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Automate YouTube Content Strategy with AI, Apify & Google Sheets

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Created by: n8nwizard || n8nwizard

n8nwizard

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Last update 9 hours ago

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📌 Overview

This advanced multi-phase n8n workflow automates the complete research, analysis, and ideation pipeline for a YouTube strategist. It scrapes competitor channels, analyzes top-performing titles and thumbnails, identifies niche trends, gathers audience sentiment from comments, and produces data-driven content ideas—automatically writing them into a structured Google Sheets dashboard.

This system is ideal for:

  • YouTube creators
  • Agencies
  • Content strategists
  • Automation engineers
  • Anyone who wants to generate YouTube content ideas backed by real data

🧠 High‑Level Architecture

The workflow is split into 5 phases, each building on the previous:

Phase 1 — Niche Outliers (Input: User Form)

Scrapes 3 high‑quality channels from your niche, extracts their outlier videos, and analyzes why they work.

Phase 2 — Broad Niche Insights (Weekly)

Scrapes the top trending content in your broad niche (e.g., "AI", "fitness", "personal finance") and logs weekly insights.

Phase 3 — Niche Insights (Daily)

Scrapes the top videos in your specific micro‑niche daily to keep track of content momentum.

Phase 4 — Comment Analysis

Analyzes real comments from your channel to understand what your audience likes, dislikes, and wants more of.

Phase 5 — Content Ideation

Generates 3 highly‑optimized title + thumbnail concepts using all prior insights.

Everything is automatically logged into a Google Sheets dashboard.

🧩 Phase-by-Phase Breakdown

⭐ Phase 1 — Niche Outliers (Form Trigger)

  1. User enters 3 YouTube channel URLs in a form.

  2. Workflow scrapes each channel using Apify YouTube Scraper.

  3. Filters for top-performing videos.

  4. Extracts: title, views, likes, thumbnail, URL.

  5. AI analyzes:

    • Power words in titles (OpenRouter/GPT 4.1-mini)
    • Thumbnail attention hooks (OpenAI Vision)

  6. All insights are appended into the “Niche Outliers” sheet.

Purpose: Understand what the best creators in your niche are doing.

🌐 Phase 2 — Broad Niche Insights (Weekly — Sundays @ 5 AM)

  1. Workflow scrapes the top videos for a broad niche (e.g., “artificial intelligence”).

  2. Analyzes:

    • Title structure
    • Power words
    • Thumbnail cues

  3. Writes weekly insights to “Broad Niche Weekly” sheet.

Purpose: Stay informed about macro‑level trends.

🎯 Phase 3 — Niche Insights (Daily @ 6 AM)

  1. Scrapes the top videos in your specific micro‑niche (e.g., “n8n automations”).
  2. Runs title + thumbnail analysis.
  3. Appends daily results to “Niche Daily”.
  4. Results feed directly into Phase 5.

Purpose: Track daily momentum and trending formats.

💬 Phase 4 — Comment Analysis (Channel Feedback)

  1. Scrapes your channel’s latest 5 videos.

  2. Extracts up to 30 comments from each.

  3. Aggregates comments.

  4. AI identifies:

    • What viewers love
    • What viewers dislike
    • What viewers are asking for

  5. Stores patterns in “Comment Analysis” sheet.

Purpose: Understand real audience demand.

💡 Phase 5 — Content Ideation Using AI

Using insights from all previous phases:

  • Top titles
  • Power words
  • Thumbnail patterns
  • Daily niche trends
  • Audience comment analysis
  • Channel positioning

The Creative Agent produces:

  • 3 optimized video titles
  • 3 matching thumbnail concepts

These are appended to the “Ideation” sheet.

A Slack notification is sent when ideation is ready.

Purpose: Fully automated content idea generation.

🗂️ Outputs in Google Sheets

The workflow populates these tabs:

📌 Niche Outliers (top competitor videos)

📌 Broad Niche Weekly (weekly trend analysis)

📌 Niche Daily (daily trend analysis)

📌 Comment Analysis (audience sentiment)

📌 Ideation (final titles + thumbnails)

🔧 What This Workflow Automates

✔ Competitor analysis
✔ Thumbnail + title breakdowns
✔ Daily niche tracking
✔ Weekly niche tracking
✔ Viewer sentiment analysis
✔ Fully AI‑generated content ideas
✔ Automatic data logging to Google Sheets
✔ Slack notifications

This is essentially a 24/7 AI YouTube strategist.

⚙️ Setup Requirements

  • Apify API Key (used in 5 scraper nodes)

  • OpenRouter API Key (for GPT 4.1-mini intelligence)

  • OpenAI API Key (for thumbnail image analysis)

  • Google Sheets OAuth2 Credential

  • Make a copy of the provided sheet template

  • Fill Set nodes:

    • Phase II: Broad niche (e.g., "AI")
    • Phase III: Micro niche (e.g., "n8n automations")
    • Phase IV: Your Channel URL
    • Phase V: Your Channel Description

🧪 Testing Guide

  1. Test the Form Trigger with 3 competitor channel URLs.
  2. Test both Schedule Triggers (weekly + daily) manually.
  3. Verify Sheets are receiving rows.
  4. Run the full pipeline end‑to‑end.
  5. Confirm Slack notification.

Everything should chain together smoothly.

🎉 Final Result

By the end of this workflow, you have a:

🧠 Data‑driven YouTube strategy system

that:

  • studies your niche
  • finds outliers
  • understands your audience
  • detects trends
  • generates smart content ideas every day