos and found the process of creating metadata for my episodes to be tedious. I hired a YouTube consultant to provide some critiques and recommendations, but I still needed a way to make the process more efficient. That’s where ChatGPT came in.

I experimented with using ChatGPT to summarize the content of my episodes and create social media posts and YouTube chapters. While the tool wasn’t perfect and required some editing, I found it to be a helpful way to streamline the process of optimizing my YouTube content and increasing its reach. Overall, I’ve been happy with the results I’ve seen from using ChatGPT.

Editor note, the text above was generated by ChatGPT by passing the text from this blog post and using these instructions to tell it what I wanted.

Write a blog post excerpt for this post titled "Using ChatGPT to optimize YouTube content for WPwatercooler" please write it in the first person

On last friday’s episode of WPwatercooler EP440 – Year in review and forward at 2023 Sé Reed mentioned ChatGPT on the show and it got me thinking about using ChatGPT to try and optimize the YouTube content of WPwatercooler. In September I hired a YouTube consultant on Fiverr to go over the videos on YouTube and provide me with some critiques and ways I can optimize for getting more quality viewers. With 10 years of content on WPwatercooler’s website and YouTube channel we have a lot of content we could optimize or revisit with optimized metadata to support the video.

One of the things that the consultant mentioned is to include some more descriptive text for the “in the description down below” and honestly I suck at that and for 2 reasons:

Writing content for an episode that didn’t happen yet

I’m not sure if you are aware but WPwatercooler episodes are thought out quite a bit before we go live. We work out a working title for the show and I do a small description to support that title. We haven’t recorded anything yet but we have any idea of what we want to talk about. Sometimes I feel like this pigeon holes us and other times I feel like the title and description are plain wrong for the content we discussed in the video. What about the video?

Writing metadata for the episode we just recorded

It’s no industry secret, we (I) don’t edit the show after we record it but I have been producing a lightly edited transcript of the show for the last few years using Descript. I feel like I’m driving a military humvee with a caravan of tanks with me to a grocery store trip when I use it, all this power and I’m over here having robots transcribe the video into text. I use ACF on WPwatercooler’s site and have a field setup for the transcription. I also uploaded that transcript to YouTube so it has a more polished version of the transcript for humans to read and laugh at less than the YouTube version. I also write up some text describing the episode replacing the preshow version with something a bit more accurate of what was talked about. Lastly I include any links and pull in the titles from the external websites so its accurate on the post too.

Making it easier with ChatGPT

The post episode write up is such a chore and this is where ChatGPT comes into play.

Using the transcription from my YouTube video I provided above please write a summary of the discussion that I can use on YouTube as the description text

I asked ChatGTP to write a summary of this episode EP440 – Year in review and forward at 2023 where Sé, Cosper and jumped between topics so fast it was hard to keep up with what was said and with some editing I came up with this:

I then read through the transcript and selected the part of it that I wanted it to focus on then wrote this for the description text for YouTube

On this episode of WPwatercooler lots of topics were discussed looking back at 2022 and what’s to come in 2023. Topics include the use of artificial intelligence in WordPress, Sé and crew launching the WP Community Collective, the possibility of a rewrite of the Media Library, the implementation of collaborative editing in WordPress, and the future of the WordPress mobile app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiaikFIUw8g

One thing ChatGPT can’t deal with is a lot of text pasted in the query window. So what I did was take 10 minutes of the 30 miniute show and pasted that text into the query window and asked it to summarize that. Then did this for the other 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes then asked it to summarize all of the content.

I then wanted to highlight some of the part of the transcript for each of the subtopics we discussed, one of which was a “word” that Sé was looking for us to focus on for 2023. Providing the raw transcript with and asking it to summarize it was able to come up with something close to this with some edits by me:

Sé Reed asked the panel what is their word for tech in the new year.

Sé mentioned impact which means to her smart operating in terms of working on things that have “the most bang for your buck”

Jason Tucker’s word is cloud, at his work he’s looking to move to more cloud services and personally wants to try to use more cloud automation services in his day-to-day life.

Jason Cosper’s is carry on. He wants to look further into ownership and control over the things he creates and the use of certain platforms, such as Twitter. not having a focus on making money, but rather wanting to have control over the distribution and use of the things he creates. Cosper wants to be less dependent on someone else’s infrastructure, owning his own part of a social media platform such as sites that are federated like Mastodon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiaikFIUw8g&t=295s

What else can it do- A Social Post?!?

Now that I have the content from the show in text form into ChatGPT I can ask it do a bunch of stuff with it. One I was toying with was creating a social media post for the episode, here is one for twitter:

Please write a tweet i can post on twitter promoting this podcast using these show notes for reference:

On this episode of WPwatercooler lots of topics were discussed looking back at 2022 and what's to come in 2023. Topics include the use of artificial intelligence in WordPress, Sé and crew launching the WP Community Collective, the possibility of a rewrite of the Media Library, the implementation of collaborative editing in WordPress, and the future of the WordPress mobile app.

Sé Reed asked the panel what is their word for tech in the new year.

Sé mentioned impact which means to her smart operating in terms of working on things that have "the most bang for your buck"
Jason Tucker's word is cloud, at his work he's looking to move to more cloud services and personally wants to try to use more cloud automation services in his day-to-day life.
Jason Cosper is carry on. He wants to look further into ownership and control over the things he creates and the use of certain platforms, such as Twitter. not having a focus on making money, but rather wanting to have control over the distribution and use of the things he creates. Cosper wants to be less dependent on someone else's infrastructure, owning his own part of a social media platform such as sites that are federated like Mastodon.
Both Jasons would love to work on their show The Query and get that off the ground soon.

The discussion turned to the present and future and Sé began discussing her use of an artificial intelligence tool called Chat GPT for various tasks, such as generating content for websites, optimizing code, and writing blog posts. She mentioned that Cosper should use the tool to rewrite his speaker bio. Sé has used it to rewrite code, and express excitement about using artificial intelligence as a tool.

Launch of The WP Community Collective and the episode EP437 - Funding the Dream with the WP Community Collective.

Sé was appointed Team Rep for the Marketing Team

Jason brought up if the Media Library will get a rewrite and the group chimed in on some of the features they wanted including taxonomy, detecting and combining duplicate images, and tags. They mention the possibility of using artificial intelligence to classify and tag photos and mention the 10UP Classify plugin that leverages Microsoft's cloud AI for this purpose. The panel also discussed the possibility of bringing this functionality into WordPress core, possibly through Jet Pack or another plugin.

The panel changed subjects and focused on discussing the possibility of WordPress implementing collaborative editing in 2023. They mention that this may require the use of web RTC or other backend connections, and may not be feasible for users on certain hosting plans. They also mention that there are plans for significant changes to the WordPress site, including an overhaul of the support forums and documentation, as well as the ability to use the Gutenberg block editor in descriptions for plugins. They mention that there have been some issues with the implementation of the block editor and that there is a reliance on the Blocks Everywhere plugin from Automatic.

Lastly, the panel discussed the WordPress mobile app may be neglected now that Jetpack has separated. They believe that the mobile app should be a good and functional app, and they believe that people with mobile app skills could make a significant impact on WordPress as a whole. The speaker also mentions that they have not personally used the WordPress mobile app without Jetpack, and they encourage others to try it. The speaker also states that they are not anti-Automatic (the company behind WordPress), but they believe that the mobile app should not be neglected.

“Just listened to the latest episode of the WPwatercooler podcast – so much great discussion on the future of WordPress and AI! They talked about the use of AI in optimizing code and generating content, the possibility of a Media Library rewrite using AI, and the potential for collaborative editing in WordPress. Plus, they touched on the future of the WordPress mobile app and the launch of the WP Community Collective. Don’t miss it! #WordPress #AI #podcast”

It’s awesome that with the text I have had ChatGPT generate I can use that resulting output as an input for another task such as making a social media post and it even included hashtags and a CTA of sorts at the end.

YouTube chapters from a transcript with timecodes

With most transcript services you can request them to be subtitles or have timecodes allowing you to do some fun stuff with them and ChatGPT.

I took about 10 minutes or content and pasted it into Chat CPT and then did that 2 more times so I had all 30 minutes of it in there. My transcript has the time code at the beginning of the transcript per line so it’s easy to see what was being said for that timeframe. I then asked ChatGTP to generate chapters from the timecode and here is what happened

Please provide time code youtube chapters formatted for YouTube including timecode using the transcript provided 

00:00 – Intro
04:55 – What’s your word for the year?
11:58 – About Launch of Query
14:02 – Sé on using Chat GPT
19:34 – Sé Reed’s goals for Marketing team of WordPress
22:43 – Necessity of media library rewrite
25:49 – Collaborative editing
28:39 – Mobile app
30:20 – Wrap up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiaikFIUw8g

If it doesn’t do it the first time edit your query and ask it a different way. I got different results depending on how I structured the request.

SEO Keywords

I went a bit deeper and asked it to generate long tail keywords for YouTube for another episode we did State of the Word 2022 and those keywords worked out well with some modifications by me

based on this content can you provide me with SEO keywords for YouTube?

And because I’m lazy I also asked it the following:

Simplify this list to comma separated values

and it will give it to you with commas so you can copy and paste it into YouTube much easier.

What have you used ChatCPT for?

I’m looking for other ways to use ChatGPT to help us with content creation. For now it’s doing A/B tests with titles and descriptions as well as keywords for WPwatercooler episodes. I’m looking for more ideas, let me know in the comments before on on social media.