Blog research and drafting
Produce a sourced, structured draft on a cadence without handing over publication.
Drafting is a good routine and publishing is usually a bad one. This guide keeps the split explicit: the routine researches and writes; a person decides what ships.
What you get: a sourced draft with title options, a summary, a body in your voice, and editorial notes separating verified facts from recommendations.
Prerequisites
- A tool-capable model.
- Optionally, a connection that can read your approved research sources — a documentation repository, an analytics server, or your own MCP server.
Configure it
Start from the template
Routines → New routine → Blog research and drafting. Suggested schedule:
0 9 * * 2.
Set topic — for example Operational security for lean SaaS teams — and
reference it as {{topic}}.
Define the voice concretely
"Write in our brand voice" is not an instruction a model can follow. Give it rules it can check itself against:
Voice: confident, calm, candid. Direct and outcome-led.
Never use: magic, effortless, revolutionary, set-and-forget, unlimited,
fully autonomous.
Never claim customer counts, revenue, or performance figures.
Every factual claim carries a source link, or is labelled as an opinion.Banned-word lists work better than adjectives, because the model can verify compliance before returning.
Ask for the editorial scaffolding
Request the parts an editor actually needs: three title options, a one-sentence summary, the intended reader, the single claim the piece makes, the body, and a list of what could not be verified.
The last item is the most valuable. A draft that says "I could not confirm this figure" saves more time than one that quietly asserts it.
Keep publication out of the routine
Do not enable a publish tool here. If you want the draft to reach a person automatically, use a webhook and put it in front of an editor — delivery is not the same as publication.
Prove it, then activate
Read the manual run's draft the way you would read a submission. If it needs a rewrite rather than an edit, change the instructions and run it again before you activate.
Tuning
- A new topic every week. Rotate
{{topic}}by editing the variable, or run several routines — one per content pillar — on staggered days. Changing the variable returns the routine to draft, so plan a proof run with it. - Drafts that read like summaries. Ask for a specific structure: a claim, a mechanism, an example, and a limitation. Structure produces argument; an outline produces a list.
- Length. Say the word count you want and what to cut first when the piece runs long.