How to Create YouTube Shorts From Existing Video in 2 Ways
Virlo Team
Learn how to create YouTube Shorts from existing video in just two simple ways, fast, easy, and no extra tools needed.
Jul 17, 2025
Many content creators today are overwhelmed when starting their journey on platforms like YouTube. With so many features to understand and trends to keep up with, it can be tough to know where to focus your efforts. If you’ve found yourself in this position, you’re not alone. Luckily, creating YouTube Shorts from existing videos can help you get started. In this guide, we’ll explore how to create YouTube Shorts from existing videos and how this can enhance your content creation journey, such as going viral through trend analysis. Let's talk about how to get started as a content creator.
One way to maximize the benefits of this process is by utilizing Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool. This resource will help you understand trends and develop a strategy to achieve your goals, such as going viral with YouTube Shorts.
Table of Contents
Benefits of Repurposing Content
1. Expand Your Audience
Repurposing content allows you to connect with individuals who may have missed your original piece. This includes those who skipped it by choice or chance. Repurposing is especially useful for reaching folks who intentionally passed on your first piece, as it gives them something better suited to their interests. For example, someone who doesn’t watch Instagram video content may scroll past your clip when it appears on their feed. But a quote card from the same clip would reach them instantly via stories. It may even yield a like.
On the other hand, if you recycle content, it can end up annoying people who skip it by choice, which may result in them unfollowing your page. In a way, content repurposed across multiple formats gives people more reasons to follow you. And it ultimately boosts your reach because the algorithm prefers pages that one follows when deciding which posts to show to the average user. However, even outside the world of social media, repurposing your content can help you reach a broader audience.
A lecture transcript can be turned into a workbook. A workbook page can be turned into a poster. Generally, the rule of thumb is that the more bite-sized something is, the wider its reach is. But not everyone prefers bite-sized content, so producing just small pieces would alienate those who want to sit through an hour-long podcast or webinar. Repurposing allows you to have your cake and eat it, too. Naturally, some people prefer to consume different types of content. Some people like to read, others watch videos, or listen to podcasts. Strategic content repurposing allows you to transform between these types of content, so you can satisfy all the demand, which results in increased reach and more followers.
2. Cultivate an Aura of Omnipresence
There was a time when the number of followers used to be the metric of success on social media. However, since we have moved past the influencer boom, the social media zeitgeist is no longer impressed by likes. Now, it is your content that reflects your professionalism, value, and impressiveness. People are no longer expecting brands and experts to have hundreds of thousands of followers. They just want good content. When people follow you on different platforms and vibe with your message, they are very likely to engage with it everywhere they see it. Interestingly, the more they engage with your content, the more they'll see it.
This can give you an aura of being everywhere all the time. The rabbit-hole phenomenon might not last long, as social media giants are being criticized for creating echo chambers. But while the echo-chamber phenomenon is here, using a content repurposing app to repurpose your content can help you create a following of super fans. The more people see you, the more they can relate to you and trust you. This is incredibly valuable for content marketers.
3. Your Audience’s Attention Span does not limit you
Theoretically, podcasts have the best audience in terms of attention span. However, even the world's most prominent podcaster, Joe Rogan, has an official Joe Rogan Clips channel with over 6.6 million subscribers. Please note that The Joe Rogan Experience had a clips channel long before YouTube started pushing short-form content. He did it for the simple reason you should do it, too: there is no logical reason to limit your content to those who can afford to sit through hours of content.
Content repurposing allows you to create bite-sized pieces that can be consumed across various media. It is easy to think that this goes one way. Content repurposing doesn't exclusively result in shorter content from long-form content. Author Ryan Holiday often stitches together the audio of his TikTok clips into an episode of his podcast, The Daily Stoic. Content-repurposing deals with one of three things:
Change of medium
Change of size
Change of distribution platform
4. Your Content Becomes Easily Shareable
On the subject of changing platforms, you might have noticed that most tech platforms are changing their forms. Netflix has introduced a clip-format tab, and Twitter has incorporated social audio in its Spaces format. Even if you have no plans to share your content on a different platform, you can repurpose your content to be ready for other products within the platform of your choice.
Here are a few ideas
Taking a recording of your Twitter Spaces Audio and turning it into a podcast
Captioning a portion of your Feed video audio with Stock or Film B-roll to turn it into an Instagram Story, and taking a screenshot of my Instagram Direct Message and making an image post (often done with reviews).
So, why is it important to have your content ready to launch on a new product within a specific social media platform? Because of reach. Every platform will give an unfair amount of reach to a particular product it is pushing. Instagram co-opted stories when Snapchat refused to sell to Facebook (now Meta). At that point, stories had a much higher reach than the feed posts.
Now, the same thing is happening with reels. Every new product is an opportunity for those who can be the first movers. And every platform makes sharing incredibly easy for a specific type of content. When you repurpose your content, it tends to be shared more. Even more important is the fact that people share what they know the other person will enjoy. When was the last time someone recommended a song to you? Song recommendations died the moment people realized that the party receiving the suggestion would probably ignore it.
Even if someone loves your webinar, podcast, or other long-form content, they will hesitate to share it because they know their friends won't go through the whole thing. But the same person will eagerly share your clips... if you have clips. How do you make clips out of long-form content? You repurpose it.
5. You Give Your Content a Shot at Virality
Aside from improving your content's reach and engagement, repurposing also helps you go viral. While it doesn't guarantee that any individual piece of content will become a viral hit, it does help you maximize the volume. Viral hits are often happy accidents. If you put too much effort into a single piece of content, betting on it going viral, you might be disappointed, disheartened, and discouraged when it doesn't. Virality for content creators is a volume-driven accident.
Almost every prominent YouTuber says that they did not expect the video that went viral to become so popular. Marketing companies that attempt to deconstruct viral hits often fail in their efforts to make virality predictable, as what goes viral is usually content that has never been created before.
Increasing the volume of your content will ultimately result in creating something unique and valuable enough to go viral. Repurposing helps you maximize the volume of your content. You don't know which video, image, GIF, or audio will go viral on which platform. But instead of giving one performance only one shot at viral success, you can let it have up to 30 different attempts at virality. If you create fresh content every day and multiply it by 30, you're improving your odds of becoming an accidental viral hit.
6. You Spend Less Time on Content Creation
Let's take the viral hit theory further. If maximizing your output increases your chances of going viral, is it worth creating 30 pieces of content every day? For most people, it's not because there are no guarantees that making that much content will result in viral fame. It takes 1600 CV submissions to get an entry-level job. And even with that statistical predictability, people apply to 113 positions on average. People would rather be jobless than put in the effort without a guaranteed return.
It is safe to assume that most people will not film 30 videos every day. But you can repurpose a single Zoom call into 130 videos. With content repurposing, you can reduce the effort required to make content. Lowering the effort can allow you to lower expectations from each piece of content. You won't be discouraged when a single image will garner 12 likes because you won't have spent hours crafting it. And when you create enough content consistently, the social media algorithms will reward you.
7. Allows You to Get the First Mover Advantage
Grant Cardone has one of the biggest personal success podcasts in the world. He also happens to be one of the few self-help event organizers to make a profit solely from ticket sales, with all upsells generating pure profit. One of the key contributors to his success was that he got on YouTube early on. But because he had a large real-life operation to run, he couldn't afford to film new content. What did he do? He repurposed a majority of his "Sales University" course and posted it for free on YouTube.
Previously, Cardone used to sell access to his Sales University through direct sales channels. It was targeted at corporate clients trying to improve their salespeople's performance. But because YouTube was giving new content creators easy reach, he was able to shift his target audience and become one of the biggest names in self-help. Today, his podcasts are repurposed into blog posts by his team.
His webinars get bundled and rebundled, and his talks get filmed and broken down into courses. He repurposes both paid and unpaid content, and you can do the same. But the key point to remember is that just because you don't have the first-mover advantage on YouTube doesn't mean you won't ever have it on a new platform. New social media platforms will never stop emerging. And when a new platform does come into existence, you will have enough content to post and maximize your reach.
8. Gives You Breathing Room To Create Better Content
Content creation can be exhausting if you do it on your own and expensive if you hire a team to do it for you. Not everyone can afford to have teams like Grant Cardone's or Gary Vee's. And that's okay. Because content repurposing is no longer a team sport, an individual can multiply their content across various formats by using ContentFries. There are two layers to this point. Firstly, even the top content creators across any space cannot afford to make only fresh content. They all repurpose content.
For instance, Shifty creates bite-sized clips for comedian Andrew Schultz. He is a full-time employee of the entertainer's enterprise. His content is then repurposed into clips, images, blog posts, and podcasts. He shared this in-depth in his famous GaryVee Content Model. Having established that top creators can focus on producing quality original content, knowing that repurposing will enable them to meet their content volume targets, we can move on to the next layer. Content Repurposing software is the second layer, as it allows everyone to do what the most popular content creators do, but without paying full-time editors or having entire teams.
In fact, the general public doesn't know anything about content-multiplying software, so you have a whole team working for you when your content gets multiplied into 100 different clips, images, videos, and even blog posts. But returning to the main point, you can create one piece of long-form content knowing that no bit of it will be wasted. If you're a professional speaker, you can focus on your keynote. If you're a podcaster, you can create one episode a week. If you're a coach or consultant, you can make a practical webinar.
9. Makes You Crash-proof Across Different Platforms
Deplatforming is becoming more common as the public has accepted the new limits imposed by social media. From the tech giants' perspective, at least, it makes the overall social media landscape safer. From some creators' perspectives, it gives unchecked power to giant platforms. For you, it's essential to be prepared in case you get banned, hacked, or shadow-banned on any platform. When you're platform-diverse, thanks to content repurposing, your entire digital footprint isn't erased by a single platform's decision to deplatform you. Repurposing gives you cross-format flexibility.
If your YouTube gets banned unfairly, you can strip audio from your videos and distribute them as a podcast. If all video and image-sharing platforms collectively decide to ban you, I can get all my content transcribed and post it as a collection of blogs. Content gives you options, and the more content formats you have, the more options you have.
How to Create YouTube Shorts From Existing Video in 2 Ways
1. Utilize YouTube Studio to Create Shorts from Existing Videos
When you want to repurpose an existing YouTube video into a Short, YouTube Studio is your best friend. Here’s how to do it:
1. Select Your Existing Video
Open the YouTube app on your mobile device and log in to your account. Find and select the pre-uploaded video you want to convert into a Short. This could be a video you want to promote, or one that contains essential information you want to share.
2. Start the Short Creation Process
When you choose your video, you'll see a Remix button underneath the video title. Click the Remix button, then select Edit into a Short.
3. Choose Your Short Footage
YouTube will take you to a Shorts creation page. Here, you can use the sliders to choose which section of your existing video to use for your Short. Keep in mind that YouTube Shorts can be up to 60 seconds long. A red bar at the top of your screen shows how much of those 60 seconds you have filled up.
4. Record Extra Footage, If Desired
If the section you selected is less than 60 seconds long, you can add extra footage. To do this, press the back arrow in the upper left corner of your screen. This takes you to Short's camera, where you can shoot additional content.
5. Import Additional Footage
In addition to recording extra content, you also have the option to import footage. To do this, go to your media library in the bottom left corner of the Shorts camera and select the video you want to import. When you’re done, click the tick icon in the bottom right corner.
6. Add Extra Features
YouTube will direct you to a preview page of your Short. At the bottom of this screen, you’ll see options to add text, a timeline, or filters to your video. Experiment with these options to include more information or modify the appearance of your Short. Use the timeline tool to adjust the timing of when your text appears.
7. Title Your Short
When you finish adding features, press Next. You’ll now see a box where you can type the title of your Short. Write out your caption. Below it, you can toggle options for the Short to be publicly visible and select whether the content is kid-friendly or not.
8. Post Your Short
Press the blue Upload Short button at the bottom of the page. This will post your Short. YouTube Shorts created in this way from pre-existing videos will include a link to the original video. Viewers can easily navigate to your original video with this link.
2. Use AI Tools to Create Shorts from Existing Videos
Another option is to use an AI tool to generate Shorts from pre-existing videos. The process is easy and quick, and it’s a great way to repurpose your content and reach a wider audience. You can make YouTube Shorts from existing videos in the YouTube Studio. On the other hand, you can use an AI platform to turn videos into Shorts straight after recording. Some tools include Riverside, Descript, Cray AI, Canva, and Opus Clip, among others.
We analyze the latest viral trends and help you understand not just when to post, but what combinations of elements are currently driving engagement. Whether you're just starting or looking to optimize your existing content, Virlo helps you navigate the ever-changing algorithms to increase your chances of going viral. Go viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool.
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How to Use Existing Videos as YouTube Shorts
1. Transform User-Generated Content Videos into Website Social Proof
User-generated content (UGC) videos can effectively show potential customers how real people use products. In doing so, UGC videos reduce buyer hesitation and help generate more sales. You can leverage UGC videos by embedding them on your website or landing pages. Let’s say you run an online store and sell tumblers. Instead of creating your product videos, you can find a video created by one of your customers on social media. By converting UGC videos into social proof for websites. This is a pretty clever use of user-generated content (UGC) videos. If you’re wondering why, consider how interactive content affects website performance: Interactive content can generate twice as many conversions as passive content. Additionally, landing page videos can enhance conversion rates by delivering key messages efficiently.
2. Create Animated GIFS Out of Videos for Email Marketing
When repurposing video content, you don’t always need to think far. It can be something as simple as turning snippets from the video into GIFs. For example, when Liquid Death partnered with Bad Birdie for a limited edition Uroclub, they repurposed their video Ad into GIFs for promotional emails.
3. Cut Soundbites from Podcasts for Social Media Promotion
Every good podcast (or interview) needs a good promotion. If you’re investing in producing top-quality video podcasts, you should be editing the footage into short videos and clips for social media promotion. It is essential to adapt video formats to suit the distinct characteristics of various social media platforms. Take out a soundbite, cut a teaser for the podcast. Create a montage with a voiceover. The possibilities are endless, but we’re providing two examples to draw inspiration from. First off, consider The Rich Roll Podcast on YouTube. He often edits the longer podcast into bite-sized soundbites and cross-posts the clips across Shorts, Instagram, and TikTok.
4. Repurpose Customer Testimonials or Influencer Collaborations into Social Media Ads
88% of consumers trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations. So, building trust and providing social proof is of utmost importance. However, we (also) often overlook something crucial. Most consumers also want to see the “product in use” to trust the brand. This is where video advertisements work wonders. Integrating repurposed video content into email marketing strategies can also be highly effective. SOSHE Beauty, a skincare-infused, clean makeup brand, often uses testimonials from genuinely happy customers as social media Ads.
5. Create Teasers and Highlight Videos to Promote Special Events, Podcast Episodes, or Contests
Repurposing long-form videos into teasers and highlights is a brilliant video marketing trick. It could be anything: a conference, a podcast episode, a product launch, and more. Regardless of the event, they can build anticipation and create buzz, chatter, and enthusiasm among the audience leading up to a special release. The Tim Ferriss Show, for example, always begins with a few seconds of teaser-like clips. It provides a glimpse into what’s to come and sets the tone for the episode.
Go Viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool
Virlo helps short-form content creators crack the code of virality through AI-powered trend analysis. Our platform combines creator insights with advanced analytics to identify winning content patterns, optimal posting times, and successful audio/video combinations that help your content stand out in today's fast-moving social environment. Perfect for independent creators looking to build a sustainable side business, Virlo eliminates the guesswork from content strategy.
We analyze the latest viral trends and help you understand not just when to post, but what combinations of elements are currently driving engagement. Whether you're just starting or looking to optimize your existing content, Virlo helps you navigate the ever-changing algorithms to increase your chances of going viral. Go viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool.
How to Find Trending Content for YouTube Shorts
1. Use Virlo to Guide Your Short-Form Content Creation
Virlo helps short-form content creators crack the code of virality through AI-powered trend analysis. Our platform combines creator insights with advanced analytics to identify winning content patterns, optimal posting times, and successful audio/video combinations that help your content stand out in today's fast-moving social environment. Perfect for independent creators looking to build a sustainable side business, Virlo eliminates the guesswork from content strategy.
We analyze the latest viral trends and help you understand not just when to post, but what combinations of elements are currently driving engagement. Whether you're just starting or looking to optimize your existing content, Virlo helps you navigate the ever-changing algorithms to increase your chances of going viral. Go viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool.
2. Dig Into YouTube's Trending Tab
To find YouTube trends via your YouTube homepage, navigate to the sidebar on the left and click the "Trending" tab. This section features a curated list of videos, organized by views, location, and engagement. Browse through the trending videos and look for potential themes and trends that coordinate with your niche, and make those trends and ideas your own! If a trend doesn't perfectly align with your style, consider how you can adapt it to fit your voice.
3. Hack the YouTube Search Bar for Related Trending Ideas
Once you get a broad view of some of the current trends, do some trending searches. Simply start typing trend queries into your YouTube search bar, but don't hit enter immediately - instead, pay attention to the suggested searches that pop up in the list below your initial query in the search bar. These suggestions can help reveal related searches, trending topics, and keywords on YouTube that viewers are actively seeking. Use YouTube keyword research to discover popular keywords with high search volume and identify the ones that match your niche.
4. Try Google Trends for Broader Insights
YouTube, of course, focuses on videos trending on YouTube - but as contrary as it seems, you shouldn't limit yourself solely to YouTube searches. YouTubers can additionally use Google Trends for a broader perspective. Google Trends shows what's being searched for on the internet in real-time, so you can use it to check out trending searches and find an even wider range of hot topics that could be relevant to your content and niche, sometimes before they even make it to YouTube.
5. Hop Onto Hashtags for More Trending Topic Ideas
Other social media platforms like Twitter (X) and Instagram are a treasure trove of trending topics for YouTubers. Look for trending hashtags and visual/text trends that are happening across your social media platforms, as well as those trending on YouTube. Keep an eye on how popular discussions are tracking so you can get a head start on the latest trends.
6. Watch What's Newsworthy for Short Inspiration
Current events, news stories, entertainment happenings, gaming events, concerts, fashion shows - all of these can rapidly spark trending topic ideas, memes, and more, helping YouTube creators get inspired to create content that capitalizes on fresh conversations!
7. Get Inspired By Your Peers for Your Shorts
Other channels and fellow YouTubers in your niche can be a great way to research trending content. Check out what topics are currently resonating with their audiences and identify potential trends you can incorporate into your content strategy - not copying other YouTube creators, but simply getting inspired to create using the trends in your way, for your own YouTube Shorts and videos!
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Go Viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool
Virlo helps short-form content creators crack the code of virality through AI-powered trend analysis. Our platform combines creator insights with advanced analytics to identify winning content patterns, optimal posting times, and successful audio/video combinations that help your content stand out in today's fast-moving social environment. Perfect for independent creators seeking to build a sustainable business, Virlo eliminates the guesswork from content strategy.
We analyze the latest viral trends and help you understand not just when to post, but what combinations of elements are currently driving engagement. Whether you're just starting or looking to optimize your existing content, Virlo helps you navigate the ever-changing algorithms to increase your chances of going viral. Go viral with Virlo's Virality Analysis Tool.
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