How to Automate Your Content Repurposing

You've probably heard the advice, you should repurpose your content. You should take a blog post and turn it into five social posts. But how does that actually get done? And does it feel like a really manual process? In this video, I'm going to talk about content repurposing automation. How you can use automation tools like Zapier to start with one piece of content and very clearly identify a workflow that takes you to another piece of content. And if you use a little bit of generative AI in the middle, you can save yourself even more time, though that's not a necessary part of the process. My name is Anna Burgess Yang and in this video I'm going to take you through, step by step, how to set up the automation and give you a bunch of ideas to get you thinking about creating automation for your own content repurposing. Before we get into some specific examples, I want to talk more broadly about how how to set up content repurposing automation. Because no matter what tools you're using, there are a few things that you'll always have in common. First of all, you have a trigger event, which is some piece of content that you have already published that might be a new blog post or a new video, or some other piece of content you've created. That's your starting point. Next, you have to think about the destination. Where do you plan to republish this content in the future? In a different format that might be republishing it to a single platform, or you might be republishing it on different platforms in the future. Next, you'll think about the transformation. Is the format of the original content suitable for the new platform? In most cases, no. You're going to shorten it, you're going to tweak it, you're going to modify it in some way so that it's suitable for your new platform. This is where generative AI can come in. You can include a genai tool like ChatGPT to help make this process flow more smoothly. In the example we're going to look at, I'm going to take a blog post and reformat it as some social posts for LinkedIn, and I'm going to use generative AI in the middle to jumpstart that process. If you're not comfortable using generative AI, you can completely skip this step and you can still use the rest of the automation. Finally, you need some type of project management tool or social media scheduling tool, or both. The whole goal of this is to build out a content calendar based on automation. So you're going to send your output to your project management tool or your social media scheduling tool, edit it from there, and then get it ready to publish. Now that I've shared these steps, what does that actually mean and what does that look like as an example? So here are the steps I follow for one of my automations for content repurposing. I start with a new blog post. I want the content of that new blog post to be turned into future social posts for LinkedIn based on the ideas that I wrote. I run the content through ChatGPT with some specific instructions about how to format that post for LinkedIn based on my style and my tone of voice. And those potential social posts are then added to my project management tool. All of this is automated. I am not manually copying my blog post content into ChatGPT and having it pull out instructions and then manually adding it to my project management tool. When my new blog post is published, the automation kicks off all of the rest of these steps. Here are some other examples you could consider. You might have a webinar transcript and you want to turn those into future social posts. You may have a post you publish on LinkedIn and you want to reformat that so it's appropriate for threads. You may have a published blog post and want to pull out one of the main ideas and turn it into a video script. I produce a lot of content on the Internet and almost all of it is repurposed through automation in some way. Here is a screenshot of my content queue in Trello. You can see I have literally hundreds of potential ideas and most of it is based on something that I have published previously. So let's talk about the tools you need to make this happen. A minimum. You have to have an automation tool. That's what makes all of this possible. You can use Zapier, you can use make, you can use if this, then that. But an automation tool is what runs in the background. You need to have a project management tool because your output from your automation tool has to go somewhere. That's so you know what additional content you need to create in the future, when and for what platform. If you don't use a project management tool today, you could output the results to something like a Google Doc or a Google Sheet, but it'll be a little bit harder to work from. I recommend using a project management tool and a lot of them have free plans. You'll need a social media scheduling tool. I recommend this so you're not scheduling social media posts on the fly Instead, you're going from your project management tool to social media scheduling. In some cases, you may even send your automation directly to social media scheduling and just edit it there. I simply prefer to work from my project management tool. And optionally you need generative AI, one that works with your automation tool such as ChatGPT or Claude. I happen to use Zapier, Trello, Buffer, and OpenAI to make all of this happen, so let's take a look at this example in Zapier. This again is going from a blog post to social media posts. It is very simple and just three steps. My first step is a new item in my RSS feed, so I have to configure this using the RSS feed URL for my blog. This will vary depending on the host of your blog platform. I use Ghost. Whether you're using WordPress or some other tool, you need to determine what that feed is. Google should be able to help you with that if you're not sure. Next, I am calling ChatGPT with a conversation with Assistant. In the configuration you'll see I have a lot of instructions with who I am, what audience I'm serving, and some examples. And if I scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see here under New blog posts, I have to pull the content from my RSS feed. That's so ChatGPT runs my instructions with this new content from my RSS feed every time a new blog post is published. Lastly, I create a card in Trello which is like adding a to do. I have a specific project called my Content Calendar. These posts are going to LinkedIn. That's how I know what platform they need to be published on. I give them the name based on the title of my blog and then here I'm putting the output from the ChatGPT step. That way when I come into work on Trello, I'll have several social posts to choose from. I might publish them all. I might not publish any of them. One thing I do to make this step easier is in the ChatGPT instructions, I tell it to return only the post examples and no other text. Otherwise ChatGPT will put something in like certainly here are some examples for you. And that's just more editing that I have to do later. By telling it to only include the output, it's easier for me to work through in Trello and then get the posts ready to schedule. Finally, I have a due date and this is how I'm building out my content calendar in Trello. I want to publish these posts 30 days later when I publish a blog post, I immediately share a link to the post and I like to space these out a little bit. So I put that I'm going to publish these additional posts 30 days later. If it's something more time sensitive, then you might want a shorter due date so that you're dripping everything out over a couple of days and that's it. Hopefully your wheels are turning with a lot of ways that you could set up automation to repurpose your own content. But if you need some additional ideas, there is a link down in the description to a free download that I have with a whole checklist of ideas for you to set up your own automation. If you liked this video and found it helpful, Please let the YouTube algorithm know by hitting the like button. You can also subscribe to be notified when new videos are published. Thanks and I'll see you again soon.