How to Automate Repurposing Your Blog with ChatGPT and Zapier

I love blogging, but I hate repurposing content. I always forget to!

That’s why I LOVE Zapier and Make.com – two systems that help me automate my content repurposing across social media, my newsletter, and even making new blog posts. Tie them in with ChatGPT and you’ve got a match made in heaven.

And I’m going to teach you how to use them right now.

But before I start, a special thank you to Ron and Jess of Unearth the Voyage.

I attended Travel Blogging Summit Nashville where Ron shared his EPIC methods of automating his team with Google Sheets and Zapier.

(My whole team is now automated AF thanks to him – and they are all super appreciative to him cause I am a disaster at organization 😛). If you’re looking to do the same with your team, you can get them to set it up for you here.

So thank you to Ron and Jess for inspiring this post!

Also thank you to Jamie IF for encouraging a full write up of my process when I assumed everyone was already doing this.

Zapier + Make.com: Two Ways to Automate Your Blog

If you’ve known me for a bit you’ll know I proudly call myself the Laziest Blogger Alive!

I will happily spend 20 hours figuring out a way to save 5 mins – so I did.

I use two tools mainly to do this: Zapier and Make.com.

Make.com (formerly Integromat) was my first introduction to tools like Zapier – although most of y’all prob know Zapier first. You get 1000 free “zaps” each month.

Zapier is the more well known product for workflow automations. It connects thousands of tools to help make your life easier. You get 100 free “zaps” each month. 

(1 zap = 1 run of an automation. So if you have 5 automations and they each run 1 time, that’s 5 zaps used. I’ll be calling them “zaps” because that’s what Zapier calls them)

Essentially you set up these waterfall connections between different softwares to transfer data.

A common use is when a software doesn’t connect to your email newsletter provider. You can use Zapier to bridge the gap – kind of like a mediator.

These systems both integrate with hundreds of products, including ChatGPT.

I started using Make.com back when I attempted Facebook ads (not my thing. Absolutely hate them. They are hell on earth to set up). It connected my Facebook ad leads to Mailerlite so I could actually email these people I’d paid to meet.

I didn’t even know about Zapier until much later, but I quickly became obsessed with the minor differences in functionality. So now I have multiple accounts on both – one for each site (cause I keep telling myself one day I’ll sell one of the damn things and I thought this would make it easier to sell).

3 Ways to Repurpose Content with Zapier and Make

On to the automations!

1. Blog Post to Socials

The Helpful Content Update has meant a lot of shifts for bloggers, including treating your blog more like a brand. 

Well, brands show up on socials all the time.

Most of us have 0 time to spare, so while diversifying is great, we just can’t hack it.

Enter my Zapier automation! 

Here is what it looks like:

How Does it Work?

It detects new WordPress posts and converts their format to Markdown (getting rid of all of the coding nonsense), it summarizes the content to about 500 words, then sends it to Open AI (the OpenAI function with Zapier works WAY better than the ChatGPT one for some reason).

I use one of the prompts from my 350+ prompt library in my ChatGPT Blogging Blueprint course. 

Note: I reduce it to 500 words because I don’t want to waste API credits having it read a 10k word post just to get 1-2 sentences to publish on socials.

I prompt it to turn the summary into a relevant social post for whichever platform I’m using – Facebook in our example. 

Since my Facebook page and group can get the same post, I use one Zap to automate both. But I have separate ones for Youtube and Twitter. 

You can even do it with Instagram or Pinterest, but the images it’ll pull from may take some tweaking to get right.

The great thing about this is it’s not just sharing some generic “click here” or “new post” kind of nonsense.

It can actually write something based on the post and even ask engaging questions to your audience. It just depends on the prompt you give it! 

Pro Tip: Use the “text-davinci-003” version of Open AI. It gives the best outputs for these purposes. 

Don’t want to fuss with setting this up?

Make.com has a great pre-made automation for it – which was actually how I first thought to do this, but I found some of the social media logins annoying to set up:

How Does it work?

Make.com takes your WordPress post and has ChatGPT read the whole thing (so you may want to add a step to get it summarized first to save $$) then convert it to social post content.

The Text Parser element finds the different social posts by identifying the name of the platform (note: you could also do this on Zapier if you want to save more API credits I’m realized literally as I write this).

Then it routes the relevant text to each platform.

I find the Linkedin extra ChatGPT prompt cool because it finds the URL for the image you reference in your post to add to your LinkedIn post.

Try it here!

Note: Both Zapier and ChatGPT can also send your outputs into an Airtable. This can allow you to repurpose content again and again. I haven’t set this up myself, but it could be a good option if you want to try to mimic a social media cyclical publisher or a scheduler .

2. Blog Post to Newsletter

Another great use case is turning your blog posts into a quick weekly newsletter.

This is so much better than just sending an RSS feed to your audience every week if you’re not really at the stage of sending full on newsletters yet.

I’ve got a couple ways to do this but the easiest for beginners is this set up in Make.com:

How Does it Work?

I wanted it 100% automated – which unfortunately neither Zapier nor Make can currently do with Convertkit.

But Mailerlite does work with Make.

So this set up detects new posts published on your WordPress, then reads them with Open AI (again, you may want to summarize the post first to save on credits) and rewrites them into a newsletter. Then it sends it to create a campaign in Mailerlite.

It will send it for you if you want, or you can schedule it. I do think scheduling it is the best idea to be honest, even though I do prefer it 100% automated.

This enables you to space out emails if, let’s say, you publish 5 blog posts in a row.

The WordPress connection will let you limit the number of posts it’ll send through within an hour, but still 5 emails in a day would be a lot for anyone to send.

Other Options:

1) You can also put it the output into a Google Doc or Airtable and just copy it over manually – but again, I wanted everything on autopilot.

This would also work to connect it to some other social share platforms that do autosend it at intervals.

2) Zapier can send it via the special Zapier email or Gmail but that’s not the same as using an email provider like this. 

This is something I’m setting up for some of my baby sites. 

I just don’t have time to deal with a newsletter for them, but inexplicably they all have subscribers though I don’t even have a freebie for any of them. 

Now my audience can be alerted to new posts, and are primed for when I eventually maybe possibly actually have a newsletter for those sites (or I sell them and someone else does have time to do that).

3. Newsletter to Blog Post

This workflow was my #1 reason I figured out these automated connections and it’s the one I’m most proud of. It took an eon and a half to finally get sorted!

(Psstt… it’s actually the automation I used to write this post which began as a far too long email!)

I spend a lot of time creating emails for y’all and I know some people miss out on them because they weren’t on the list back then. 

Or they want to refer back, but they’ve lost it in their inbox.

I wanted to create blog posts from these newsletters, but I had 0 spare time.

Some people just upload them as is in a newsletter archive, but why would I make it easy on myself? 

Here is the set up:

How Does it Work?

This one isn’t perfect, I’ll admit. 

Convertkit and Mailerlite don’t have quite the right formatting within Zapier, so the best method is to have a custom Zapier email as a subscriber.

Once the Zapier email receives your newsletter, I found the best results were from finding the “view in browser” URL and then parsing it to turn it into Markdown.

Technically the Formatter can do that too, but on all my tests it just didn’t work as well as this somewhat circuitous method. And since it doesn’t cost me anything extra to have it go this route, I just went with it.

Note: Make.com does it as well – which is where I started with it, but it’s a bit sloppier. So I like this set up best. Their internal zaps aren’t as clear as Zapier’s so it’s more of a hunt to get it close to this functionality.

And voila! You have a blog post from your newsletter, so you don’t have to just publish an archive page.

You will still need to edit the post a little bit and it doesn’t pass over the images unfortunately.

Other Automations I’m Working On

I’ve been playing around with a number of these with OpenAI/ChatGPT to automate more things in my business.

After an Authority Hacker video about using AI to auto respond to emails or auto categorize them, I found a zap that can do basically the same thing with Zapier.

So now all the “guest post request” emails for my baby site can get an auto reply that denies it unless they want to pay for a sponsored post and sends my rates.

I have one I’ve been developing for custom backlink outreach but I keep having too many irons in the fire to finalize it.

It’s pretty cool though but it does require some human intervention between the steps, but it works a lot like programmatic SEO meets backlink building.

Connecting ChatGPT

You can’t connect your GPT4 account for this to work. You’ll need an OpenAI API to make these function.

It’s pretty easy to set up. You can do so here.

It does cost some money for this to run but it’s not terribly expensive. Do be careful when you’re testing your prompts and your zaps, as it can rack up quickly if you’re having it run on 10k words 100x trying to get yourself organized.

Test your prompts inside of ChatGPT first then move them over to the zap after.

Conclusion

I honestly didn’t realize everyone wasn’t doing this already, since I usually feel like I’m the last one to ever learn any tech – and I came to Zapier sooo late in the game. 

If you have any cool ones you’re doing, I’d love to know! Or if you can think of any better ways to do the things I’m doing, I’d love to know that too!

But since I mentioned the social media set up, about 30 people have asked me to make a course on the AI-ifying of Zapier so I might have to.

Share any of your top Zapier tips in my free Facebook Group, SEO for Bloggers to help us all get AAF – automated as fuck.

Read More About AI and Content Creation

Like this post? Share it with others!