Nowadays, automation is the name of the game. Generally speaking, as a business owner, the time you have available tends to be a struggle, so you’re going to need to find ways to preserve it. Luckily, with the technology that’s accessible, automating certain tasks is no longer a sci-fi dream – it’s real and it’s here. Better yet, you don’t necessarily need to be a tech whiz to pull it off. While you certainly could if you wanted to, let the following sink in: you do not need to be a coder to set up a simple automation and we’ll show you everything you need to know.

If you’re reading this, you’re already well aware of the power of blogging and the wonders it can do for your business in terms of getting new clients and eyeballs on your products and services. Whether it’s to boost natural traffic to your website via SEO, for your newsletter or simply to give your visitors another reason to stop by every so often, the industry pros choose to automate blog posts by implementing what’s referred to as RSS feed automation.

But don’t let the name scare you! First, we’ll explain what the technology is meant to accomplish in layman terms, then, if you stick to the end, we’ll show you how modern-day tools like Ocoya can completely automate this aspect of your business.

RSS feed automation: What is it and why should you care?

In essence, Really Simple Syndication (or RSS for short) is a format of sorts. It’s a structured way to keep up with different publications and news sources, including blogs. From a reader’s perspective, it allows you to keep in the loop with your favorite creators without having to visit their respective websites individually. In other words, it’s a massive time-saver!

Describing it as ‘all of your news and blog updates in one place’ would be a good way to go about it. And it works as a subscription-based mechanism – you only receive the kind of updates you’re actually interested in (when this stops being the case, you can unsubscribe at any time). It also happens to be a fantastic way to curate content, so other distribution channels have an easier time picking it up and featuring it as part of their newsletters, PR blasts, etc.

However, that’s by no means all it can do – pay attention to this part if you’re a business owner or a digital marketer! If you set up an RSS feed automation, it’s a fantastic way to populate your social media channels with the very same content you’re posting to your blog, and you don’t even need to lift a finger to do it. Think of it as killing two birds with one stone. Simply put, it’s a fantastic way to save time and optimize your workflow.

Now here’s where most business owners stumble – they may read up on all the advantages that RSS feed automation brings to the table, they’re ready and willing to automate their blog posts to be posted to various social media channels on autopilot, but they simply don’t know how to get the ball rolling. More often than not, this is due to technical hurdles.

But don’t worry – we’re here to address that and give you a way to automate your blog posts via RSS on easy mode! In fact, if you’re already using Ocoya, setting up the RSS feed automation should be smooth sailing and we’ll lead you every step of the way.

How to automate blog posts with Ocoya

We’ve prepared a comprehensive over-the-shoulder guide on how to set up your RSS automation fast and easy, the Ocoya way:

We invite you to go and have a look. After that, let’s re-iterate and emphasize a couple of key points:

- There’s a content filter available. If you have an RSS feed with lots of clutter but you’d only like to post certain types of blogs exclusively, it’s a handy, turnkey solution that lets you do that.

- The default setting is for Ocoya to save the content as draft, meaning it won’t go live straight away. You can, of course, simply disable this setting with one click. But generally speaking, leaving the ‘save as draft’ option turned on allows you to have an extra degree of control over what gets posted to your social media channels.

- You can also use your Youtube channel as an RSS feed.

- Ocoya has an AI-powered feature that lets you automatically generate content based on a prompt you provide. This lets you get pretty creative with it!

- Ocoya will either publish your post immediately or schedule it for a later date

- After your post has been published, Ocoya will track its performance with the help of advanced analytics

See how easy and straightforward that is? Your grandma could probably do it! To make it work, you only need to make sure that:

- You have an Ocoya account

- Your social media accounts have been successfully integrated (you can easily get that done under the “Socials tab”)

- You either have content already prepared (alternatively, you can let Ocoya’s AI capacities handle that part for you – yes, that includes images and videos, and it can even analyze your top performing content to generate something similar)

How to automate blog posts using a Zapier automation

If you, for some reason, want to make it harder on yourself, there are alternative ways to do it (although they are not recommended, especially if you’re not particularly tech-savvy). Setting up a Zapier automation is probably the closest middle ground to what we’d consider user-friendly, and even that doesn’t even come close to the bells and whistles you’d get by using Ocoya.

So, if you’ve decided to go the Zapier way, immediately, there’s a question that you need to answer: will you be republishing your posts or are you planning to syndicate other people’s posts on social media? You could even go the ChatGPT route and utilize your own prompts if you’re not afraid of doing a little bit of prompt engineering. Just a word of warning – things will get a bit technical from here on out!

For starters, you need to pick a template offered by Zapier. Alternatively, you’re free to create your own workflow. That’s assuming you already have a Zapier account – go create one if you haven’t done so already. Depending on what exactly you need, you can edit a template to suit your needs (at the very least, you’re going to need to insert your tokens and credentials).

Bear in mind that, Zapier’s logic dictates that every step should start with a trigger (the so-called ‘if statement’ if you have a background in programming). After you’ve determined that, setting up what happens afterwards is the next logical step. This can be either one or more steps. Every time the condition is fulfilled, the trigger will activate, causing a chain of events to unfold. For instance, this could be:

- A new post appears on your blog (a trigger)

- Zapier picks it up and posts it on your social media channels (an action event)

If you’re using Wordpress (at the time of writing, it’s still one of the most popular CMS platforms), your RSS feed will be automatically generated for you. Every time a post gets published, this adds another entry to it, effectively updating it on the fly. And Zapier can easily hook into your RSS feed, determining whether a new post has been published.

This is an over-simplified way of describing things for the sake of illustrating them to people who have never done anything similar before. You can, of course, make your Zapier scripts as simple or as complex as you wish them to be. For instance, if you want to generate new posts from scratch by integrating ChatGPT, you can bet that things will become quite technical.

In Zapier’s terms, invoking ChatGPT is referred to as a ‘conversation’ and it’s one of the action events you could place in the chain. But even before that, you’re going to need to set up a connection with it and make sure it works. That requires fetching API keys from your ChatGPT user account (you will need to create a new secret key on ChatGPT). Store these credentials in a safe place, because you’ll need them for integration purposes.

So now that you’ve connected ChatGPT and Zapier, you need to decide on what model you’re going to be using. The default option is the GPT-4o mini, but you’re free to go with whichever you prefer. Finally, hook it up with a prompt you’ve cleverly designed and polished, have it generate the blog post for you, then publish the result to a social media of your choosing (Zapier seamlessly integrates with most if not all of the popular ones).

As a final nugget of wisdom, make sure to always test, test, test! Set up a dummy account and make sure that everything goes according to plan before deploying. And remember – if any of the above sounds way too technical and not like something you have the time or the patience to mess around with, know that the process is not even 10% as difficult, demanding or time-consuming with Ocoya.

Best practices for auto posting content to social media

Now that you know at least a couple of ways to automate blog posts, it’s not a bad idea to familiarize yourself with what to do and, more importantly, not to do when relying on this approach. For starters, you don’t want to get flagged as a spammer! Moreover, make sure to keep the following in mind:

- If you’re not going to be posting your own original content but rather syndicating content created by other people, choose feeds that are relevant to your audience and also gauge how well they align with your brand’s voice and the message you’re trying to convey. As a general rule of thumb, go for the kind of content that demonstrates value and also positions you as an authority in your niche.

- Be vigilant when it comes to filtering out the noise. As stated in the previous point, you want to keep the content you post relevant, otherwise there’s a real risk of losing the attention of a subscriber and that’s not good. If you’re already a happy user of Ocoya, you can take advantage of its built-in RSS feed filtering features that do most of the heavy lifting for you. And, if you want to manually check everything that gets posted, there’s always the option of putting the post in draft.

- Find a way to put a personal touch on things. Understandably, you want a hands-off approach and we get it! Just know that, if you go ‘too hands-off’, you’re essentially running the risk of coming off as generic and bland, and you don’t want that. So it certainly pays off to add a bit of a personalized touch to your automated campaigns, even if it’s just commentary or a call-to-action.

- Stay active when it comes to updating your feeds and keeping them fresh. Over time, they may become outdated or their focus might shift from the original direction, thus causing them to no longer be a fit for your audience. Every once in a while, it makes sense to give your RSS feed a refresh, effectively spicing things up by adding new sources and purging some of the old ones.

- Make your automated posts visually appealing. There’s plenty of reasons to do this; not only are people visual creatures, you also need to keep in mind that other content posted on social media is constantly competing for their attention. Therefore, you must employ every trick in the book just to capture their attention. You can do so by including images, infographics, videos and any other hooks you can imagine.

- Once you get the ball rolling, don’t stop! If you want to consistently keep on catching people’s attention, you’re going to need to ensure there’s enough content being pushed out on a regular basis. At the same time, going overboard is not the right way to go about it either (follower fatigue is a very real thing). Luckily, with Ocoya, you can effortlessly control all of that.

In conclusion, RSS feed automation is one of the best ways you can automate blog posts and syndicate them to your social media channels. Whether you’re pushing out your own original content of merely repurposing content authored by others, consistency is the key to success. As for the technical approach, we’ve shown you more than one way to do it, and the choice is yours.

At Ocoya, we’ve made RSS feed automation as easy as it gets. Will you keep struggling with code-heavy and technically demanding solutions or will you kick back, relax, and let Ocoya do all the heavy lifting for you? Don’t be silly, especially if it’s your first time doing this. Let Ocoya handle the technical aspects of the job and free up your time you can then take and devote to other aspects of your business!

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