How I Automate My YouTube Videos (My 5-Step Content System)

So, you want to grow your brand on YouTube, but you're dreading having to do the editing and thumbnails and title creation. Well, what if you could create pro-level videos without ever having to set one foot in a video editing software? I'm Dave Polykoff, creator of the Personal Brand Accelerator and co-founder of zenpost.com, where me and my team create pro-level YouTube videos for me and my clients on a weekly basis, including things like YouTube videos like you're watching today and my podcast. And by pumping out consistent weekly YouTube videos, we saw that it was getting overwhelming having to go through the editing process, thumbnail creation, title creation, you know the drill. So I created a content system that streamlined the entire process, one that I installed not just in my business, but in my clients' businesses as well. Today, I'm going to walk you through that exact content system so we can install it into your business by the end of this video. This content workflow is a five-step process that combines AI, automation, and a dedicated video producer role to take on all the human steps that AI and automation currently aren't able to do. There are some things being built right now by me and my team though, so stay tuned for that. Cool, let's jump into it. **Step one: record the content.** What I use to record my content is a tool called Riverside. If you want to check it out, it's called Riverside.fm, and it's a podcasting tool. To run my podcast, I invite people on to interview, and those people are typically doing the interview from their house or apartment, so we have to do it remotely, and Riverside is an awesome tool to help you manage that entire process. There's a free subscription for Riverside, but that obviously has its limitations. I personally use the entry-level subscription, which I think is about $30 a month, but it's well worth it for what Riverside actually does. There are some editing features you can use for the videos you create, but I actually use a separate editing tool, which we'll get into later. Once I actually capture the video, it's on to step two. **Step two: organize the process in Asana.** Step two is to organize this entire video editing process in a tool called Asana. You can check it out at asana.com. Asana is a project management tool, and the cool thing about it is that you're able to create project templates. So what I've done is create a separate project template for each type of content we're creating. One might be for a YouTube video like the one you're watching now. Another might be for my podcast interviews. Or another might be if I'm a guest on someone else's podcast and want to repurpose that content. No matter what it is, we have a dedicated project template for it. Within these project templates, I'm breaking down step by step every task that needs to be accomplished, not just to edit the video, but also to come up with things like titles and thumbnails, show notes, and promotional material for once the video goes live. Everything is listed out. And within the tasks themselves, there's documentation, training videos, and links to other tools or templates they need to complete that task. So everything my video producer needs to edit and get that video published, scheduled, and live is detailed out within this Asana breakdown. This is the keystone of the entire content process. It takes away the ambiguity or confusion of what needs to get done, when it needs to get done by, who needs to get it done, and the directions, details, and resources needed to get those tasks done. Asana is a key element within this content workflow. To have the content templates, custom fields, and everything you need to power this workflow, you'll need a paid plan, which I believe starts at about $15 per month per user. **Step three: edit the video in Descript.** The next step, after you've recorded your video and started to organize it within your Asana project, is to actually dive in and start editing. Now, this isn't done by you. This is done by your dedicated video producer. If you need to hire one, check out places like Upwork or OnlineJobs.ph. Or if you want someone you can really trust, check out zenpost.com, where my agency can inject one into your business and do it all for you. For editing the video, you'll use a tool called Descript. You can check that out at descript.com. I mentioned that Riverside has its own video editing features, but they're not as powerful as Descript. Descript is a very powerful, intuitive video editing tool with a lot of features that are necessary to streamline this process. One feature I love in Descript is the templates tool. Instead of having to redesign your videos every time, if you want certain text to appear, borders around the edges of your videos, certain graphics, or transitions between scenes, you don't have to redo those every time you edit. Instead, there are presets and templates within Descript. With a few clicks, you can get everything looking consistent and keep your brand consistent across videos. That's key because you're going to have a dedicated video producer producing and editing this content. While you can find video producers for relatively little money, time is still money, and you want to make sure you're providing them a process, a system, and tools to make their job as easy as possible. Not only does that decrease the time it takes them to edit, it also keeps the boundaries tight so they can't make creative decisions you won't like. By having these templates in place, you know each of your videos will be consistent, and your video producer won't make creative decisions that don't make sense for you. The other awesome part about Descript is that you can create not just the horizontal landscape YouTube videos, but also square and portrait ratio videos for social. You don't have to export your long YouTube video and then import it into some caption tool that claims to pull the viral moments from your long-form video. Descript does all that for you within the same system, so you and your video producer can edit the long-form video and the short-form clips within the same workspace, which is awesome. **Step four: generate titles and show notes with Castmagic.** Now your video producer can quickly edit your video in Descript, which takes us to step four, using a separate tool called Castmagic to create things like titles, show notes, and promotional materials for your video. Descript does have AI features where you can ask it questions about your content and it'll give you titles and such, but it's a more manual process. The magic with Castmagic is that you can set up preset AI prompts within a workspace, then upload your video to that workspace, and it'll run all of those preset prompts for every video you create. Upload your podcast or YouTube video and it automatically transcribes it, then runs those AI prompts automatically. So you can set up preset prompts like "create an SEO-friendly YouTube title," "create SEO-friendly show notes," "create a LinkedIn post that promotes this video," and so on. These are all prompts I have preset in my Castmagic account. As soon as the video producer uploads the podcast or YouTube video, it spits out all the details they need for the YouTube listing or the social post. The post is already created. This matters because when you hire a video producer, they're not going to be expert video editors, thumbnail creators, and title writers all at once. They don't need to be an expert in everything, because you have separate tools guiding them and providing details that are otherwise outside their skill set. That way, things stay consistent even if the person managing the process isn't an expert in every step. Castmagic will create your YouTube title, show notes, promotional material, and quotes from the video. If there's anything interesting you or a guest said, it'll find it and spit it out, and you can turn that into tweets or quote cards. Now you have all the additional material you need to go on to the next step. **Step five: review and approve.** Here's the thing. Castmagic can create your SEO YouTube title, show notes, and suggest a thumbnail design, but we don't want to fully rely on AI and your video producer as the end-all-be-all decision maker. Maybe after some training you could, but definitely in the beginning, you'll want to inject yourself into an approval process to make sure the title is good, fits your brand, and the show notes are in your voice and style. So the next step is a review step, where your video producer takes everything they've created so far, the edited video, the suggested title, show notes, and promotional material, and goes back into Asana to upload and update each task with that material. They update the status of the task, for our process, from something like "option pending" to "option pending review." That means it's a task for me or the client to go in and review the details. It's basically saying, "Here's the title we created, here's the promotional post, here's what we're going to run with unless you have notes or want to reject it." To this point, all you've had to do is record the video. Now all of this edited and suggested material comes back to you for review, and you just give your sign-off before moving to the next step. This matters because, eventually, you want to be fully hands-off. But one of the biggest things I've seen over my 15 years building content systems is that you still want to include yourself in the editorial process at a review phase, especially early on, so your video producer or team gets the feedback they need to polish content going forward. Over time, you get to a cruising altitude where you can be more hands-off because you trust your team and systems to produce content you'd approve no matter what. This review process is an additional step, but a quick one. Asana has a mobile app, so you can review content on your phone while you're in the bathroom or waiting in line for coffee, add notes, reject, or approve. Once everything is approved, we move to the final step. **Final step: schedule the content.** The final step in the content workflow is to actually schedule the content, and we do that through a few different tools. In Descript, you can click to publish your video directly to YouTube, whether that's the long-form video or a podcast episode. Click export, sign into your YouTube channel, and push it directly there. Then go into your YouTube channel and make any final tweaks or settings before officially publishing or scheduling it. All of this is handled by your video producer and outlined within your Asana tasks. Additionally, you'll have other assets, promotional content, social posts, and promo cards, that you want to publish onto channels like LinkedIn, TikTok, or Instagram Reels. Another tool I highly suggest for that is Planable, which you can get at planable.io. I've tested multiple social media scheduling tools, and Planable is by far the most intuitive and easy to use, and it publishes to all the major platforms. There's no way to easily push your content from Asana or Descript into Planable directly, so it's a manual process, but that's something your video producer is doing anyway. Within Asana, we have custom fields for once something is approved and ready to be scheduled: one for the publish date, and one for the channels it should be published on. Once something's ready, you click the publish date field, choose a date, and that tells your video producer when to schedule it. The channels field lets you make multiple selections, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. Your video producer uses that information, goes into Planable, uploads the content, creates the post, and it's scheduled. **Recap.** So if we recap the entire content workflow: you record a video in Riverside (or Descript, if it's not a podcast). You generate or start a new Asana project, which automatically tasks out your video producer on what steps they need to take, along with the training, documentation, templates, and resources they need. You sit back and wait for the first drafts to come to you. That happens once your video producer edits the video, uses all the tools we talked about, comes back to you, and updates the tasks. You get a notification on your phone, go in, review the options, and say, "Sure, this is what I want." Your video producer finishes the drafts, takes what you approved, creates the social posts, finalizes the clips, and automatically schedules everything to be published on the date you set. So really, you're only involved at two steps. One, you create the content. Two, you review and approve it. The next thing you see is your content getting published onto your social platforms. This is the content system I run for myself and install for my clients as well. It's the content engine that powers the personal brands we build, and it's the reason my clients are able to scale their businesses, because they're not spending all this nitty-gritty time editing videos and creating quote cards in Canva. They're able to focus on building their business, attracting more clients, and closing more deals on sales calls. If you're interested in any of the tools I mentioned today, check out davepolykoff.com/toolbox for the solopreneur toolbox with all my recommended apps and gear. And if you're looking for a video producer to help run your YouTube channel, video creation, and social media content, check out zenpost.com, where we'll install this system into your business in the next 30 days. Thanks. See you on the next video.