YouTube automation: Create videos without creating new content

Starting and maintaining a YouTube channel takes a lot of time and energy. From finding a niche to planning your content, promoting your channel and interacting with your viewers, it can be overwhelming for many content creators and marketers.

But what if there’s a way to generate video content in bulk and grow your Youtube audience? This is where video automation comes in, which lets you streamline your workflow and ensures increased visibility for your videos.

This guide will show you how to use Shotstack, a cloud-based video-editing tool, to generate videos at scale and automate your Youtube video creation using content you already have without knowing how to code.

Let’s get started.

Find and organise relevant and high-quality media assets

The first step in automating your YouTube video creation is to find relevant and high-quality assets that align with your niche or target audience and fit the story you want to tell in your videos. If you have a bank of media assets available, audit what you have and see what you can repurpose.

Find images, video clips, audio files, fonts and logos you want to use in your edit and save them to a cloud storage solution such as AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage. You can also use Shotstack’s Ingest API to fetch assets from URLs and edit them, including cropping and resizing your videos.

Video Template.png

Create and customise your video template

Once you have your assets ready, it’s time to create your video template. No-code users can choose from Shotstack’s professionally designed and pre-built templates.

You can use transitions, motion effects and filters to customise your template. You can also add your own intro and outro, overlay your logo or watermark, trim or cut parts of the video, generate captions or subtitles and add voiceovers in multiple languages using Shotstack’s Create API’s text-to-speech.

Once your video template is done, you can start generating videos at scale using Shotstack’s API. This means taking your single video template and creating hundreds or thousands of unique videos by inserting dynamic elements such as text, images, videos, audio files, etc.

No-code users can use any data source and tools like Make and Zapier to automate the video generation.

Here are some ways how Shotstack can help you generate videos in minutes:

Turn long-form blogs and guides into videos
Turn archival or stock images into video slideshows
Stitch short video clips to create longer videos and vice-versa
Bulk create personalised videos by pulling data saved on CRM, spreadsheets, forms, and other databases

When you finish your edit, you can render your videos in Youtube’s recommended 1920x1080px resolution and other formats to promote the videos on different channels to reach a wider audience.

The final video output can be downloaded from Shotstack’s video hosting and CDN, stored on AWS SW3 or Google Cloud Storage or sent to Mux for direct streaming.

You can also automate your workflow using Make or Zapier to publish your videos directly to Youtube and other social media channels.

Optimise the video titles, descriptions, and tags

Optimising your YouTube videos' titles, descriptions, and tags is crucial for increasing visibility and attracting more viewers. When it comes to titles, make sure to include relevant keywords that accurately describe the content of your video. This will help your video appear in search results when users are looking for specific topics.

In the video description, provide a detailed summary of what viewers can expect to see in the video, again using relevant keywords. This will help with search rankings and give viewers a clear idea of what they will be watching.

Final result

Keen to see what Shotstack can do? Here’s a simple example of an automated real estate video listing, which can be automatically uploaded on YouTube, Facebook and other social channels using Zapier with absolutely no code and in just a few minutes.