by Stacy Zemon
Creating full written transcripts of your videos is an easy way to increase the benefits you receive from your DJ company’s online video presence.
By doing so, you will be able to provide content for people who can’t watch video due to an accessibility issue, and increase your search engine optimization (SEO) power by taking advantage of keyword-rich text.
The latter reason makes the search engines happy by giving them content to index, and you make users happy when your content suddenly becomes easier to find.
Now that you know the main benefits of adding transcripts to your video, here’s how you go about doing it.
Optimize Your Script/Dialogue
You need to do keyword research to know which terms you want to appear for and make sure you use them in the video.
Prepare the File
Google wants small business owners to increase the accessibility of their videos, so they’ve created a “Help” page to explain how to prepare a transcript file. I encourage you to check it out, and here are some things you’ll want to pay special attention to when creating your file:
- Save your transcript document as a plain text file.
- Don’t use any special characters (smartquotes, em dashes, etc) which could disrupt speech recognition matching from YouTube and readability of the transcript.
- Use a double line break to signal a long pause (3 seconds or longer) or a new sentence.
- Add tags like >> at the beginning of a new line to identify speakers or change of speaker.
- At the end of the video, include a link to your website in the audio transcript.
Upload the File
Once you have your transcript file, you have to upload it to YouTube. To do that, you’ll want to log in, go to “My Videos” and select “Edit” for the video you want to add a transcript to. Once you’re there, navigate yourself to the “Captions” and “Subtitles” screen.
Publisher & Chief Scribe
Stacy Zemon is a self-described serial entrepreneur (Equal parts creativity and business). She is widely considered an authority on the DJ business, and has become a distinguished industry leader over the course of her illustrious 30+ year career. Stacy is a veteran DJ entertainer, publisher and chief scribe of ProMobileDJ.com, longtime writer for DJ Times magazine, and author of the world’s best-selling DJ books: The Mobile DJ Handbook, The DJ Sales & Marketing Handbook and The Mobile DJ MBA. From her efforts, Stacy has spawned more professional disc jockey business owners than any other person in the mobile DJ industry. For the longer version of Stacy’s story, click here. To learn about Stacy’s business consulting services, click here.
