From Transcript to Traffic: How I Automated My Content Creation with n8n and AI

As a content creator, you know the grind. You pour your heart into creating a great video, only to face the next mountain: repurposing it. You need a compelling YouTube description, an engaging LinkedIn post, a blog article... the list goes on. This manual, repetitive work is a major bottleneck. But what if you could automate it?

In this article, I'll show you the exact workflow I built using the open-source tool n8n and AI to turn a simple video transcript into ready-to-publish social media content in seconds.

The Challenge: The Manual Content Repurposing Grind

Before automation, my process looked like this:

• Finish editing a video.
• Get the transcript.
• Stare at a blank page, trying to summarize the video for a YouTube description.
• Stare at another blank page, trying to rephrase it for a LinkedIn post.
• Repeat for other platforms.

This process was not only time-consuming but also drained my creative energy. I knew there had to be a better way.

📢 Watch the n8n automation Video

The Solution: A Self-Hosted n8n Automation Workflow

My secret weapon is n8n, a powerful, node-based workflow automation tool. By self-hosting it on my local machine using Docker, I have complete control and flexibility.

The goal was simple: create a workflow that could read my video transcript, send it to an AI with specific instructions, and save the generated content back to my computer for a final review.

Building the Workflow, Step-by-Step

The beauty of n8n is its visual interface. Here’s a breakdown of the nodes I used:

Trigger: It all starts with a manual trigger. I drop my transcript file into a specific folder on my desktop.

Read File: The Read/Write Files from Disk node is configured to watch this folder. As soon as a file appears, it reads the content. This is possible because I've mounted my local desktop folder into the n8n Docker container.

Process with AI: The text from the transcript is passed to a Basic LLM Chain node. This node is connected to the OpenAI API, giving it the power of ChatGPT.

Crafting the Prompt: This is the most critical step. I wrote a detailed prompt telling the AI exactly what I needed:

"You are a digital marketer and blogger. Read and analyse the video and output the transcript and outline the following tasks: 1. an engaging Youtube description with a call to action stay relevant in marketing and subscribe to my youtube channel 2. an engaging Linkedin post with a call to action to reach out to me under my website or email."

Save the Output: The AI's response is then passed to another Read/Write Files from Disk node, which saves a new text file containing both the YouTube description and the LinkedIn post right back into my folder.

The Result: Productivity on Autopilot

Now, my process is transformed. I drop a transcript file into a folder, click "Execute Workflow," and a few seconds later, a new file appears with high-quality, ready-to-review drafts.

This changes everything for content creators:

• Massive Time Savings: What used to take 30-60 minutes now takes under 30 seconds.
• Scalability: I can now produce content for multiple platforms without the extra workload.
• Consistency: The AI, guided by my prompt, helps maintain a consistent tone and style.
• Focus on Creativity: I can spend my time and energy on what truly matters: creating valuable core content.

Your Turn to Automate!

This is just one simple example of what's possible. Automation isn't some far-off, complicated concept reserved for developers. With tools like n8n, anyone can start optimizing their repetitive tasks.

What's the first task in your workflow you would automate? Let me know or reach out to me to discuss.

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript from my video. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the video.

(00:01) hey folks it's time to speed up your productivity through n8n automations but let's start again with what is your goal what do you want to achieve that's the starting point before then afterwards breaking down your process that you want to automate into subtasks and also I need to say that there are some prerequisites when it's coming to n8n self-hosting you need to learn and understand how to set up properly the local server i'm using docker desktop for instance then also to mount my local folders in the n8n container so you

(00:53) need to first learn and understand how to do this properly but then afterwards the automation itself is straightforward and simple so my goal is to automate a simple process where I want to take my YouTube uh transcript i want the automation to read that file so you can see that here in the node read and write files from disk I mounted this to my drop off folder which is on my desktop so let me just show you that folder i created this video transcript drop off folder here is my transcript with my text then I go back to my automation canvas

(01:49) it's reading the file it's extracting the file and feeds it into a basic LLM chain and the model that I attached for simplicity reasons uh my chat GPT account initially I wanted to attach it to an open source like Ollama but just for going straight to the point you can attach any model that you want what does chat GPT do it grabs my file and I'm asking chat gpt I'm setting up a prompt where I'm basically telling chat GPT what to do take my file and output a YouTube description and the LinkedIn post that I can review manually adjust as I feel to

(02:43) and post it then afterwards on YouTube and on LinkedIn here it continues to I'm converting the file again and I want the automation to drop the output so the description back to the folder on my desktop and here you can see the file and in there I do have proposals that I can review just as I feel to and you straight away to publish so that's a simple workflow where I I'm optimizing my productivity and you should starting to start breaking down your processes automate as much as possible because now I'm ready to

(03:37) scale i can really now go through any other process that I really want to automate break it down using and just speeding up my productivity does this sound good to you get started and let me know how it goes and I would be happy to chat with you about your experiments and how you scale your processes