Automating Newsletter Content with Make.com: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating engaging newsletter content can be time-consuming, but automation tools like Make.com offer an effective solution. This comprehensive guide explores how to build a newsletter automation flow that scrapes articles, summarizes content, and formats everything into a professional newsletter – all without writing a single word manually.

The Automation Process Overview

The automation workflow described follows these main steps:

1. Collect article links through a Google Form that feeds into a Google Sheet
2. Scrape the content from each link using Fire Crawl
3. Pre-process the scraped content to remove unnecessary text
4. Generate summaries and headlines for each article using GPT
5. Create section-specific content for different newsletter segments
6. Combine everything into a properly formatted newsletter
7. Output the final product as a Google Doc with proper HTML formatting

Setting Up Your Data Collection System

The foundation of this automation is a simple data collection system:

• A Google Form where links to articles are submitted and categorized by section (Economics, Tech Trends, News Bites)
• A connected Google Sheet that serves as the central data hub
• A structured approach to organizing links by section for proper processing

Each section in the form collects relevant links that will be processed separately through different paths in the automation flow.

Building the Make.com Flow

Initial Setup and Data Processing

The flow begins with a Google Sheets module as the trigger, pulling in the latest form submissions. Multiple variables are set to split the links by section using comma separators. A router then directs the flow into three separate paths – one for each newsletter section.

Content Scraping and Processing

Each path follows the same initial process:

• An iterator module processes each link in its respective section
• Fire Crawl (a free scraping tool) extracts the raw content from each link
• A GPT pre-processor removes irrelevant content like ads, menus, and boilerplate text
• The pre-processor adds specific delimiters to mark the beginning and end of each article

This pre-processing step is crucial as it filters out unnecessary text that would consume tokens and potentially cause rate limit issues with GPT.

Content Generation

After pre-processing, the flow uses ChatGPT to generate engaging content:

• A GPT module transforms the cleaned article text into newsletter content
• The system is prompted to create bold, hyperlinked headlines followed by witty 1-2 sentence summaries
• Markdown formatting is used to ensure proper HTML structure later
• Example inputs and outputs help GPT understand the desired tone and format

Variables are set to store the generated content from each section path for later aggregation.

Final Assembly

The final steps bring everything together:

• All section content is aggregated into a single flow
• A teaser section is generated to introduce the newsletter content
• A TLDR section summarizes each story in one sentence with emojis
• All content is composed into a markdown string
• The markdown is converted to HTML for proper formatting
• Everything is output to a Google Doc with the current date

Practical Applications and Benefits

This automation significantly reduces the time required to produce a newsletter by:

• Eliminating manual content scraping and summarization
• Maintaining consistent formatting across all sections
• Generating engaging, witty content with minimal human intervention
• Creating a buffer for review before sending to subscribers

The entire process takes approximately 2.5 minutes to run from start to finish, saving hours of manual work for each newsletter issue.

Advanced Customization Options

The flow can be customized in several ways:

• Adjust the tone by modifying the GPT prompts
• Add more sections by creating additional paths in the router
• Increase the number of links per section by modifying the iterator
• Change the output format by modifying the HTML conversion step
• Connect directly to newsletter platforms instead of using Google Docs

By understanding the core principles behind this automation, you can adapt it to suit your specific newsletter format and content needs.