In partnership with: Outpost for more member revenue
It takes A LOT OF PROMOTION to run a media business. You’re busy and you don’t have time for all that. So what do you do?
AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
Anything that you’re doing on repeat is a candidate for automation.
We ran a live session on how to automate with Zapier (just for community bundle members!) and this post contains the 5 recipes we workshopped together, along with the session recording.
Zapier is a tool that connects two (or more) apps together. You can connect Squarespace to Buffer or Substack to Kit or Stripe to Airtable and more. They have 7000+ integrations and you can build your own integrations too (with some development work).
Get a free Zapier account and try some of these recipes below out! I included one click templates you can copy so it should take you mere minutes to start automating.
In this play
Watch the recording
Watch the recording from this session and make sure to sign up for a free Zapier account to try this stuff out. The free account allows you to have unlimited Zaps (you get limited on how much they can run and you’re limited to only two steps).
I know it can feel like YET ANOTHER SUBSCRIPTION (should you want to upgrade your Zapier account), but it’s much cheaper than wasting your time or hiring an assistant.
5 automation recipes for Zapier
Send new form submissions to newsletter subscribe
If you’re using a form tool like Squarespace (or any form tool!), you can send new form submissions through to add them as a subscriber. Only do this with permission (either make it clear in the message or add a checkbox so they opt in.)
🛠️ Tools involved: Squarespace and beehiiv
👟 Trigger: Squarespace → New Form Submission
🚅 Action: beehiiv → Add new subscriber
✏️ Notes: Squarespace’s API is an upgraded feature. You could hack this but sending your Squarespace form to a Google Sheet and making Google Sheets the start of your Zap automation.
Send a survey to canceled subscribers
Every time someone downgrades, you can send them a note with a survey to get a sense of why they cancelled. You can also send offers or tag these readers to remarket to later. You can either send them a note from your email OR you can send them the form directly.
🛠️ Tools involved: beehiiv and Fillout (or Gmail!)
👟 Trigger: beehiiv → New Subscription Downgrades
🚅 Action: Fillout → Send Form
✏️ Notes: This will send from notifications @ Fillout which isn’t very personal. I’d recommend either automating this within beehiiv (or your mailing list tool) OR changing the action to Gmail and sending a more personal note.
Save published posts to editorial calendar sheet
If you track your editorial calendar in Google Sheets, Airtable or Notion, you can use Zapier to sync back all your published links so you have a record of your posts.
🛠️ Tools involved: beehiiv and Google Sheets
👟 Trigger: beehiiv → New Post
🚅 Action: Google Sheets → Create Spreadsheet Row
✏️ Notes: You can do lookups on Google Sheets and you can filter data in Zapier (before you take an action) but we couldn’t easy crack how to look up the calendar row and sync this data so instead, we’re just added a new row. If you use a spreadsheet for your editorial calendar, I’d add a new sheet for published links and track them separately from your drafts/planning content.
Send published posts to social media
Take all your new published posts and automatically send them to your social channels. This is easiest with Bluesky, Twitter, Threads and LinkedIn but it could work on Instagram too.
🛠️ Tools involved: RSS Feed → Buffer
👟 Trigger: RSS Feed → New Item in Feed
🚅 Action: Buffer → Add to Queue
✏️ Notes: You can swap Buffer for the individual social channel but note that Bluesky is a paid feature of Zapier and Twitter’s no longer available in there. Buffer has a free tier though!
Send donors a personal thank you
Getting tips and donations and want to thank them? You can use Zapier to send them a note from your Gmail and you can even add them to spreadsheets or label them in your email tool to track donors.
🛠️ Tools involved: Stripe → Gmail → Google Sheets → Ghost
👟 Trigger: Stripe → New Payment
🫗 Filter: Filter by Zapier → Only continue if “Description” contains (whatever it contains for donations)
🚅 Action: Gmail → Send Email
🚅 Action: Google Sheets → Create Spreadsheet Row
🚅 Action: Ghost → Create Member
✏️ Notes: You can swap Google Sheets for Airtable or another CRM. On the Ghost side, you can also Update Members and Label them as donors. If you have trouble with this, you could use the Google Sheets info to make these updates (rather than the original Stripe data).
Other tips from our session
- Use a digital whiteboard or a piece of paper to map out what you’re trying to do BEFORE you hop into Zapier (especially if it’s multi-step).
- If your automation goes from the same app to the same app (Ghost to Ghost, beehiiv to beehiiv, Notion to Notion), see if you can set your automation up inside that tool instead of using Zapier.
- For general social media scheduling, use Buffer or Publer
