The gap between bloggers who grow and bloggers who plateau usually isn’t about writing quality. It’s about leverage. A blogger who manually shares every post is competing against one who built a system that does it automatically every time.
Make is the tool that creates that leverage. It’s a visual automation platform that connects your apps together and runs workflows automatically. The free plan is genuinely capable, setup takes an afternoon, and once it’s running you don’t touch it again.
Here are the three automations that have the most direct impact on a content blog’s growth — built in order of setup difficulty, starting with the one you should build first.
Before You Start: Set Up Make
Go to make.com and create a free account. The free plan includes 1,000 operations per month and unlimited scenarios (that’s Make’s word for automations). For a blog publishing two to four posts per week, 1,000 operations is more than enough to run everything below without paying anything.
Once inside, go to Connections and add WordPress. Make will ask for your WordPress URL and login credentials. Once connected, Make can watch for new posts, read post content, and trigger actions the moment something publishes. This connection is the foundation for the first automation.
Automation 1: New Post → Social Distribution
What it does: Every time you publish a WordPress post, Make automatically creates and queues a social media post for your platforms.
Operations cost: Roughly 5-8 per publish. At 1,000 free ops/month, this handles 125+ posts before you’d consider upgrading.
How to build it:
- In Make, click Create a new scenario
- Add a WordPress module — choose “Watch Posts” as the trigger
- Set it to watch for new published posts only
- Add a Text Formatter module — use it to build your social caption from the post title and URL
- Add your social platform module (Buffer, LinkedIn, Pinterest — Make supports all of them) and map the formatted caption to the post field
- Turn the scenario on and set it to run on a schedule (every 15 minutes is sufficient)
Total build time: 30-45 minutes for your first automation. Every post you publish from that point will automatically generate a social post without any additional work from you.
Automation 2: Email Subscriber Segmentation
What it does: Tags new Kit subscribers based on which post or form they subscribed through, enabling targeted broadcasts later.
Why it matters: Sending a hardware review to your entire list when half of them subscribed because of an email marketing post wastes their attention and hurts your open rates over time. Segmented lists convert better because the content is relevant to why people joined.
How to build it:
- In Kit, set up a unique form for each content category (hardware, automation, email marketing, etc.) or use URL parameters to track which post a subscriber came from
- In Make, create a new scenario with a webhook as the trigger — Kit will fire this webhook when someone subscribes
- Add a Router module with branches for each subscriber source
- Connect a Kit “Update Subscriber” module on each branch to apply the appropriate tag
Once running, every new subscriber is automatically tagged based on their source. When you write a post about automation tools next month, you send it to subscribers tagged “automation” and get a 35-40% open rate instead of 18% on a full-list broadcast.
Automation 3: Affiliate Click Tracking
What it does: Logs every affiliate link click — which post, which program, when — to a Google Sheet you can actually analyze.
Why it matters: Without click data, you’re guessing which content drives affiliate revenue. With it, you know. You can double down on the post types that convert and stop wasting time on content that gets traffic but doesn’t earn.
How to build it:
- In Make, create a new scenario with a custom webhook as the trigger. Copy the webhook URL.
- In your WordPress theme’s functions.php or via a code plugin, add a small JavaScript snippet that fires a fetch() request to that webhook URL whenever someone clicks any link with the CSS class “affiliate-link”
- Add all your affiliate links that CSS class in WordPress
- In Make, add a Google Sheets module — “Add a Row” — and map the incoming webhook data (post URL, clicked link, timestamp) to your spreadsheet columns
After 60-90 days of data, patterns emerge. In our case, two posts generate over 70% of affiliate clicks despite representing less than 15% of our content. That data directly informs where we spend our writing time.
Is Make’s Free Plan Enough?
For most blogs publishing two to three posts per week and running these three automations, yes — the free plan’s 1,000 operations per month handles everything comfortably. At $9/month for the Core plan (10,000 operations), Make is also one of the most cost-effective paid tools in a blog’s stack if you do hit the free limit.
👉 Start with Make free — build the social distribution automation first. It’s the highest-impact setup for the least complexity, and you’ll see results with the very next post you publish.
Disclosure: FutureTechStack earns a commission on Make signups through our links. We run Make on our own blog and pay for it ourselves.