How To Make an Automated List of Your Blog Posts in a Spreadsheet

Have you ever needed a list of all your blog’s posts in a spreadsheet? Personally, I keep one in my Google Drive to manage my Pinterest group boards and keep track of which posts have been posted where. Originally I needed a spreadsheet of my posts because I had switched over my domain name and needed to go back and edit the Pinterest graphics associated with each post. Having a spreadsheet made keeping track of that project super easy!

A few other ideas that come to mind are: maybe you want to keep track of which affiliate networks are mentioned in each post, or how much each post has earned you, etc. There are a ton of possibilities and I think it’s better to be organized than not when it comes to blogging!

Here’s how I keep an updated list of all my blog posts as they are published. I use a tool called IFTTT to accomplish this, which happens to be the same tool I use to automate all of my social media sharing. IFTTT is essentially a bridge between two systems that automates certain tasks. Kind of like a free personal assistant! Today, I’m going to show you how to create a connection between WordPress and Google Drive and allow them to “communicate” to each other using IFTTT. Don’t worry, it’s super easy and will take you less than 10 minutes!

Ready to automate?

Connect Your Accounts

First, sign up for IFTTT if you don’t already have an account. Don’t worry, it’s totally free!

Click My Applets, then New Applet, and finally + This

Type WordPress and select the icon

Click Connect on the following page

A pop-up will appear. Enter your website, the username you use to login to your blog, and your password for the blog.

If you get a message like, “Unable to verify WordPress credentials. Please try again.” then this means you have extra security enabled on your blog and you need to create an application specific password. Unfortunately this error is really common and IFTTT hasn’t issued a fix for it, so the easiest thing to do is go back and select “RSS Feed” if you keep getting this error.

Select New Feed Item (or New Post if you were able to connect WordPress) as your trigger

Enter your RSS feed link, which should be something like: http://yourblog.com/feed/

Select +That

Type Google Drive and select it

Click Connect, then select your username or log in through the pop-up window, and finally click Allow

There’s a few different options for this part, but we’re going to go with the last one: Add row to spreadsheet

Tell IFTTT What You Want It To Do

Now we’re going to tell IFTTT what to do with a new post in Google Drive.

I call the spreadsheet name Posts

In the “Formatted Row” section, you can choose which pieces of data are pulled from WordPress into your spreadsheet. Feel free to add any ingredients you like here, but I typically include the Post Name, the URL and the Publish Date.

You can copy and paste the following into the box:

then click out of the text box and it should work.

In “Drive Folder Path,” I delete the default text, otherwise it will create folders in my Drive which is unnecessary. Instead I simply write a slash which tells IFTTT it can find the document in the main section of my Drive. If you do have a folder you’d like the document inside, then feel free to type it there.

Click Create Action.

Choose whether you want to be notified when this applet runs (I turn this off) and click Finish.

Check Out Your List of Blog Posts

There you go! Pretty soon you’ll have a nice list of all your blog posts for you to reference whenever you need to. This method requires no maintenance on your end and you can even have the spreadsheet open while publishing posts. It won’t mess up the applet. Depending on how often you write posts, the sheet is generally updated within an hour of when you publish your blog post.

Have you found a great way to use a list of all your blog posts in a spreadsheet? I’d love to hear other use cases, so please leave your story in the comments below!