Do you want to learn how to put captions or subtitles on your videos, but you just don't
know how?
Well in today's video, you're going to learn exactly that.
Not only are you going to learn a step-by-step, how to upload transcriptions or captions or
subtitles into your YouTube videos, but you're also going to learn three different ways on
how to create captions for your videos.
All right, so let's jump into it.
Transcriptions for YouTube.
What exactly does that mean?
You've probably heard them called captions, subtitles transcriptions.
Basically.
It is the text word for word of what you were saying in your YouTube videos.
Now you might be thinking
"Why does this even matter?
YouTube autogenerates these.
So why do I have to create my own?"
That is a very good question.
And yes, while YouTube does transcribe your videos, it does a really poor job at doing
so.
There are tons of typos and words wrong, and it's just not a great experience for your
viewers who may want to watch your videos with the captions on.
Now above just having a great viewing experience for some of your viewers who may want to watch
your videos with captions on, the number one reason why you need to do your own captions
is because it helps your videos get ranked in the YouTube search.
Like I said before, the transcription is word for word your script of every single thing
you're saying in your YouTube video.
And that is gold for YouTube because remember: YouTube is just a computer and it has an algorithm
of different things that it looks at when determining whether to rank a video in YouTube
search or not.
These are things like your title, your tag, your descriptions, and your transcriptions.
Basically what you put in each one of those sections are indicators of what your video
is about.
So one of the best indicators for Google is that transcript because it's word for word
what you are saying.
You have limited characters in your title to try to get the point across to Google.
But if Google can now read the transcript, it now has a very crystal clear idea of what
that video is about.
And so that is why I recommend putting transcriptions ones that you create yourself on every single
video.
Now, if you are unfamiliar with the SEO process, I actually have a video right here about how
I do SEO research for YouTube, so that way my videos can start ranking higher.
So definitely check that out after this video, now that we understand why transcriptions
are super important and why you should be doing them manually and creating these on
your own and not just trusting the one that YouTube uses, because those are garbage.
Now let's talk about how to create transcriptions.
Now, like I mentioned before, I'm going to be going through three different ways that
you can create your transcriptions for YouTube.
Basically these are going to be a good, better, best model.
So you get to choose what works for you and your process.
I obviously have a favorite, which I will get to and I will make it very obvious which
one is my favorite.
Now there is one obvious way, which isn't one of my three.
This is I'm talking about good, better, best.
This is probably bad because it wastes so much time, but that's creating your transcriptions
from scratch.
So basically watching your YouTube video and typing it out that just so much time, that
is going to be a waste of your time.
You're better off making the videos, not transcribing the videos.
So I would not recommend doing that at all, but if you want to go for it, all right.
So the first way, this is the good way.
What you can do is after you upload your video to YouTube, you can take the auto transcription
that YouTube provides.
And then you can take that, put it into a Google doc, put it into a word document and
then use that as your base.
So that way you can edit the transcription from there.
So you'll have a really good rough outline, and you'll just have to watch the video and
then make the updates as you go.
This is pretty good and it's free, which is one of the reasons why I recommend it.
And it's so much better than writing it all from scratch.
Really?
Why would you start from scratch?
One?
YouTube gives you a decent rough draft, but again, it is usually just filled with so many
mistakes and errors that it's not my preferred way to go, but this is free.
So that is a plus.
So just do that.
Watch your video, make your edits and off you go.
All right.
My next way is to use an automated transcription, but not from YouTube, but to be automated
transcriptions from a service called rev.com.
rev.com is a transcription service, and they are really, really fantastic and great at
what they do.
That is their bread and butter, and that is what they are good at.
And so that's why I go to them.
They have a variety of different services that you can use, but one of them is an automated
transcription where basically you give them a link to your YouTube video and then their
automated system will spit out a transcription pretty fast.
That is, I would say rough draft quality, but it's probably 85% of the way there.
Now, again, this is a service that you do have to pay for at the time of recording.
This automated transcriptions are 25 cents per minute.
So if you have a 10 minute video, you will be paying $2.50 cents to get a really nice
transcription.
The automated transcriptions, they have punctuation, they have capitalization.
Their AI has learned over time, certain words, how they're spelled, how they're capitalized.
And it really does a pretty decent job, which another benefit of this is that it comes pretty
quickly.
I would say automated transcriptions for my videos that are anywhere between eight and
20 minutes long.
I get within five to 10 minutes.
They are very, very, very quick.
Then once you have your automated transcription, what you can do is you can actually watch
your YouTube video right there in the preview panel of your transcription.
You can put it on double speed, which is what I do.
I put the video on double speed and then I push play.
And then it goes through each one of the words.
And so I just review the transcription really quickly.
I fix punctuation and spelling from there for the most part, it is really, really good,
and it does a great job.
So I'm not constantly having to pause the video to fix the transcription.
I can pretty much do it in real time.
And again, I am a double speed queen.
I listen to everything on double speed.
So that is a way that I'm able to streamline this process along because I just hit double
speed and off I go.
Now that is a little time consuming on my part, because again, I do have to review the
transcription before I upload it to YouTube, but it's totally worth it for the cost-savings
to start with this rough draft and then go from there.
It takes me anywhere from five to 15 minutes, depending on the video.
And I've gotten so much better at doing this.
It's a very, very, very quick process.
So the reason this is my better recommendation is because it does cost a little bit of money.
So every single video you're probably going to be spending, I don't know, $3 to $6 to
$7, depending on how long your videos are.
And it does take a little bit of time.
So a little money a little time, but the quality is really, really good.
Now, if you want to check out rev.com to try out the service for yourself, you can go to
morganstradling.com/rev and sign up there.
And that will give you $10 off your first order.
So you can try out the various services to see what works for you, but you might as well
use it and get your first transcription more or less free.
All right, my last way.
And this is the best way to do transcriptions for YouTube is to use rev.com, but to use
their transcription service.
This is where a person will actually go through and watch your video.
And then they will give you a final copy of the transcription.
I find that these are probably 99-100% perfect because you've had a human instead of you
having to do it, you've paid someone to do it, and they have reviewed the transcription
for you to make sure that everything is perfect, perfect, perfect.
At the time of recording this, doing these type of transcriptions are $1.25 per minute.
If your video is less than 30 minutes, Rev says that the turnaround time is 12 hours.
I have found that it is typically much less than that, just a few hours.
So there is a little bit of a delay in when you will be getting your transcription back.
So that's totally fine if you are uploading your video the next day or in a few days,
but if you are the type of person who just edits your video, you upload your video and
then you publish your video.
Just as soon as it's ready off it goes, this will add a little bit of time to that because
you definitely don't want to publish your video before the transcription is ready.
You want to make sure that the transcription is ready and uploaded and then publish.
So there is a little bit of lead time.
Absolutely do this.
I did this for a few of my videos at the very beginning.
And then I realized that the preferred way for me was to do the automated transcription
and just spend 5 to 10 minutes, reviewing the transcription and going from there.
So there you go.
That is the good, better, best of how to transcribe your videos for YouTube.
Now, let me know in the comments below, which of these methods do you prefer?
Are you a good, are you a better, or are you a best type of person?
Not that this is an indicator of the type of person you are.
We're all best.
Let's be real, but good, better, best.
Let me know.
All right, now that you have your transcription created, I'm going to hop over to my computer
and I'll show you exactly how you upload a transcription in YouTube.
So now that you have created or generated your transcriptions or your subtitles or your
captions, whatever you want to call them.
Now we're going to get to upload them to our YouTube video.
So you want to go to YouTube Studio and find the video that you want to add the transcriptions
to.
So I'm going to do this video, the video that I mentioned before, how to do SEO for YouTube,
definitely check that video out because it's a good one.
And you will go right here to the little pencil icon that says "details".
Then to add your transcriptions, you're going to go on the left-hand sidebar to the subtitles
section.
So I've been calling it YouTube transcriptions, YouTube calls it YouTube subtitles.
It's also known as YouTube captions, whatever you want to call it.
It is all the same thing, but this is the section that you need to go to add your captions.
So you will see when you're here on the video, you already are going to have a caption that
is already there.
This is the auto-generated caption that YouTube does.
And so you'll see it right here in the language.
It's going to say the language and then automatic.
So whatever language your video is in, it's going to say "automatic".
So that's the indicator that, you know, that is the one that YouTube created for you.
And that is the one that we do not want because it is garbage.
So we will end up deleting this caption once we upload our own captions.
So let's go ahead and do that.
Now, no matter which of the three methods you use to create your captions, you are going
to follow this process.
So you're going to click the blue button that says, "add language".
And then you're going to select the language which your video is in.
So this video was in English.
So I'm going to scroll down to "English" and then you'll see that you now have another
language added.
You can add multiple languages.
If you want translations for some of your viewers, you can definitely do that, but you
can only have one transcription per language with the exception being this auto-generated
one.
So I couldn't have two English ones unless I did one English one that was Great Britain
and one English that was United States.
That's the exception, but it's one transcription per language, and you can have as many languages
as you want.
So now that this is here, I'm going to want to go over to this "subtitles" column.
And I'm going to click add.
Now this will give you a variety of ways to add your YouTube subtitles.
One of these is you can manually type in your transcription.
So you'll be able to watch the video right here and then just type the transcriptions
as you go.
Again, not recommended that is the bad on the good, better, best scale.
The next one is where you can upload a file.
And there are particular file formats that are used for subtitles and transcriptions.
And I just find that these, when you do it by uploading a file and Rev does allow you
to export to these files.
For example, there is a particular subtitle file format called .srt.
And Rev does allow you to export your transcription to this file format.
But I found whenever I upload the file, it just doesn't sync properly.
And it doesn't work the way that I like.
So what I do is I click this button right here, which says "auto sync".
So what auto-sync does is basically you're going to put in copy and paste the whole transcription,
and then YouTube is going to match it to the speaking parts of the video.
It is sophisticated enough where it can recognize what words go with what sound waves.
And it is really, really, really good at doing that.
So that's, I do it this way.
So we don't have anything here.
So we need to go to rev.com to find our transcription.
So here is my transcription and I have already reviewed this.
This was an automated transcription.
And so I went through and I watched the video at double speed, and then I just fixed different
things here and there.
And so this transcription is Morgan approved.
So all you have to do, you don't have to download anything.
Although that is an option.
All I do is I do control a, which selects all of the texts.
And then I do a copy, which is control c and then I just paste it right in here.
So I do control v. Boom, and you can see that already at the bottom, it is assigning timings.
Even though there's a button right here that formally assigned timings, you can see that
it is already starting to do the basic process of lining up the transcription with the words
and the audio files in the video.
And you can even see those right here, down below.
It's going to show the transcription, subtitles, closed caption section, and then the actual
audio file.
So you can see where I'm speaking, it's going up and then the are silences.
So we are almost done.
All you have to do is select assign timings.
Then what this is going to do.
It's going to break down each of the sections into different timestamps.
So from zero to six seconds, I say this, and then the next section, and it breaks it down
into small chunks.
And these are the chunks of words that you are going to see if you were watching the
video.
So you're going to see all of this, and then it's going to move on to this and this and
this.
And so it does a really, really great job of assigning the timings and they are near
perfect.
So all you have to do now is hit "publish".
Now with the new YouTube studio assigning, the timings is incredibly fast.
It used to have to take a few minutes, maybe 10 to 20 minutes to sync the timings and to
do that work.
But they have gotten so quick at doing that.
That basically it's instantaneous.
So you might occasionally see something here that says assigning timings, and you won't
be able to publish yet.
But I have found with the new YouTube Studio in this new updated, that it's almost instantaneous.
So this one, it worked.
So as you can see, because I hit publish, we're done.
There's nothing else that you need to do.
There used to be all these extra steps that you had to do, but now it's very streamlined.
It's super simple, super easy.
Although my very, very last step is I always go and I delete the automatic transcription.
I want to make YouTube very aware that they need to only be using my transcription, not
their transcription.
So I go in and on the three dots right here, which is the options.
I just click that and I put delete for the automatic transcription.
So now I only have one caption, one transcription, one subtitle for this video.
And I know that it is good.
I know that it is accurate.
I know that it represents what I say in the video, and that is how you add transcriptions
or subtitles or captions to your videos in YouTube.
It is super seamless and very easy, especially if you're using one of the two rev.com methods,
which I highly highly recommend because it just makes this process so quick.
So if you're interested in using rev.com, go to morganstradling.com/rev, and that will
give you $10 off your first order, which is a great deal.
And it allows you to try out the service to see how you like it.
So definitely do that.
And if you do come back and let me know how you liked the service in the meantime, be
sure to check out this video right here, where I talk about my SEO process, transcriptions
titles, how to rank in search all of that.
If you were a new or small YouTuber, and you're really struggling to have views on your videos,
this is where you will want to go next.
So that is all I have for today.
And I'll see you next time.
Do I want to hop over to the computer right now?
Um, um, my mama, mama, mama.
I'm not a singer.
I don't claim to be.