Wouldn’t it be great to increase your marketing impact without putting in much more effort? Guess what—you can! In this post, I’ll show you how to use Lumen5 AI to turn an existing blog post into video content.
You’ve already done the work to write your blog posts—why not put in a little effort to get even more mileage out of them? Repurposing existing content is a great way to get fresh content to your audience without having to start from scratch.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Importing Blog Content into Lumen5 AI
To follow along with this tutorial, the first thing you’ll have to do is create an account on Lumen5’s website. I chose the free “Community” plan to get started, and I didn’t have to input my credit card information. However, if you want to customize your video, I recommend choosing the paid “Starter” plan, which will allow you to match the colors and other style elements to your brand.
Now that you have a Lumen5 account, go ahead and choose “Create videos for a specific project.”
Next, you’ll be asked to select a template, but you can skip this step. Let’s see what we can come up with on our own!
Now you should be in the Lumen5 AI workspace, ready to get building.
On the top left-hand side of the screen, there’s a bar directing you to “Paste a URL to your blog/article.” Go ahead and paste your blog post URL in that bar and click “Import.”
After your blog post imports, you’ll see the content on the left-hand side of the screen. Scroll down to make sure everything looks A-OK, and then click “Convert to Video” at the bottom of the screen.
Let’s see what we get when we use Lumen5 AI to turn blog posts into videos!
Add Your Own Branding
The program will take a few minutes to fully convert your blog content. As the program is working, you’ll see your blog content being repurposed as a series of slides. Now is a good time to scroll through and start jotting down some notes to save time.
I can already tell I want to swap out the introduction design in my example. As it is, it’s just a lot of text from the blog—it’s hard to read and doesn’t make all that much sense in this format.
On to the first step of the design process, hover over the first slide you’d like to edit. You will see a menu will pop up on the right; click “Swap design.” Then scroll through the options and choose one that matches your content and brand. For my video, I’m choosing from the “Collage” section.
In the same design menu as “Swap design,” you’ll also see an option to “Shuffle colors.” Play around with the colors of the text and graphics until you’re happy with the result and try matching the colors to your brand colors! In the vertical bar to the left of the slide, click “Style,” and a small library of colors will pop up.
At this point in the process, I bet you can see why I think going with a paid plan is totally worth it. Sure, you could stick to the basic design elements for your video, but editing the slides to match your brand colors, fonts, and overall design to represent your business is definitely something I recommend. For most of these customizations, you’ll need to upgrade to the “Starter” plan.
Continue to go through your slides and swap out the design however you’d like.
Now, in the vertical menu on the left-hand side of the page, you should see an item called “Media.” This is where you’ll edit or drop in relevant images to accompany and enhance your video and break up the text.
For my video, I want to replace the text in a circle graphic with a person. So, I typed “happy person” in the “Media” search bar and found a great image to drag and drop onto a slide.
Another thing to consider is how long each slide in the video is displayed. You can decrease or increase screen time in the right-hand vertical toolbar. For slides with more text or important information, you should display them longer, maybe 5+ seconds. And you can decrease the screen time for less critical slides to 3 or 4 seconds.
Preview your project in Lumen5 AI
Now’s a good time to click “Preview” on the top right bar in Lumen5 AI to see what your project looks like. Then, take notes while watching and decide if you want to change your strategy or aesthetic.
As I preview my video, I don’t like the headline text I’m seeing. It doesn’t read like headline text and I need something more catchy and to the point. I clicked “Story” on the vertical toolbar, which took me back to my original blog post, where I can figure out how and from where the program is pulling the text.
As I scanned my original blog post, I found other text I would rather highlight. I edited the new text directly in the slide.
Go through each slide to edit the text and design until you’re happy with each slide.
Quick Tip: If you want to change the order of your slides, click the up and down arrows on the left-hand side of the slides. You can click the delete icon to erase a slide altogether.
Include a Call to Action
On your Outro—or, the last slide—include a quick overview of the video. Be sure to include your logo, links to your socials, and any other calls to action you want to include.
Remember when we talked about editing the screen time for each slide? Make sure you give your audience enough time to take in all the information on the Outro. I recommend at least seven seconds.
Wrap up
And there you have it! If you want to take your blog content and put it into video format, Lumen5 is a great tool. I’m really happy with how my video came out—I’m a big fan. It was super easy to add the content and then change out the text, images, design, and colors. Now you can use the Lumen5 AI video editing tool to turn blog posts into videos!
Check out Lumen5 with your own blog post and let us know how it goes!