Draft WordPress Posts: Claude + Make

A folklore podcast keeps a running list of episode topics in a spreadsheet. Every week someone on the team opens WordPress, stares at the blank editor, and spends forty minutes turning one of those topics into a rough draft. The draft is never the problem. The blank page is.

This guide removes the blank page. You will connect three things, Google Sheets, Claude, and WordPress, so that the moment you type a topic into a spreadsheet row, Claude writes a first draft and drops it straight into your WordPress drafts folder. You read it, fix what you want, and hit publish yourself. The robot does the typing. You keep the judgment.

We are using Make to wire the three apps together because its visual canvas is the easiest place for a beginner to see what is happening. If you prefer a different tool, the same build works in Zapier or n8n, and there is a short section near the end showing how. Everything here is AI automation in its most useful, least scary form: small, visible, and fully under your control. I built this on my own site before writing it up, so the steps below are the ones that actually worked for me, not a diagram drawn in theory.

What does this workflow actually do?

In plain terms: a spreadsheet row becomes a blog draft. You keep a Google Sheet with one column for the topic and maybe a second for a few notes. When you add a row, Make notices, hands the topic to Claude with instructions on how you want the post written, and Claude returns a title and body. Make then creates a new draft post in WordPress with that content. Nothing goes live. You approve everything.

Who actually gets value from this? A few real examples, on purpose none of them the usual ones:

• A two-person metal-detecting club in Cornwall that wants a short write-up for every notable find but never finds the time.
• A vintage-synth repair shop owner who wants a steady stream of “how we fixed this” posts to pull in search traffic, working solo between repairs.
• A community-theater group publishing a cast-and-crew spotlight before each show, written by whichever volunteer has a spare evening.
• A regional beekeeping association turning its monthly meeting notes into a public blog so members who missed the meeting can catch up.

Different sizes, different reasons, same bottleneck: the writing start. That is the part Claude is good at and the part you do not need to do by hand.

Why use Make if Claude can already write?

Fair question. Claude is good at one thing here: turning a topic into a draft. It is not built to watch a spreadsheet, carry text from one app to the next, post to WordPress, or run itself every fifteen minutes and retry when something hiccups. That part is plumbing, and plumbing is what Make does. The two are not competing for the same job. They split it.

Make handles every step where you do not need a model’s judgment: noticing a new row, passing the text along, creating the post, keeping to a schedule. Claude handles the one step that actually needs intelligence, the writing. Picture Make as the conveyor belt and Claude as the one skilled worker standing at it. You would not ask the worker to build the belt, and you would not ask the belt to write. I have tried pushing the AI to do everything, including the data-shuffling, and those builds came out slower, costlier, and more fragile. Letting Make do the boring parts and Claude do the one smart part is what makes this hold up.

What do you need before you start?

Four accounts, and you can do the whole thing on free tiers while you test:

• A Make account. The free plan includes 1,000 operations per month, which is plenty for a personal blog. Sign up at make.com.
• A Claude API key. This is different from the Claude app you chat with. You generate a key in the Claude developer console and Make uses it to send your topic to Claude. New to Claude itself? Start with how to use Claude.
• A Google account with a Google Sheet you can edit.
• A WordPress site where you can install an application password (Users, then Profile, then Application Passwords). Make uses that to create the draft.

Two words you will see a lot in Make, defined once. A scenario is Make’s name for one automation, the whole Sheets-to-Claude-to-WordPress chain you are about to build. A module is one step inside it, one of the boxes on the canvas. Three boxes, one scenario. That is the entire vocabulary.

How does the workflow work, step by step?

Three modules, left to right. Here is the shape before you build it:

Module	App	What it does
1. Trigger	Google Sheets	Watches your sheet and fires when a new row appears
2. Brain	Claude	Reads the topic and writes a title and post body
3. Output	WordPress	Creates a new draft post with Claude’s text

You will build them in that order. Each step below is one module.

Step 1: Set up the topic spreadsheet

Make a Google Sheet with two columns in the first row: Topic and Notes. The Topic column is what Claude writes about. Notes is optional, a place to add an angle (“focus on beginners” or “mention the 1973 model”). Leave one example row filled in so Make has something to read when you connect it.

In Make, create a new scenario and add the first module: Google Sheets, Watch New Rows. Connect your Google account, pick the sheet, and tell it the first row holds headers. This is your trigger, the event that starts everything.

Step 2: Let Claude write the draft

Add a second module and search for Claude (Anthropic). Choose the “Create a Message” action and paste your API key when Make asks for it. Pick a current model, Claude Sonnet is a good, affordable default for blog drafts.

The important part is the prompt. This is where you teach Claude your voice once, so every future draft sounds like you. A prompt that works:

You are writing a blog post for [your site name].
Topic: {{Topic from Step 1}}
Notes: {{Notes from Step 1}}

Write a 600-word draft in plain, friendly English. Use a short title,
three or four subheadings, and a one-line takeaway at the end.
Avoid hype. Write like a knowledgeable person talking to a curious friend.
Return the title on the first line, then the body.

The {{Topic}} and {{Notes}} bits are Make mapping tokens: you click them in from Step 1 rather than typing them, so each row fills them in automatically. If you have tuned a prompt you love already, this is the same craft as building any good AI automation prompt, just pointed at Claude.

Step 3: Send the draft to WordPress

Add the third module: WordPress, Create a Post. Connect it using your site URL, your username, and the application password you made earlier. Then map the fields: set Title and Content to the matching parts of Claude’s reply from Step 2.

Now the single most important setting in this whole guide. Set Status to Draft, not Publish. This is the difference between a tool that helps you and a tool that embarrasses you in public. A draft waits quietly for you to read it. Resist every urge to flip this to Publish, no matter how good the drafts get.

How do you run it and check the result?

Click Run once in Make. It reads your example row, sends it to Claude, and creates the draft. Open WordPress, go to Posts, and your draft is sitting there. When I tested this, that first draft showed up in my WordPress drafts in about ninety seconds, and it was maybe eighty percent of the way there, a solid start I trimmed by hand. Read it. The first one is rarely perfect, and that is the point: you tweak the prompt in Step 2 until the drafts come out the way you like, then turn the scenario on with a schedule (every 15 minutes is fine) so it watches for new rows on its own.

From here on, the job changes. Instead of writing posts, you collect topics. A repair shop owner jots “fixing a dead Juno-106 power supply” into the sheet between customers. Twenty minutes later a draft is waiting. A post that used to take forty minutes to start now takes the ninety seconds it takes Claude to write it, plus your editing time. That is the trade: you stop being the typist and stay the editor.

What does this cost to run?

Less than most people expect. Here is the real math for a small blog publishing a few times a week:

Piece	Free tier	If you outgrow it
Make	1,000 operations/month free	Core plan from about $9/month
Claude API	Pay per use, no free tier	A 600-word draft on Sonnet runs well under one cent
Google Sheets	Free	Free
WordPress	Your existing site	No extra cost

Each draft uses three Make operations (one per module) and a fraction of a cent of Claude usage. Thirty drafts a month is ninety operations, well inside the free Make plan, and a few cents of Claude. The cost is not money. It is the twenty-five minutes of setup. For the full breakdown of Make’s tiers, see our Make beginner’s guide.

What can go wrong, and how do you avoid it?

• The draft publishes itself. Only if you set Status to Publish in Step 3. Leave it on Draft. This is the one mistake that matters.
• Claude’s title and body run together. This one bit me in testing: until I told Claude to put the title on its own first line, it kept folding the title into the body. If you see that, tighten the prompt (“Return the title on the first line, then the body”) and split on that first line in Make.
• It fires twice for one row. Usually because the example row was still “new” when you switched the scenario on. Clear test drafts and let it settle.
• The API key is rejected. A Claude app login is not an API key. You need a key from the developer console, and it needs billing set up, even a small amount.

If you want to go further, the same three-module pattern is the backbone of dozens of builds. Our roundup of Make AI scenarios shows where to take it next, and Make’s MCP support opens up newer Claude-native connections.

How do you build this in Zapier or n8n instead?

The three jobs do not change, only the names do. If you already pay for one of the others, use it.

Job	Make	Zapier	n8n
Notice a new row	Watch New Rows	New Spreadsheet Row trigger	Google Sheets Trigger node
Write the draft	Claude module	Claude (Anthropic) action	Anthropic node
Make the WP draft	Create a Post	WordPress Create Post	WordPress node

Make and Zapier are the friendliest for a first build. n8n is the pick if you want to self-host or run a high volume cheaply. We compared all three for beginners in Zapier vs Make vs n8n if you have not chosen a tool yet.

Get the importable template

Common questions

Do I need to know how to code?

No. Every step is clicking and mapping fields on a visual canvas. The closest thing to code is the prompt in Step 2, which is just instructions written in plain English.

Is it safe to give Make access to my WordPress site?

Yes, when you use an application password instead of your real login. An application password can be revoked any time from your WordPress profile without changing your main password, and it only does what you allow.

Will the posts sound robotic?

They sound like your prompt. Spend your setup time on Step 2: tell Claude your voice, give it an example, and the drafts improve fast. You are still editing every one before it goes live, so the floor is “a draft I clean up,” never “published nonsense.”

Can I use the Claude app instead of the API?

Not for this build. The app is for chatting; the API is the version other software can talk to. They use the same models, so the writing quality is the same.

What if I want images or categories set automatically?

Both are possible by adding fields to the WordPress module or extra modules, but start with title and body. Get the simple version working before you add anything.

Sources and official docs

• Creating a scenario (Make Help)
• Claude API overview (Anthropic)
• WordPress REST API (developer.wordpress.org)
• Google Sheets basics (Google)
• Make — Grokipedia

Last reviewed: May 2026. Make, Claude, and WordPress all update their interfaces; verify the exact button names on the official pages above.

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