Our client, who has a YouTube channel and regularly shares their latest YouTube videos on their blog wanted to save time as the whole process required multiple manual steps for each new video and new post.
The problem
The time consuming, manual way of creating blog posts for new YouTube videos:
- Creating the post
- Copying the share code for the video and adding it to the post
- Copying the relevant parts of the video description and pasting them to WordPress.
- Uploading the thumbnail
- Setting the correct category and tag
- Setting the correct published date
The solution
The client needed a way to automatically create a post every time a new video was published.
Using Zapier, we developed an automated workflow that:
- Monitors the channel for new videos
- Applies a series of 3 filters to ensure only qualified videos meeting specific criteria get published to WordPress:
- The privacy status is set to public
- The video has a custom thumbnail
- The video contains hidden text to signify it should be sent to the blog
- Utilises Zapier’s formatters to extract part of the text from the video description and add one day to the date
- Uploads the thumbnail from YouTube to WordPress and creates the new post.
Each post’s publication data is scheduled 24 hours in the future from the video publication s that the editorial team have time to add additional content before the post goes live.
The Win
Through this automation, our client eliminated the manual effort and ensured that no videos were overlooked as well as improving the consistency of regular posts to their blog.
Systems Integrated
- YouTube
- WordPress
- Zapier
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