How to Automate Money-Making Blog Posts on Medium

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Hey everybody, Doug from ai-businessplans. Grab yourself a coffee and follow along because in this video, I'm going to improve an automation that I've written that creates articles that make money over on Medium.

This automation is going to research current data and turn it into a useful format for my niche of readers.

This is something that I would like to see every week, so I'm automating it and monetizing it.

I'm going to show you how you can do the very same thing very simply for whatever your niche is, no matter what your business is.

In this video, I'll show you step-by-step how AI will research economic data and then create a report formatted the way I want to see the data.

In our use case, I'm going to test the quality of this post by submitting the draft to a dedicated publication over on Medium.

If the article is accepted and published, it will go out to 2400 people.

I've also hooked this up to WordPress, so basically you can create your own automatic news reporting agency with this script if you'd like to.

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Want the full breakdown, with examples from companies like SaaStr and Chili Piper? Read it for free here

I know that writing with AI content is kind of controversial, and there's a lot of different companies creating new guidelines about AI content. I also want to respect Medium's focus on human-generated content.

If you want to do this for yourself or if you're curious about how AI can take news and industry events and turn them into a money-making article, then this video is for you.

First things first, I want to say thank you so much to everybody who's joined the AI business plan newsletter and community. It's really encouraging to read the great reviews already. I want these tutorials to remain high value and really simple and useful for everybody in the community.

The 7-day trial will remain, but the price will increase as more people join. The reason I'm increasing the price is to represent the additional value of all the new tutorials but also to cover the amount of time it'll take to support such a large and growing community.

Enhancing an Existing Automation Script

In today's video, I'm going to improve on a script that I already have. I'm using a small part of a recent video by Nick Saraev.

f you haven't found Nick's channel yet, click on the link below and follow his fantastic tutorials. I really can't say enough about the amazing setups and how much I've learned from Nick's channel. Thank you very much and a big shoutout to Nick. The other day, Nick put out a video called "How to Scrape an AI Parasite SEO System from Medium," and it's really fantastic.

The thing that I was most interested in was at about the 15-minute mark in his video where he described how he set up ChatGPT inside Make.com.

So now I'm going to take this lesson and apply it to improve a very basic automation that I already have created. In the spirit of Nick's amazing knowledge drops, I'm going to make my two documents available for free down below so you can download the blueprint.

You also get the insight of how I've crafted this command for Chat GPT so that you can just copy and paste it right into your own.

Key Insights and Strategy

Some of the key points I learned from Nick's video are how to use the different prompts: system prompt, user prompt, and assistant prompt inside the Make.com commands.

Let's take a look at some before and after details so that I can show you the three things that I learned from Nick's tutorial.

I want to point out that the strategy we're about to go over right now can be copied, pasted, and applied to almost any niche that changes over time.

For example, this same script could be used to create an article for every single event that is booked at a local conference center.

This script could create an article for every sports and fishing outdoors show throughout a specific geographic area.

Now, in this section of the video, I want to go into the details, the before and after, and show you the changes that went through into this script. I'll give you both scripts so that you can use these and adapt them as you see fit.

Testing AI Tools (midjourney image by author)

Testing Different AI Tools

As I go through, I'm going to show two different things: how I changed the prompts inside and also whether or not Perplexity AI is really worth paying for the extra fees for now.

Let me go through the before and after of what I did in this script and what I changed as a result of what I learned from Nick. Then I'll talk about what I learned as a result of testing Chat GPT versus Perplexity AI.

First of all, when I did the messages to instruct Perplexity AI, I had a message from the user, and I just told Perplexity what to do, just like I was giving a command right on Perplexity's homepage.

Next, I had Chat GPT go through that and write a 10-word title that's kind of clickbait.

Then I had Chat GPT take everything from Perplexity AI and rewrite it into a story.

Finally, I had a router break it up into WordPress and Medium.com so that I could have both of those outputs: the original from Perplexity and the rewritten article from Chat GPT.

Improving Prompts for Better Output

After watching Nick's video, I learned the difference between the user role, system role, and assistant role.

It took a while to break that down, but I've got two different documents for you now so that you can download this blueprint.

You'll get the before and after blueprints, plus the details on how I trained GPT, which is a part of the video that Nick paused and then came back to after he finished that part. I'm going to include that for you in the free stuff that you can download below.

Formatting Content for Multiple Platforms

Let's jump in and first of all take a look at how my commands changed. We can see here that I started out with a system message giving the system and telling the system what their capacity is.

Then I had a user content, then I had an assistant content, then finally I had the user content again.

I gave one example of the user giving the command, the assistant providing the report in the format that I wanted, and then I gave the command, and that's what I did for training it.

Then second, I still have a 12-word title that's almost clickbait.

Third, I had the message sequence improved over on Chat GPT as well.

First, there's a system message, then there are two user messages in a row, which Perplexity wouldn't allow.

So, I have a user, "Your task is to convert the data into a news article."

Then I had the user giving the command and the assistant rewriting it.

Finally, I had the user take this same information that I got from Perplexity, and I'm expecting it to be rewritten into this new format.

Later, I rewrote a new GPT command and wanted to see if GPT could go and do the research without Perplexity.

So, I created a whole new structure here where the message says, "You're a helpful expert." The user gave the command and the assistant replied.

Then the user gave the command again, and all it's doing is researching directly. It didn't have anything to do with Perplexity.

Finally, I had that data formatted and put out onto Medium and WordPress at the same time using that router, and I split it up so that I could look at and see which of the three results I really liked the best:

  • the stuff that came directly from Perplexity,

  • the processed stuff that was done with Chat GPT,

  • or the stuff that was just done directly from Chat GPT alone.

I have to tell you, the stuff that came just directly out of GPT was totally worth it.

Maximizing Earnings from Blog Posts

Here's the article that it produced, and now I'm going to talk about where the money is going to come from this article. I've submitted the article to the publication, and it's up to the editors now to decide if they will publish it. I'll let you know how that goes.

The revenue from this post is going to come from a number of different places.

First, from the post itself, from anybody who is a member who reads it and claps for it, or they highlight the content or comment on the content. Those things will earn money from the Medium platform, and I'll show you some examples in a second.

Then I went through and linked back to myself to other articles that are monetized.

So, if the reader leaves this article and goes into one of my other articles, there is a chance that I can get readership earnings from that as well. Again, here's another article where I've linked back to myself within the information about corn prices. A third time, I've linked back to another article that is very topically related. Then we have the conclusion and the "Read Next," and this is another article that I get paid for people reading it.

There are still other revenue streams that I could put into this.

For example, I could put a link off to an exchange and be really aggressive about suggesting people go and sign up on that exchange. If they do and they start trading, I can make a little bit of money over time.

But I just want to see if this whole system works and how much this is going to make over time because I can continue to put out these articles every single week on these keyword phrases and keep linking back to all of my articles over time.

Tracking and Improving Earnings

How much money can you earn? (midjourney image by author)

Now, one of the things that I want to track over time and improve as we go along is how much these articles each individually earn.

So, I've gone into my story stats and then dug down into the statistics for some of these articles that I linked to.

We can see that this article has earned $28 since it was published on January 29th.

I've also linked to it at the very bottom of the most recent post, so I could be sending traffic to this over a long period of time and continue to boost the earnings for this post.

We can see where the earnings have come across for the monthly if we go through May, April, and March.

We can see there was a period where I sent more traffic to it, and it was earning on a daily basis. If we can do this for many different posts and keep them consistently earning a dollar a day, this is really good, important money.

The other articles I link to here are more recent.

Here's one from May 16th that's earned $23, so it'll be worth my time to send traffic to it.

Building a Network of Earning Posts

Now, what I'm creating here is a network, a little minet of posts that will all earn from each other. When a user comes into them, they can just keep moving people around, and I can find other revenue streams to put into this.

Once this weekly report is getting some followers and they are looking for this regularly, it's starting to get some traffic, and we can see this whole net of articles starting to earn some more money.

Then I can add other revenue streams in there like the exchange that I was mentioning.

The most exciting thing for me is that this little revenue stream can be generated from a single post.

A single command can generate a post that goes out onto Medium, and in time, that will turn into a revenue stream.

I can create many of these different little revenue streams across many different subject areas.

One of the things I'm most excited about is that we have this community where people can join, take these scripts, and create something. I'm so excited to see what you build with it.

Final Thoughts and Encouragement

So, that wraps it up for today's video. I'm super excited and grateful to have you along.

Join our Community and Master AI Tools (midjourney image by author)

You are a trooper for watching all the way to the end. You know the routine: hit the thumbs-up button if you like the content so that other people will find it, subscribe to the channel, and hit the notification icon so that you get notified.

And of course, join our community so that you can be working with like-minded people who are also learning how to use these AI tools for themselves.

Until the next video, here's to your success.

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