YouTube to WordPress: Claude + Make

A guy who restores vintage guitars films every repair for his YouTube channel. The videos do well. The blog that is supposed to live next to them has three posts from 2024, because writing one up after a long day at the bench never happens. The footage exists. The audience exists. The write-up is the missing link.

This guide builds that link automatically. You connect three things, YouTube, Claude, and WordPress, so the moment a new video goes up on your channel, Claude writes a companion post from it and parks it in your WordPress drafts. You read it, fix what you want, and publish on your own terms. The camera does the demo. Claude does the write-up. You stay the editor.

We are wiring it together in Make because its visual canvas is the friendliest place for a beginner to watch the pieces connect. The same build works in Zapier or n8n, and there is a short mapping near the end. If you have already set up our spreadsheet-to-WordPress version, this is the same idea with a YouTube channel as the trigger instead of a sheet.

What does this workflow actually do?

In one line: a new video becomes a blog draft. Make watches your channel. When you upload, it hands the video’s title and description to Claude with your instructions, Claude writes a post, and Make creates a draft in WordPress. Nothing publishes itself. You approve every word.

Who gets the most out of this? A few real cases, none of them the usual suspects:

• The vintage-guitar repair channel above, finally getting a searchable write-up for every fix.
• A model-railroad restorer who films layouts and wants each one as an article people can find on Google months later.
• A two-person mushroom-foraging channel turning each “what we found this week” video into a post for the people who prefer reading.
• A community college media program that records every guest lecture and wants a recap page for students who missed it.

Video is the hard part, and these folks already do it. The post is the easy part they never get to. That is exactly the gap Claude fills.

Why use Make if Claude can already write?

Worth asking. Claude is great at the one creative job: turning a video’s details into a readable post. It is not built to watch your channel around the clock, carry data between YouTube and WordPress, create the post, and keep doing it on a schedule. That is plumbing, and plumbing is Make’s job. They are not rivals. They divide the work.

Make handles every step that needs no judgment: spotting the new video, passing the text along, creating the draft, running on its own. Claude handles the single step that needs intelligence, the writing. Think of Make as the assembly line and Claude as the one craftsperson at the bench. You would not ask the craftsperson to bolt together the line, and you would not ask the line to write. I have built versions that shoved the whole job onto the AI, and they were slower, pricier, and broke more often. Splitting it this way is what keeps it steady.

What do you need before you start?

• A Make account. The free plan covers 1,000 operations a month, plenty for a channel that posts a few times a week. Sign up at make.com.
• A Claude API key. This is the developer version, not the chat app. You generate it in the Claude console; Make uses it to send the video details to Claude. New to Claude? Start with how to use Claude.
• A YouTube channel you own, so Make can watch it for new uploads.
• A WordPress site with an application password (Users, then Profile, then Application Passwords).

Two Make words, defined once. A scenario is one automation, the whole YouTube-to-WordPress chain. A module is one box in it. Three boxes, one scenario. That is the whole vocabulary you need.

How does the workflow work, step by step?

Three modules, left to right:

Module	App	What it does
1. Trigger	YouTube	Watches your channel and fires when a new video is uploaded
2. Brain	Claude	Reads the video’s title and description and writes a blog post
3. Output	WordPress	Creates a new draft post with Claude’s text

Step 1: Watch your YouTube channel

Create a new scenario in Make and add the first module: YouTube, Watch Videos in a Channel. Connect your Google account and point it at your own channel. This is your trigger, the event that starts everything. Set it to pull the few most recent videos so you have something to test with.

When you run it, this module hands the next step the video’s title, description, link, and publish date. The title and description are what Claude will write from, so the better your video descriptions, the better the first drafts.

Step 2: Let Claude write the post

Add a second module and search for Claude (Anthropic). Pick “Create a Prompt”, paste your API key, and choose a current model. Claude Sonnet is a sensible, low-cost default for this.

The prompt is where you set your voice once. A version that works well:

Write a blog post that companions this YouTube video.
Title: {{video title from Step 1}}
Description: {{video description from Step 1}}
Video link: {{video URL from Step 1}}

Write ~700 words in plain, friendly English. Open with what the viewer
will learn, use three or four subheadings, and end with a one-line recap.
Embed the video link near the top. No hype. Return the title on the first
line, then the body.

The {{ }} bits are Make mapping tokens: you click them in from Step 1 rather than typing them, so each new video fills them automatically. Tuning this prompt is the same craft as any good Make AI scenario, just pointed at your channel.

Step 3: Send the draft to WordPress

Add the third module: WordPress, Create a post. Connect it with your site URL, username, and the application password. Map Title and Content to Claude’s reply from Step 2.

Now the setting that matters most in this entire guide. Set Status to Draft, not Publish. A draft waits for you to read it. Publish would put an unread, AI-written post on your live site under your name. Leave it on Draft, every time, no matter how good the drafts get.

How do you run it and check the result?

Click Run once. Make grabs a recent video, sends it to Claude, and creates the draft. Open WordPress, go to Posts, and it is sitting there. When I tested this against a real channel, the companion post landed in drafts in under a minute, and it was roughly eighty percent of the way there: a clean recap I tightened and added a personal line or two to. Read yours, adjust the Step 2 prompt until the drafts come out the way you like, then switch the scenario on with a schedule (every 15 minutes is fine) so it watches for new uploads on its own.

From there the job flips. You stop facing a blank editor after every shoot and start editing a draft that already exists. For a channel that posts twice a week, that is roughly eight companion posts a month you were never going to write by hand.

What does this cost to run?

Piece	Free tier	If you outgrow it
Make	1,000 operations/month free	Core plan from about $9/month
Claude API	Pay per use	A ~700-word post on Sonnet runs well under one cent
YouTube	Free	Free
WordPress	Your existing site	No extra cost

Each video uses three Make operations and a fraction of a cent of Claude. Twelve videos a month is thirty-six operations, deep inside the free Make plan. The real cost is the twenty minutes of setup. For the full tier breakdown, see our Make beginner’s guide.

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

• The post publishes itself. Only if Status is set to Publish in Step 3. Leave it on Draft. This is the one mistake that actually matters.
• The draft is thin. If your video descriptions are one line, Claude has little to work with. This bit me in testing: richer descriptions, or adding the transcript as a later step, fixed it immediately.
• It fires for old videos on first run. Normal. Clear those test drafts and let the scenario settle so it only catches new uploads.
• The API key is rejected. A Claude chat login is not an API key. You need a key from the developer console, with billing set up.

Want to go further with the same three-box pattern? Our roundup of Make AI scenarios shows where to take it next.

How do you build this in Zapier or n8n instead?

The three jobs are identical; only the names change.

Job	Make	Zapier	n8n
Catch a new video	Watch Videos in a Channel	New Video in Channel trigger	YouTube Trigger node
Write the post	Claude module	Claude (Anthropic) action	Anthropic node
Make the WP draft	Create a post	WordPress Create Post	WordPress node

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

Frequently asked questions

Do I need the video transcript, or is the description enough?

The description is enough to start, and it keeps the build simple. If your descriptions are short, add a transcript step later so Claude has more to work with. Begin with the simple version and see if the drafts are good enough.

Will every video really turn into a post?

Every new upload triggers the scenario, yes. Whether each one becomes a published post is up to you, because they land as drafts. You can delete the ones that do not deserve a write-up in a second.

Can I use the Claude chat app instead of the API?

Not for this. The chat app is for you; the API is the version other software talks to. Same models, same writing quality, different door.

What if I want a featured image set automatically too?

Possible, by adding fields or a module, but start with title and body. Get the simple three-box version working before you add anything.

Is it safe to connect Make to my WordPress site?

Yes, when you use an application password rather than your real login. You can revoke it any time from your profile without changing your main password.

Sources and docs

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

Last reviewed: May 2026. Make, Claude, YouTube, and WordPress update their interfaces; check the official pages above for exact button names.

You may also like

• Draft WordPress posts from a spreadsheet with Claude + Make
• Make.com Complete Beginner’s Guide
• Make AI Scenarios: automations that save hours
• Zapier vs Make vs n8n: which to start with
• How to use Claude AI
• n8n Complete Beginner’s Guide
• The AI Tools Directory