How to Automate Content Marketing with Claude (Write → Publish → Distribute)

The difference between AI slop and posts people read isn’t the model — it’s the input. Never ask Claude to “write a blog post about content marketing.” Feed it something only you have:

• Your work. Meeting notes, support threads, a decision you just made and why. If it taught you something this week, it can teach your audience.
• Your take on the news. Have Claude scan what’s happening in your niche, pick the story your audience cares about, then interview you for the opinion. The post is your take, Claude just does the typing.

The fastest version — the interview. Paste this into Claude and answer out loud (voice input) or in text:

Interview me for a blog post. Topic: [the thing you want to write about].

Ask me one question at a time, 8–12 questions total. Push past my first
answers: ask for the specific example, the number, the moment I changed
my mind. If I say something quotable, mark it QUOTABLE and keep it
verbatim. When you have enough, say INTERVIEW COMPLETE and output the
full transcript.

Fifteen minutes of answering questions gives Claude more usable material than any amount of prompt engineering. (Sourcing posts from meeting notes, your inbox, or an automated news scan each deserve their own setup — those guides are next in this series.)

One-off prompts produce one-off quality. Instead, give Claude two small reference docs it reads every time it writes. Where they live depends on how you use Claude:

• In the Claude app: create a Project (call it “Blog engine”) and add both docs to its project knowledge. Every chat inside the project knows your voice automatically — each week you only bring the new interview transcript.
• In Claude Code: keep them as two markdown files in your project folder.

voice-guide.md — how you sound. Paste 3–5 things you’ve written that sound like you (posts, long emails, anything), then have Claude build the guide:

Read these writing samples. Extract a voice guide I can reuse: sentence
rhythm, vocabulary I favor and avoid, how I open and close, how I use
examples, what I sound like when I'm being direct. Write it as
voice-guide.md — rules and examples, not compliments.

style-guide.md — what a post must contain. Structure, length, how many examples, banned phrases (“in today’s fast-paced world”, “game-changer”, “delve”), formatting rules.

Then drafting is one prompt:

Using my voice guide and style guide (in project knowledge, or the two
md files in this folder), draft a blog post from the interview
transcript below.

Rules:
- Use my QUOTABLE lines verbatim — they carry the post.
- Where you're missing a fact, write [GAP: question for me] instead of
  inventing one.
- Output: title options (3), the post in markdown, and a one-line
  summary for the blog index.

[paste transcript]

The [GAP] rule matters more than it looks: it converts hallucination risk into a checklist for your two-minute review.

Level 1: Paste it in (two minutes)

Ask Claude to end every draft with a clean, paste-ready version — then it’s WordPress editor → paste → set the featured image → publish. Add this line to your drafting prompt:

After the markdown post, also output a paste-ready version for the
WordPress block editor: plain text with headings, no markdown symbols
left visible, title separate.

That’s the whole step. It stays manual, but it’s two minutes — and everything after this step is automated regardless. If that’s your speed, skip to Step 4.

Level 2: Fully hands-off — Claude Code publishes for you

If you’re comfortable, Claude Code (Claude’s agentic coding tool) can publish directly. WordPress has had a full REST API since 2016 and built-in application passwords since version 5.6 — Claude can publish with one HTTP call. No plugin, no Zapier.

3a. Create an application password. In WordPress admin: Users → Profile → Application Passwords. Name it claude-publisher, click Add Application Password, and copy the generated password now (it’s shown once). Your site needs HTTPS.

3b. Test the connection. Ask Claude Code to run this (or run it yourself):

curl -s -u "YOUR_USERNAME:xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx" \
  https://yourblog.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users/me

If it returns your user JSON, Claude can publish. If you get a 401 with correct credentials, your host is probably stripping the Authorization header (some FastCGI setups do) — the fix is the standard HTTP_AUTHORIZATION rewrite rule in .htaccess, or ask your host.

3c. Store the credentials where Claude can use them. Put them in a .env file in your project folder (and out of any git repo):

WP_URL=https://yourblog.com
WP_USER=your-username
WP_APP_PASSWORD=xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx

3d. Tell Claude how publishing works — once. Add this to your project’s CLAUDE.md so every session knows the rules:

## Publishing
Publish posts to WordPress via the REST API using the credentials in .env:
POST $WP_URL/wp-json/wp/v2/posts with basic auth, JSON body:
{"title": ..., "content": <post as HTML>, "status": "draft",
 "excerpt": <one-line summary>}

ALWAYS create as "draft", never "publish". Tell me the preview link and
wait for my explicit OK before switching status to "publish".

That draft-first rule is the guardrail that makes agentic publishing safe: Claude does 100% of the mechanical work, and nothing goes live without your click. Once you trust the loop, you can loosen it; we haven’t needed to.

Now the entire write-and-publish flow is one sentence in Claude Code: “Interview me about X, draft it per the guides, and put it up as a WordPress draft.”

Here’s where most automation guides quietly hand the work back to you. A published post is not a LinkedIn post, not an Instagram carousel, not a TikTok slideshow. Reformatting one article for five platforms — hook rewritten per platform, text broken into slides, branded, sized — is a couple of hours per post. Every post. Forever. That’s the half of content marketing that kills consistency.

This is the half WaveGen automates. Point it at your blog once:

1. Connect your blog — WaveGen monitors it for new posts.
2. Set up your brand kit — colors, fonts, logo, extracted from your site in a minute. Every asset comes out on-brand.
3. When Claude publishes, WaveGen picks the post up and turns it into platform-native drafts: a LinkedIn post with carousel, an Instagram carousel, a TikTok slideshow, a YouTube short, a Pinterest pin — each built for how that platform works, not a copy-paste of the same blurb five times.

(Under the hood this is the repurposing layer — more on how it works in AI content repurposing.)

The weekly rhythm that makes this a system instead of a stunt:

1. Write day (~30 min). Run the interview, answer the [GAP]s, approve the draft, and it goes up on the blog (pasted or auto-published, per your Step 3 level).
2. Review sitting (~15 min). Open WaveGen, review the generated social drafts — tweak a hook, swap a slide image — and schedule the week across platforms.

Total: about 45 minutes a week for a published article plus a full week of platform-native social content. The parts of you that can’t be automated — judgment and taste — are the only parts still in the loop.