When you run a YouTube channel, it’s easy to spend more time manually sharing videos across platforms than actually creating content, turning what should be a creative endeavor into a soul-crushing game of digital cut-and-paste. Your social media feeds become a graveyard of forgotten upload links, and before long your enthusiasm for content creation slowly withers under the weight of repetitive administrative tasks.
Enter the world of automation: a digital lifeline for content creators drowning in promotional busywork. When you add Zaps—Zapier’s automated workflows—to your toolkit, you can transform your YouTube channel from a time-consuming side hustle into a streamlined, efficient content engine. Discover how automation can handle everything from video notifications to social media sharing and archiving.
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To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Send notifications for new videos
If a video posts to YouTube and no one clicks on it, does it make a sound? Yes, and it sounds like crickets. Your first mission is to make sure people click your videos. A great way to do that is to share your latest videos as soon as they’re live in your community Discord or Slack channel:
Or send a Gmail message if that’s how you typically communicate with your audience.
These workflows are also a great way to keep your internal team in the loop if they need to keep on top of your production schedule. If a separate team handles social promotion or you just want your team members to share your company’s latest video with their friends and family, a quick Slack ping or email can do the trick.
Automatically upload your new YouTube videos
If you run a YouTube channel in your free time, then you know how it feels to burn daylight while you wait for a video to upload. After so many hours of planning, scripting, filming, and editing your videos, you still have to do the manual work of putting the video up on the Internet. And if YouTube is a side hustle, that means YouTube cuts into your free time. It cuts into your family time. It cuts into the time you could be resting.
So instead, cut down on the uploading time by letting Zapier handle this part. All you have to do is choose where you want to save your videos, then the following Zaps will automatically upload a video once you’ve saved it to a specific Google Drive or Dropbox folder. These can also double as a backup “archive” of your YouTube videos.
If you want to add AI to this system to make it even easier, you might consider Jasper. For example, you can save a new video file to your selected Dropbox folder. The Zap will then send that info to Jasper, which can use AI to come up with the appropriate meta tags on your new YouTube video. Finally, the third step will send the new file directly to YouTube.
But there’s another sneaky way to get more videos onto YouTube with minimal effort: Zoom. If you record podcasts where you regularly interview guests on a webcam, you can move a new Zoom recording to YouTube with a Zap. That means no editing, no extra manual labor—just the direct movement of a file from one platform to another.
Automatically share YouTube videos on social media
Family and friends are great, but a good YouTube channel will eventually rely on the interest of strangers, too. You need to get the word out. What if you have a social media presence somewhere else—say, Twitter? You can set your YouTube channel to automatically cross-post there. Think of it as multiplying your YouTube audience every time a video uploads…just without the extra work.
It doesn’t have to be just Twitter, either. Facebook, public shares on LinkedIn, new posts on a WordPress blog—they can all be a part of your automated YouTube ecosystem. Ideally, you’ll set it so every new YouTube upload creates a cascade of downstream promotional effects.
Simply sending new YouTube videos to Webhooks by Zapier, for example, can create an automated system by itself. You can use Webhooks to send someone an email, send Slack channel messages, or even post new Facebook lead ads.
Later on, we’ll talk about some ways to automatically upload your videos to YouTube as well. But start here. Ensure each new video goes out to your audience the way you’d prefer. Then, when you automate uploading, you’ll have nearly the entire process automated.
Turn your YouTube videos into an automatic archive
Imagine where we’d be as a civilization if an earthquake hadn’t taken out the Library of Alexandria. Even in modern times, we have to be on the lookout for imminent disaster when it comes to our digital files. If the wrong folder gets corrupted, we may not have any digital files.
The effect is even worse if you have a great idea that becomes a hit on YouTube…but receives a strike against it. Maybe you’ll want to re-upload the same file after some edits. If you don’t have a great backup, you’re stuck. You have to start all over.
The larger your YouTube following gets, the more detailed you’ll want your archives to be. If you save your YouTube file names in a spreadsheet, for example, you can do a quick keyword search to find any file you need.
Turn YouTube into a productivity machine
YouTube can be tough to navigate. Video tags, unique descriptions, learning how to archive your videos…it’s too much, especially if you’re launching a new channel as a side hustle.
But if you set up the right YouTube Zaps from the beginning, you’ll be surprised at how little work you really have to do. Once you have a finished product, you can click and drag the file into the right folder, then let automation handle the rest.
This article was originally published in June 2023. It was most recently updated in November 2024.
