A113. Scheduled Marketing for YouTube Videos and Blog Posts
In this episode of Curated Business Ideas, Jack Lookman sets out an app idea for taking the strain out of promoting content. The pitch in one sentence: an app that automates the routine promotion of blog posts and YouTube videos, publishing each one to channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram and social media on a set schedule — so a creator's back-catalogue keeps circulating without the creator having to do it by hand.
As Jack puts it, the idea is “about automating what I would have loved to be done.”
The problem it sets out to solve
Promoting content manually is slow and repetitive. Jack explains that doing it himself “takes time and effort,” and that he would otherwise have to ask someone to help post links to a WhatsApp status on a regular basis.
The second problem is visibility. His own Curated Business Ideas blog holds, in his estimate, “about 200 or 300 plus topics” which were collected over the years. A visitor who lands on the blog can simply “get drowned in the volume of content there”, and so most individual posts never get a fair reading. The idea is to surface the content to a few pieces at a time, steadily, rather than all at once.
The engine of the idea is deliberately simple like creating a spreadsheet that the user fills in at once. Each row describes one piece of content, and the app works through the rows to decide what to post and when.
|
Column |
What goes in it |
|
Title |
The name of the blog post or the YouTube video. |
|
Link (URL) |
The digital link where the content lives — the blog post or video URL. |
|
Affiliate link (optional) |
A separate link to use if the content is being monetised through affiliate marketing. |
Once the columns are populated, the app “picks up each URL and posts it… periodically.” The process can run either automatically or semi-automatically, depending on how much control the user wants to keep.
The posting cadence
Cadence is the part Jack returns to most, because it is what separates promotion from spam:
• Once, twice or three times a day, making it whatever the user chooses.
• Non-spamming by design. “That’s very, very important. You don’t want to spam your audience.”
• Cyclical. It keeps sharing one, two or three links a day “until you have gone around all of the blog posts,” you then create a full pass through the catalogue rather than a burst.
• Automatic or semi-automatic. The user sets how much of the posting the app handles on its own.
Who it is for
• Content creators with an accumulated body of work such as bloggers and YouTubers who want their older posts and videos to keep reaching people.
• The marketers who promote on their behalf. Jack notes that he has associates, “especially in our native Nigeria,” who spend time posting on WhatsApp on a regular basis. A user-friendly, not-too-technical app would suit them, and they could also monetise it by charging creators for that marketing service.
• Affiliate marketers. Apart from promoting a blog or a YouTube channel, the same engine can push affiliate offers on WhatsApp, Telegram and similar channels.
Jack's own checklist before building it
Jack is candid that the idea is at concept stage, and he lists the groundwork any founder would need to do:
1. Market research by testing whether the product is feasible and whether it can bring in money.
2. Competitor research by checking whether anyone is already doing something similar, and whether there is still enough space in the marketplace.
3. Number crunching, like when you decide whether to build it yourself by leveraging AI, or to outsource it, and work out the financial numbers behind the build.
4. A monetisation and marketing plan, like how the app will make money, and how word about the app will be spread.
Compliance caveats
Jack flags several rules that anyone automating posts has to respect:
• Affiliate platforms have their own terms and conditions, and not all of them allow affiliate links to be posted on WhatsApp or Telegram. Read them before automating.
• The messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, have terms of their own terms of use, with each needing to be checked, so the activity can stay compliant.
- Affiliate links often cannot be posted directly to social platforms. The workaround that Jack describes as a “bridge post” is to send people to your blog or website, and carry the affiliate link there. This is industry standard.
The debate: is the idea actually new?
The most useful part of the episode is the host's pushback, and Jack's honest response to it.
The host notes that scheduling tools already exist, like there are “quite a few” products, almost like a digital office assistant, into which you load content and schedule it to post across various social platforms at chosen times. What is less clear is whether those tools cover WhatsApp and Telegram. If they do not, he asks, what makes those platforms different, and would you be using them in this way that requires some kind of agreement with the organisations that run them?
Jack admits he is “not too familiar” with the tools already on the market. He knows scheduling tools exist for appointments and similar tasks, but when he looked into doing this for WhatsApp and Telegram, the feedback he found suggested there may be restrictions.
He is open about wanting to know which apps already do it, if any. His own candidate differentiators are twofold: the affiliate-marketing angle, and a design that is genuinely user-friendly and “not too technical.”
The conversation then turns to what sets WhatsApp apart from, say, Facebook Messenger. Jack argues WhatsApp feels more personal, like a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship that is built on phone numbers.
The host counters that the phone number comes first: access to a number is not a perk of WhatsApp but the precondition for using it, and in a group you can reach people whose numbers you were never given.
He also suggests WhatsApp is the more private option, with encrypted messaging and a communication trail that is harder for outsiders to access, while noting that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger share an owner, and that WhatsApp for Business has added a range of features since Meta took it over.
Where the idea landed
The episode does not end with a build decision, rather it ends with a to-do. Jack concedes that the marketplace may already contain similar products and says he will “go back on the drawing board,” check what exists and explore the tools he finds.
The host's closing advice is the standard that any version of this product will have to meet: whoever takes the idea forward will need “a unique selling point beyond the other scheduling tools.”
Key takeaways
1. The core idea: an app that automates the routine promotion of blogs and YouTube videos across WhatsApp, Telegram and social media.
2. The workflow: fill in a spreadsheet once such as title, URL, and an optional affiliate link, and let the app cycle through the rows.
3. The cadence: one, two or three posts a day, deliberately non-spamming, running until the whole catalogue has been shared, automatically or semi-automatically.
4. The intended users: content creators, the marketers they hire, and affiliate marketers.
5. The open questions: whether comparable tools already exist, whether WhatsApp and Telegram permit this kind of automated posting, and what the unique selling point will be.
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