I used to spend about four hours every week on tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Sharing posts to social. Updating tracking spreadsheets. Sending follow-up emails. Tagging subscribers manually. Busy work that felt productive but wasn’t growing anything.
Now that same four hours is automated. All of it. For under $50 a month — and honestly, most months under $20.
Here’s exactly how the FutureTechStack content pipeline works, what tools run it, what it costs, and how you can copy it.
The Problem With Manual Content Distribution
Every time you publish a post and then manually share it, you’re doing two things: spending time you could have used to write another post, and introducing inconsistency. Some posts get shared everywhere. Some get shared once. Some get forgotten entirely because you published on a Friday and didn’t check back in until Monday.
Automation doesn’t just save time. It makes your distribution consistent by default. Every post gets the same treatment regardless of when you published it or what else is going on in your life.
The Full Stack (and What Each Tool Costs)
| Tool | What it does | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Make | Connects everything, runs all automations | $9/mo (Core plan) |
| Kit | Email list and subscriber management | $0 (free up to 1,000 subs) |
| WordPress | CMS — publishes trigger all automations | Existing hosting cost |
| Google Sheets | Affiliate click tracking log | Free |
| Buffer | Social post scheduling queue | $0 (free plan) |
Total: $9/month for Make. Everything else is free. That’s it.
Automation 1: New Post → Everywhere It Needs to Go
This is the one that changed how the site feels to run. The moment a post publishes on WordPress, Make picks it up automatically via webhook. It pulls the post title, excerpt, featured image URL, and permalink. Then it runs three things in parallel:
- Formats a platform-appropriate social caption and adds it to the Buffer queue
- Logs the new post to a Google Sheet with publish date, title, slug, and category
- Checks whether the post has a target keyword tag and, if so, adds it to our internal content tracker
Setup time: about 45 minutes the first time. Operations used per publish: roughly 8-10. On Make’s Core plan at $9/month, you get 10,000 operations — that’s room to publish over 1,000 posts before you’d need to think about upgrading. In practice this automation costs fractions of a penny per post.
Automation 2: Subscriber Tagging by Source
Kit is the email tool. When someone subscribes through any form on the site, they come in untagged by default. That’s fine — but tagged subscribers convert better because you can send them content that’s actually relevant to why they subscribed.
The automation: Make watches for new Kit subscribers via a webhook. When one comes in, it checks the source field (which form they used, which page they were on) and applies a tag automatically. Subscribe from the hardware post? Tagged “hardware.” Come in through the automation post? Tagged “automation.”
This lets us send a broadcast about a new GPU review to subscribers tagged “hardware” and skip everyone else. Click rates go up. Affiliate conversions follow. It took about 30 minutes to set up and has run without touching it since.
Automation 3: Affiliate Click Tracking
This one required a small JavaScript snippet added to WordPress — about 10 lines — that fires a Make webhook every time someone clicks a link with the class affiliate-link. Make receives the webhook payload (which post, which link, timestamp) and appends a row to a Google Sheet.
The result: a running log of every affiliate click, which post generated it, and which program it went to. After 90 days, the data is clear. Two posts generate 70% of all affiliate clicks. We know exactly where to add new affiliate links, which posts to update, and which content topics are worth doubling down on.
Without this tracking, you’re guessing. With it, you’re making decisions on actual data from your actual audience.
How to Build This Yourself
Start with a Make free account. The free plan gives you 1,000 operations per month — enough to test all three automations above before spending anything.
Build in this order:
- Post distribution first. Connect WordPress as a trigger, add a text formatter module to shape the post data, then connect Buffer or your social tool of choice as the action. Test it by publishing a draft post with visibility set to private — Make will pick it up without actually publishing to your site.
- Subscriber tagging second. You’ll need a Kit account with a form set up, and Make needs to be connected to Kit via API. The trigger is “Watch Subscribers” in Make’s Kit module. Add a router with conditions based on the subscriber’s source tag.
- Click tracking last. This one requires touching your WordPress theme files to add the JS snippet, which is why it’s listed third. If you’re not comfortable with that, skip it for now — the other two automations deliver most of the value.
The whole thing should take a Saturday afternoon to set up properly. After that, it runs without you.
👉 Start with Make free — 1,000 operations/month, unlimited scenarios. Build the post distribution automation first and you’ll see the value immediately.
Disclosure: FutureTechStack earns a commission if you sign up for Make through our links. We pay for Make ourselves and use it to run the automations described in this post.