Hey there!

Welcome back to another edition of The Automated Growth Blueprint.

I'm Travis Steffen, and if you have any text-based content you’d like to rank in organic searches, chances are you’ve at least dabbled in keyword research, SEO meta info, and optimizing articles for search.

If you want to automate these motions, you're in for a treat.

Last week I was inspired to start building this automation because I migrated my old blog, Viral Hero, to my personal site (TravisSteffen.com). I wasn’t doing much with it because it’s now a book on Amazon (and wherever books are sold), but it was highly optimized for search and got a good amount of free traffic. Here it is if you want to check it out (alignment is still a bit janky… it’s a work in progress.)

Let's break down how I started this process by using common tools to turbocharge my SEO efforts with AI and automation tools.

The example below uses the blog post associated with the very newsletter you’re reading right now.

I’ve used ChatGPT, Zapier, SEMrush, and Google Sheets, but you can easily tweak this for your unique use case.

It’s a bit beefy, so buckle up.

(I’ll likely extend this automation significantly in future issues, so stay tuned - but in the meantime, here we go…)

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Step 1: Automate Keyword Research

a. Google Sheets Setup:

• Lay the groundwork with columns: "Blog Title", "Suggested Keywords", "Suggested Meta Info", "Status", and "Notes".

b. Zapier + HubSpot:

• Trigger: As soon as a new blog post emerges in HubSpot.

  • Use the “New COS Blog Article” event.

  • I also used “Drafts Only,” but you can also use “Published Only.” (There is a “both” option, but I’m not sure if you’d generate duplicates by doing that and didn’t test that.)

• Action: Make it populate your Google Sheet, recording the blog title.

  • Use the event “Create Spreadsheet Row” and the “1. Name” event in HubSpot as the text in the Blog Title column.

Here’s how the output looks so far:

Next, let's set up a new zap.

c. Zapier + ChatGPT + Google Sheets:

• Trigger: The prior automation’s Action step is the trigger for this one. In other words, this one gets triggered when a new entry appears in our Google Sheet cell that was just updated called Blog Title.

• Action 1: Using the ChatGPT Zapier plugin and integration (which I walked you through in last week’s newsletter), we prompt it to suggest keywords related to the blog title. Feel free to copy my settings below.

• Action 2: ChatGPT then needs to populate the "Suggested Meta Info" column with its recommendations. Notice that this time in the Assistant Instructions, I include GPT-4’s previously-generated keywords inside this prompt.

Okay - so far, so good…

But we have a bit more to go yet before we get an output in the sheet.

• Action 3: This one is a Spreadsheet Lookup action. This should ensure each row gets populated in order rather than overwriting.

• Action 4: Now we can actually populate the cells in the spreadsheet with what GPT-4 generated for us. Here’s how the action should look:

Let’s take a look at our output so far…

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Step 2: Get SEO Recommendations from SEMrush

a. Google Sheets Preparation:

- Draft columns for: "Topic", "Content Brief", "Generated Article", "Status", and "Notes".

b. Zapier + ChatGPT:

- Trigger: Upon adding a new content brief in Google Sheets.

- Action: ChatGPT crafts an article following your brief, which is then updated in the "Generated Article" column.

→ Today's action steps: Integrate your blog CMS with Zapier, and set up the automations as outlined above to save yourself or your marketing team and/or content creators about an hour per week.

That’s all for today.

Stay hungry.

- Travis Steffen

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If you’re hungry for more, you can…

1. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter where I share bite-sized nuggets about starting, growing, and selling companies every single day.
2. DM me directly via social media with a specific question, and I can explore it for a future newsletter.

PS - I have four 100% free guides that are about to go live on TravisSteffen.com that will walk you through how I think about starting new companies (I’ve started dozens), growing any company systematically (I’ve helped hundreds of founders do this), raising venture capital (companies I’ve grown have raised nearly $100m), and selling your company (I’ve sold 8 so far).

Stay tuned…