Affiliate Summit West 2019 ran January 6 to 8 at the Park Las Vegas Hotel. On Sunday, January 6, the very first session in Track 1, from 1:00 to 2:00 pm, was Clever Ways to Automate Content Creation with WordPress, presented by David Vogelpohl and our founder, Brian Messenlehner. Afterward, Brian summed it up as an awesome time talking about automating content creation.
Why automation
Affiliate and content publishers produce a lot of pages. Product reviews, comparisons, deals, roundups and data driven landing pages all need to be created and, more importantly, kept current. Doing that by hand does not scale. Doing it carelessly produces thin pages that hurt the brand and search rankings.
The session was about the middle path: using plugins, tools and techniques to automate the repetitive parts of content creation responsibly, so editors can focus on the parts that need a human.
What automation looks like on WordPress
The building blocks are well established:
- Scheduled imports that pull product data, prices and offers from feeds and APIs into custom post types.
- Templates that turn structured data into consistent, well formatted pages.
- Custom fields and taxonomies that keep content filterable and easy to compare.
- Workflows that flag stale content, broken links or expired offers for an editor to review.
- Publishing rules so nothing goes live without a human check where it matters.
The point is not to replace writers. It is to stop asking them to copy prices and product specs by hand.
The idea kept evolving
Brian gave a refreshed version of this talk at WordCamp Miami 2020, titled Clever Ways To Help Automate Content Creation With WordPress. Since then, AI tools have added a new layer to the conversation. Our view has not changed: automation and AI can draft, enrich and organize content, but a person should review what gets published. As Brian has put it, AI generated code and content still need to be thoroughly reviewed and tested.
What we build for publishers
At AlphaWeb, content automation is a regular part of our WordPress development work:
- Feed and API importers with logging, retries and alerts.
- Editorial dashboards that show what needs attention.
- AI assisted drafting and tagging, always with editorial review.
- Structured data for search so automated pages are understood correctly.
If your team spends hours on content tasks a script could handle, AlphaWeb can help you automate the right parts.
At a glance
- Event: Affiliate Summit West 2019
- Dates: January 6 to 8, 2019
- Venue: Park Las Vegas Hotel
- Session: Clever Ways to Automate Content Creation with WordPress, Track 1, Sunday, January 6, 1:00 to 2:00 pm
- Presenters: David Vogelpohl and Brian Messenlehner
Related: WordCamp Miami 2020: Clever Ways to Help Automate Content Creation, Webinar: 12 Fresh Strategies Super Affiliates Use to Optimize Their WordPress Sites and Integrating WordPress With Everything: REST API Patterns and AI Services.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
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