How One Content Creator Helps YouTuber Ali Abdaal Grow His Social Media Following

With over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, Ali prioritises expanding his content’s lifespan to keep up with his audience.

Subly
6 min readMay 25, 2021

About Joe’s and Ali’s Content Creation Process

With 4.2 billion social media users globally, more and more creators share their content to break through the noise. How are they doing it despite the challenge?

They’re building value-driven brands by making the most of each piece of content they’re putting out.

At least that’s how Joe is helping Ali Abdaal and his team to reach millions of viewers.

Joe Gannon works with online creators like YouTuber Ali Abdaal to repurpose his video content across various social media channels. Joe uses Subly to maximise the impact of Ali’s work, to reach an even wider audience and to have an efficient workflow.

With over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, Ali prioritises expanding his content’s lifespan to keep up with his audience. For him, repurposed content in the form of ‘fire moments’, as he calls them, is crucial. This way, he makes sure he’s keeping all his audiences engaged across the multitude of platforms they use.

Smoothly running his YouTube channel and podcast series alongside his social media can be a challenge.

Together with his team and Joe, they’ve cracked a secret formula that enabled them to drive value without compromising their consistency or quality. And, without spending any more time than needed on editing!

What helped them to spend less time editing and more time creating? The time-efficient workflow that Joe had established for repurposing Ali’s content.

The Challenge

Content creators will spend days editing a single video. Perhaps, even weeks. For Joe, this wasn’t a good enough option, so he set out to create a better workflow.

“My own content focuses on how to build an organic content marketing strategy that will generate new business and establish a personal brand that pulls in opportunities,” says Joe. “So, I am fascinated in finding ways to build processes and systems that enable seamless content marketing.”

Joe started his agency to help other content creators maximise the impact of their organic content efforts. When Joe began working with Ali, he knew content repurposing would be a big part of their workflow.

As Ali’s YouTube channel grew in popularity, he recognised that to successfully balance his time between being a doctor and a YouTuber, his content would have to be the gold standard. This meant accessibility, consistency and multi-channel impact.

As a content creator, Joe saw the impact repurposed content could have on brands. He also knew that growing Ali’s channels would involve finding time-efficient solutions like repurposing his content.

His primary challenge was cutting down the number of steps it took to get a piece of content social-media-ready. Whether it’s a podcast episode, social media caption, or a YouTube video, he needed a tool to help him get his content looking top-notch. He needed something that would reduce the 15 steps of overall video editing in multiple tools to preferably fewer steps in just one tool.

It was essential to create a workflow that utilised styling templates, gave full control over the look and feel of on-screen text and headlines, helped to resize content ready to post, and achieved automatic TXT and SRT files when exporting, too. This workflow meant that Joe could create high-quality content frequently enough to help Ali expand his reach onto new platforms to find new audiences whilst still maintaining existing channels.

The Solution

Before Subly, repurposing content for Joe involved days in front of Final Cut Pro. There wasn’t an all-in-one solution for transcribing, subtitling, styling and resizing video and audio files. Or at least one that didn’t involve a high level of skill and hours of his day in front of the screen.

“One of the biggest limitations of other tools is the difficulty of selecting how you want subtitles and on-screen text to look,” says Joe.

Access to Subly Pro meant that Joe could focus more on strategy and less on the nitty-gritty details of finding new (and interesting) ways of editing and repurposing content faster.

“Subly has helped me to create videos in a system that saves time and has an increased output!” says Joe.” I upload video clips made from podcasts and interviews, brand and style them in Subly, then export in different aspect ratios for various social media platforms.”

What used to take Joe hours now takes him a matter of minutes. So what changed about his process? He found an all-in-one tool for making Ali’s videos social-media-ready.

Ali Abdaal said: “My team love using Subly to save time and repurpose my YouTube content for different platforms.”

Today, his process looks like editing his video in Final Cut Pro, running it through Subly for automatic transcription, subtitling and resizing, sharing across social media in different formats with his exported TXT file as the caption.

Joe said: “I love using Subly because I can download TXT files which I use as my first iteration of the social media copy– it saves me so much time when posting online.”

The result — “Subly has literally given me back hours each week.”

With the help of Subly, Joe found an easy and fast way to support Ali with his content.

“The Subly team was so supportive, and it’s been incredible to see their tool go from strength to strength,” said Joe. “Subly has literally given me back hours each week.”

From the 15 steps Joe would typically take in Final Cut Pro, he was able to simplify the process by completing 7 of them in Subly.

Ali’s videos could be ready for export within minutes thanks to the easy-to-use automatic transcription, subtitling and styling features.

This is how he transforms one piece of content into as many as Ali needs to keep growing his social media channels at a fast pace!

Ali is still a Doctor working in the UK, and during his one-year sabbatical to explore other interests, he grew his YouTube channel to over 1.5M subscribers. He still creates content, writes his newsletter and runs a weekly podcast, ‘Not Overthinking’.

Joe is now on his way to hiring his first employee thanks to establishing a proactive workflow that’s helped him grow to a profitable agency.

Want to see what results repurposed content can bring you? Try Joe’s workflow with Subly Pro today.

Just click the image below to get started.

--

--

Subly

Automatic transcription and subtitling for videos. Create content, less time editing.