I wrote before about not wasting content that you’re creating as you answer questions or interact on communities like Twitter, Bluesky, Discord or Slack.
One great source of content for your newsletter or blog is podcasts or livestreams that you are on. Here’s how I’d do that with an example podcast interview I did a few months ago.
First you need to transcribe it. Most podcasts and livestreams are posted to youtube, and my go to tool there is youtubetranscript.com. Here’s the transcript of the interview. I know people who are happy with Descript and I’m sure there are other solutions out there.
Most podcasts are a wide ranging conversations with multiple possible newsletters or posts contained within them. Sorting out these topic areas is a great use case for AI.
Paste the transcript text into Claude.ai and ask for topic grouping as well as verbatim text for the beginning of each of the topic groups.
Here’s an example of the Claude output:
Content Creation and Repurposing Strategies
Starting text: “I think that the reason I wrote this blog post is because I am a member of a lot of different slack communities or follow people on again on some of those platforms that I shall not mention and I see some great great content that comes out and great answers great wisdom and then it just and then it goes poof away”Themes:
- Leveraging existing content from platforms like Slack
- Low-effort content creation
- Transcribing podcasts for newsletter content
- Maintaining authentic voice while repurposing
- Best practices for newsletter creation
Claude identified five topic areas in this transcript. Once you have this, go back to the raw transcript. Search on a unique text string and. Pull out an interesting, relevant section.
I use the youtubetranscript site to understand where I stop talking and other people start. You can click on a section in the text and view the corresponding part of the video. There may be an AI solution or a specific GPT to do the transcription and have it include speaker names, but I haven’t found one yet.
Here’s an example section that I extracted:
I think that the reason I wrote this blog post is because I am a member of a lot of different slack communities or follow people on again on some of those platforms that I shall not mention and I see some great great content that comes out and great answers great wisdom and then it just and then it goes poof away and even on some some like I follow the ietf emailing lists around ooth and things like that I see some great content there but it it especially in in slack but even in those other places it just gets lost and so my point was by picking up and putting it onto um a newsletter you can and maybe you do some editing right because most stuff that you you um write off in a slack it might not be as Pol as you would normally put a newsletter but you can basically take this um wisdom exhaust right like it’s like kind of like data exhaust from the early 2000s but you can like pick it up and put it together and even if you don’t think you have enough content for a newsletter I think you do if you are active on those channels and by taking it from these walled Gardens of the platforms or slacks or discords and putting it out on a in a newsletter you do a couple of things one is you just showcase Bas your knowledge um the same way a Blog would you can deliver it to people you have a low effort way to connect with folks right if you ever run into somebody a conference or whatnot instead of asking them to follow you on something you can say hey I have a newsletter about real estate in Atlanta or I have a newsletter about how developers are the new king makers or AI or whatever it is and that’s just a lower ask than some other things and it will start to build up a longer term relationship with anybody that you’re um engaged with at low effort to you so that’s kind of the the purpose of the blog post is people are creating all this beautiful content and it’s just trapped especially stuff in slack
This one section is 383 words. This is the kernel of a newsletter edition or a blog post. However, this needs some work. I can’t copy it directly into a newsletter or blog post because I don’t talk as clearly as I write.
Let’s take the above content and lightly edit it to be something I’d feel comfortable publishing.
The reason I wrote this blog post about not letting your content go to waste is because I am a member of a lot of different slack communities where people post great content. I also follow people on Bluesky, that which was formerly Twitter, and other platforms where, again, people are dropping lots of knowledge. This even occurs on IETF mailing lists. There the content is available but it can be difficult to separate the gems from the dross.
I see great great content published and great answers for common questions. Then it goes “poof” away.
Especially in slack but even in those other places, this content just gets lost.
By picking up and putting it into a newsletter you save it. You have to edit it, because most Slack posts are not as polished as newsletter content would be.
But even with that work, you can basically take this “wisdom exhaust” and repurpose it. It’s kind of like data exhaust from the early 2000s. Even if you don’t think you have enough content for a newsletter, you do, if you are active on those channels.
By taking it from these walled gardens of the platforms, slacks or discords and putting it out on a in a newsletter, you do a couple of things.
- you showcase your knowledge
- you deliver it to people’s inboxes so they remember you
- now you have a low effort way to connect with folks; if you ever run into somebody a conference or whatnot instead of asking them to follow you, you can ask them to subscribe to your newsletter
- you start to build a corpus of knowledge and a set of people interested in hearing from you.
I edited to clarify and expand on the content. I added links where appropriate, and also updated it–Bluesky wasn’t a big thing when I did this podcast.
This is fewer words, but a firm foundation for writing a longer blog post. I could also review the transcript for more of my words.
So, that, in a nutshell, is how you can easily generate written content from a podcast, recorded presentation, or livestream.
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