How I Automated My Entire Content Business with Make.com (And You Can Too)
Six months ago, I was doing everything manually.
Research a topic. Write the post. Format it. Upload it. Schedule the newsletter. Cross-post to socials. Track affiliate clicks. Repeat. It was a full-time job just to keep the content engine running — and I hadn't even touched growth yet.
Now? Most of that runs while I sleep. Not because I hired a team, but because I built a system. The tool that made it possible: Make.com.
This isn't a listicle of "10 automations you should try." This is the actual playbook I use — with specific workflows, trigger logic, and the exact tools connected. If you run a content business powered by AI, this is what the back end looks like when it's actually working.
Why Make.com and Not Zapier
I'll keep this short because it's not the point of the article: Make.com handles complex, multi-step logic without charging you a fortune or making you feel like you're working against the tool.
Zapier is point A to point B. Make.com is a visual workflow builder where you can branch, loop, aggregate data, handle errors, and chain 20+ steps without duct tape holding it together. For a content business with real complexity — multiple platforms, affiliate tracking, conditional publishing — Make.com is the only tool that doesn't break under the weight of what you're actually trying to do.
Start with a free account here and see the visual builder before you decide. It clicks fast.
Workflow 1: The Content Research Pipeline
What it does: Monitors RSS feeds, newsletters, and Reddit threads for trending topics in my niche. When something hits a relevance threshold, it logs it to a Notion database and sends me a Slack ping.
The logic:
- Trigger: Scheduled — runs every 6 hours
- RSS aggregator pulls from 12 sources (AI/tech/creator economy feeds)
- OpenAI module: feeds each headline through a prompt that scores relevance (1-10) and flags if it's "content-worthy"
- Filter: Only items scoring 7+ continue
- Notion module: Creates a new row with title, source, summary, and relevance score
- Slack/webhook: Sends me a digest of flagged items
Time saved: ~45 minutes of daily feed-checking, gone. The database populates itself. I review it when I'm ready to write.
Real result: I haven't manually searched for content ideas in four months. The pipeline surfaces them.
Workflow 2: The Article → Multi-Platform Publishing Flow
This is the one that changed everything.
When I finish an article and mark it "Ready to Publish" in Notion, a Make.com scenario fires and does all of this automatically:
- Pulls the article content from the Notion database
- Formats for Ghost — strips Notion-specific markdown, applies proper HTML structure, inserts affiliate links at the right positions
- Publishes to Ghost via the Admin API
- Creates a Substack draft with an adapted intro and the full article body
- Generates 3 X thread variations using an OpenAI prompt tuned to my voice
- Logs everything — Ghost URL, publish time, platform status — back to Notion
What used to take 90 minutes of copy-paste-format-upload hell now takes the time it takes me to flip a status toggle.
Workflow 3: Voice Content Automation (With ElevenLabs)
Here's one most people aren't doing yet: audio versions of every post.
The workflow:
- After Ghost publish, the article HTML gets cleaned to plain text
- Make.com sends it to ElevenLabs via API — my cloned voice reads it aloud
- The audio file gets uploaded to a podcast RSS feed automatically
- Substack and Ghost get updated with the embedded audio player
The result: every piece of written content I produce also becomes a podcast episode. Zero extra work on my end. ElevenLabs handles the voice synthesis; Make.com handles the routing.
If you're not already using ElevenLabs for this, you're leaving audience reach on the table. The voice quality is indistinguishable from human at this point — and your readers who prefer audio will thank you.
Workflow 4: Affiliate Click Tracking + Weekly Revenue Reports
Affiliate revenue is real money — but only if you know what's working.
My tracking scenario:
- A webhook fires whenever someone clicks an affiliate link (via a custom redirect service)
- Make.com logs: link clicked, referring article, timestamp, and device type
- Every Monday at 9am: an aggregation module summarizes last week's clicks by article and affiliate partner
- OpenAI generates a 3-sentence insight (e.g., "Make.com links in workflow articles convert 3x better than in list posts")
- The report lands in Notion + a Slack message
This sounds fancy. It's not. It took about two hours to build and now I have real conversion data instead of guessing.
The Architecture Underneath All of This
Every workflow connects back to Notion as the single source of truth. Make.com is the connective tissue between platforms. OpenAI does the cognitive work — summarizing, scoring, generating variations. ElevenLabs handles voice. Ghost and Substack are the output surfaces.
The total cost of this stack: under $100/month. The time it frees up: somewhere between 15-20 hours per week that I used to spend on mechanical, repeatable tasks.
That's not automation as a gimmick. That's automation as a business model.
Where to Start
If you've never used Make.com, don't try to build all four workflows at once. Pick the one that hurts most right now — probably the publishing flow if you're manually cross-posting — and build that first.
Sign up for Make.com here (they have a generous free tier — you can build and test everything before you pay a cent). Then come back to this article and use it as a build guide.
The content business that runs itself isn't theoretical anymore. It's a Make.com scenario file.
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