Content Production System

Most top-of-funnels are digital cookie monsters gobbling content with reckless abandon. 

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You must feed the beast. 

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I’ve been creating content consistently since 2018 and it’s only gotten harder to pump out new ideas.

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But what if you don’t even bear the title “content creator”? What if you’re working with clients who are busy business owners?

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Content creation is intimidating. 

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That’s why an automated content production system is your new best friend. If content is cookies, then a content production system is a recipe book. 

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Today I’ll show you how to build your very own Content Production Agent-cy (see what I did there?) using Zapier to scrape existing Youtube videos as inspiration, create new ideas, and generate video outlines. 

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Build time: 1.5 hours (less for you since I did all the hard work)

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P.S. This is a great packaged service you could sell to businesses.

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Let’s build. 

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How the Youtube Content Agent works

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You’ll start by creating a Zapier AI Agent (in Central) that can do two things:

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1. Search for Youtube videos and scrape their details
2. In the Chrome Extension, scrape details from a visible Youtube video

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It will put the videos into a Zapier Table. Within the table, you can do two things:

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1. Archive videos that aren’t relevant
2. Click a button to generate video ideas inspired from the original scraped video

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If you decide to generate ideas, the button triggers a Zap that does two things:

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1. Uses AI by Zapier (just a ChatGPT wrapper) to generate ideas and create a video outline
2. Add each idea (along with a link to the video outline) in another table

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While I used Google Docs and saved the video outline in a specific folder, you could just as easily create the video outline in Notion, Coda, Gmail, or any other place you want.

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Let’s break down each part of the system. 

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Creating the AI agent in Zapier

You’ll use Zapier’s AI Agent product Central (the name of the product might actually change soon!).

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No need to get an Apify subscription or any other AI web scraping tool. Zapier can handle it all. 

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You only need two (almost identical) behaviors:

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1. One for searching Youtube videos
2. One for scraping a Youtube video (when using the Chrome extension)

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You’ll give each behavior the ability to search the existing Zapier Table to avoid duplicates and to create records in the Table. 

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Here’s the prompt for searching Youtube videos:

You will search Youtube for a list of videos based on a topic I will give you and target number of videos to find and possibly other criteria I give you like published date ranges and/or view counts. Then, you will take each video, search {{insert Zapier Table data source}} to make sure it hasn't already been added. If it hasn't been added, then ensure you find the Channel name for each video and then {{insert Zapier Create Record action}} with the Youtube video URL, Title, Channel name, full Description, View Count, and published date, and the topic(s) (which is the one(s) I'll give you).

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The only difference for the Chrome extension behavior is to replace the sentence at the beginning with “You will scrape a currently viewed video or list of videos through the Chrome Extension.”

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Grab the Zapier Central extension if you don’t already have it.

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Storing the videos and generating ideas

All of the videos you scrape will pull into the Zapier Table. 

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If you do end up scraping from the Chrome extension, you could reveal the transcript of the video by clicking “more” on the video description and at the very bottom you’ll see a button to “Show transcript.” Just click that and the AI agent will grab the transcript, too. 

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Now, I could have set this up to automatically generate ideas and video outlines, but it helps to have a human filter down the list. 

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For each idea, you can either archive it by clicking a checkbox or click the Generate button to trigger the Zap. Just set the Filter to only show Archive = false to make the archive functionality come to life. 

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If you click to generate ideas a Zap will trigger.

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What I love about this Zap is that it uses AI by Zapier. It’s powered by ChatGPT but it has a prompt assistant which makes things so easy. Here’s what generating the ideas looks like (you’ll see the prompt builder assistant on the far left which I originally used to generate the prompt):

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The Zap loops through all five ideas (you could set this to be 10, 20+ ideas if you want), creates a brief video outline, and saves the Google Doc in a folder.

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Wrapping it up

This Content Production System could be used for more than just Youtube videos. Use it for blog posts, social content, and whatever else. 

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You’ll have a handy little folder anytime you need inspiration for content, saving you from the blank page.

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This is a great package to sell to small businesses whose owners are typically juggling a billion different things and need some help with content.

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To recap:

• Content Production Systems help inspire and generate ideas from existing content
• AI Agent scrapes, Zapier Table stores, Zaps automate with AI
• Use it for any type of content and target small business owners if you’re looking to sell the system

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce