Read time: 6 minutes

Hello, fellow Fluxers,

We got a fun automation planned for you today. Writing blog posts can be boring and honestly, quite tedious… Let’s see if we can automate that, with today’s new workflow!

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

🤖 Automate blog post development with OpenAI and Zapier

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🤖 Tutorial

Automate Blog Post Development with OpenAI and Zapier

Unleash the prowess of OpenAI to supercharge your content creation! Imagine harnessing a vast array of data, crafting it with flair across various styles and tones — what a relief for your content squad! You’re not in it to craft epics from scratch but to spruce up OpenAI’s genius with your own twist.

The catch? OpenAI isn’t your one-stop shop content workshop. It’s a maestro of words, not a hub for your team’s content choreography. That brilliant output needs a stage to shine.

Enter the age where businesses are crafting content machines with the help of OpenAI’s GPT. They do this by using Zapier to link OpenAI to your project management platforms and Google Docs. Then, like magic! You’ll get a seamless workflow and futuristic content creation machine.

Create blog posts with OpenAI and Zapier:

Zapier is your backstage crew, orchestrating automated sequences known as Zaps that effortlessly pass your data from one app to the next. You can create your own Zap from scratch, without any coding knowledge required.

Zapier provides quick templates to help you get started. If you’d like to start with a template (make sure to create a Zapier account), click on your template, and you’ll be taken to the Zap editor. Then, just follow the instructions below to set up your Zap.

Prep your Project Management Tool:

We’re using Trello as our project management tool and Google Docs as the destination for our final drafts.

The prompt is extremely important when you start generating blog posts using OpenAI. A bad prompt will require additional editing (boo), or something that doesn’t match your goals at all.

You should probably develop a prompt template to streamline this process. After you fill in that template, you’ll add the prompt to your project management tool so Zapier can pick it up and send it to OpenAI.

FYI… Most project management tools allow you to create templates. In Trello, you can create a Template card and put the structure of your prompt in the Description. Then you can fill in the blanks for each piece of content you write.

In order to help OpenAI understand your prompt, you might also want to create additional custom fields within your project management tool. Some potential custom fields you might want to add are “Audience”, “Tone”, “Keywords”, and “Draft”.

Now let’s add a separate list for AI content:

Regardless of what project management tool you use, you should always have a method of indicating that the content is ready to be drafted in OpenAI. This method will be necessary because it’s:

1. The trigger Zapier needs to run your prompt.

2. All your content might not pass through OpenAI (mostly videos).

So you’ll need a way to differentiate which item of content should be sent to OpenAI

In Trello, we’ll create a separate list called “AI Content.” When we move our content to this list, that will be the trigger for Zapier (depending on your project management tool, you could use a tag, label or other indicator to accomplish this).

Now let’s set up your Trello trigger step:

Great! Now let’s go ahead and set up the Zap. In this example, we’re selecting Trello as our trigger app and Card Moved to List for our trigger event.

Next, we’re going to select the list you want Trello to watch for new cards. This should be the same list you created for AI content.

Now, test your trigger step. The data collected in this test is going to be used to set up the rest of your Zap. Once this test is completed, click Continue to move on to your first action step.

Let’s send the OpenAI prompt:

It’s finally time to set up your action step to send your prompt from Trello to OpenAI

Select OpenAI for your action app and Send prompt for your action event.

Now we’ll set up the Prompt field, which tells OpenAI the information it will need to write the blog post. This is an example used from the Zapier blog post, which you can use as motivation…

So in this example, not only did they add the description (which contains the prompt) they also added context (by using the custom Trello fields) to identify the keywords, audience, and tone. If you want to add all of these and any other data from the previous Trello step, simply click in the Prompt field and select the from the Insert Data dropdown.

So once we finish setting up our prompt, we should always test the action step and then add an additional step to our Zap.

Sending the OpenAI output to a Google Doc:

The previous OpenAI action step generated a blog post based on your prompt (yay!). Now, we need to send that output over to where we want to edit that blog post (like, Google Docs).

Select Google Docs for your action app and Create File from Text for your action event.

Now, click on the correct folder in your Google Drive to properly organize everything.

Now, let’s add the text output from the OpenAI step and any fields from Trello we want to include over to the File Content field, so we can add them to the body copy of our Google Doc. (P.S. In this example, they’re using Card Name from Trello as the document name and adding the assigned writer to the doc’s text.)

Now, let’s go ahead and select True for Convert to Document so that the file is properly added as a Google Doc instead of as a text file, or something like that.

Now that we’re done customizing our field, let’s go ahead and test our action step again. This will create a new Google Doc with our written draft in the Google Drive folder that we selected. Here’s an example from the Zapier blog…

Make sure to double-check and make sure that everything looks the way you need it to. Now, let’s go ahead and add the final step to our Zap!

Adding the Google Doc link back to the project management tool:

In order to close the loop on our content workflow, we will add the created Google Doc link back to our project management tool. We do this so we can easily click from our project management tool over to the Google Doc to see the final result.

In Trello, we should add a custom field for the Google Doc link.

Then, let’s add a final action step to the Zap. Select Trello for the action app and Update Card for the action event.

We’re now going to click in the Card field, then click on the Custom tab. After all that, we’ll select the Card ID (from our first step in Zapier).

Now, we click in the Draft Link field (this is what we named our custom field in Trello) and add the Alternate Link from our Google Doc step (which contains the full URL).

No need to update any other field in this Trello step. All we have to do is test our final action step, and then we should see our draft link the the project management tool

We double-check that everything is working as it’s supposed to… and finally… we’re now ready to use our Zap!!!

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