Connecting Zapier and Automate.io with Notion API

Section 1: Introduction

• Introduce the Notions API and the purpose of the tutorial
• Mention that the tutorial will be using Zapier and Automate.io and their free plans
• Give a brief overview of the Notion page that will be used in the tutorial

Section 2: Connecting Notion to Zapier

• Explain how to find and copy the secret token in Notion
• Show how to create a new app in Zapier and name it
• Discuss the trigger event and action in Zapier

Section 3: Setting up a Slack notification

• Connect Slack to Zapier
• Choose the "Send channel message" action in Zapier
• Customize the message and test it

Section 4: Turning on the Zap and testing

• Explain how to turn on the Zap
• Test the Zap by making a new sale on Gumroad

Section 5: Connecting Notion to Automate.io

• Explain how to connect Notion to Automate.io
• Discuss the trigger and action in Automate.io

Section 6: Setting up a Twitter search in Automate.io

• Connect Twitter to Automate.io
• Set up a search query and filter out unwanted results
• Discuss how to customize the search and narrow down the results

Section 7: Testing the Automate.io bot

• Explain how to test the Automate.io bot
• Test the bot by tweeting about Notion HQ and mentioning the word "database"

Section 8: Conclusion

• Recap the steps taken in the tutorial
• Encourage viewers to try out the Notions API and explore its capabilities

‍

It has been a really long wait, but the Notions API is finally here. Today, I want to show you how to create a simple notifications database inside Notion that collects data from external programs using the API. Specifically, I will be using Zapier and Automate.io to make this happen. I will only be using their free plans, so you can totally follow along. Both allow you to create up to five bots. For Zapier, you'll have a limit of a hundred actions a month, which basically means a hundred updates to your Notion page or workspace every month. With Automate.io, that limit is 300 actions per month, and you can use 10 bots.

I'm going to show you how to grab data from Gumroad, RSS feeds, and Twitter. We'll start with those for today. I'll definitely do more content in the future, especially with emails and connecting them to Notion.

Let's take a look at the page I'll be working in inside Notion. This is my content calendar page for my blog and YouTube channel. We have our notifications database, which we'll be working with for these integrations. We also have my content creation process for 2021, some reminders, some goals with check boxes, and another database called user research. This is a list of queries that we'll be connecting through Zapier or Automate.io. We'll go into Twitter and create an automatic search query so that when someone tweets about Notion HQ and happens to mention the word "database," I'll get a list of tweets that will populate this page. This will give me ideas for content based on questions or things people are talking about regarding Notion and databases.

Let's get started by connecting our Notion to Zapier. We'll go to the apps section of our Zapier account and add a connection. We'll search for Notion and it will prompt us to find a token. To do this, we'll go to the sidebar, select settings, then members. Under the workspace section at the bottom, we'll go to develop your own integrations. We'll create a new integration and call it. You can also upload a logo if you'd like.

Click the workspace you're associated with and make sure you are an admin of that workspace. Navigate to the Zapier bot and ensure the integration type is set to internal. Copy the secret token.

In Zapier, create a new app and name it "New Sale." The trigger event will be a sale from Gumroad for the product "Notion Library Collect HQ." Test the trigger and select one of the options provided.

For the action, search for the official Notion app and choose the "Create database item" action. Connect to the "Notifications" database. Set up the properties for the database, including an emoji, the name of the product sold, and a tag for monetization. Test the action and continue.

Next, set up a Slack notification to be sent whenever a new sale is made. Connect to your Slack account and choose the "Send channel message" action. Customize the message and test it.

Finally, turn on the Zap and test it by making a new sale on Gumroad. This should trigger the action in Notion to add a new database item and send a notification in Slack.

someone shared your content." I think that's pretty relevant for a content creation page. Say Twitter share, click Twitter, it will prompt you to log into your Twitter. I already did that. I'm gonna go down to search mention as the trigger. Then, now what I'm gonna do for this search term is just my website redgregory.com, but I'm gonna filter out everything that I'm posting. So, if I post something with my website, of course, I will because I will be promoting my stuff. I want to filter that out of here, so I'm going to say minus from colon and just have my ad name here at red gregory 1.

There's a lot of different ways you can narrow down these searches, so if you are looking to automate some Twitter results into your workspace, I will leave a link in the description to a video on how to do Twitter searches specifically. But for now, let's just continue.

So we have one result, and what we're gonna do is create a new database item in Notion just like we did before. We're gonna create a new database, and we're going to call this one Twitter Shares. We'll have a name, we'll have a description, and we'll have a link. The name will be "Twitter Share" and then in the description we're going to say "congratulations, someone shared your content" and then we'll put in the link to the tweet. Let's test this one out. All right, it looks like it worked. Let's turn on the zap and move on to the next one.

The next one is actually going to be a little bit more complex. We're going to be using a tool called Parabola and what we're going to do is we're going to be setting up a workflow that will take all of the blog posts that I have ever written and put them into a Google Sheets document. The reason why I want to do this is because I want to be able to track my progress over time. I want to see how many views each blog post gets, how many shares, how many likes, things like that. So, to do this we're going to be using Parabola.

First, let's go ahead and create a new workflow. I'm going to call this one "Blog Post Tracker." The first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect to my RSS feed just like we did before. We're going to search for RSS and we're going to connect to my feed. Once we have that connected, we're going to go ahead and add a new step and we're going to search for "Google Sheets." We're going to create a new sheet and we're going to call it "Blog Post Tracker."

Next, we're going to go ahead and map out all of the different columns that we want to have in our sheet. We're going to have the title of the blog post, the date it was published, the URL, the number of views, the number of likes, the number of shares, and any other metrics that we might want to track.

Once we have all of our columns mapped out, we're going to go ahead and test the workflow to make sure everything is working properly. It looks like everything is working properly, so we're going to go ahead and turn on the workflow and that's it. Now, every time I publish a new blog post, it will automatically be added to my Google Sheets document and I can track my progress over time.

Last time, someone shared my content. Let's go through all the mentions and make sure none of them are from me. Make sure this worked so that is a retweet and mention.

BI mention A is also a retweet, so go into connecting this to Notion. Searching for Notion and creating a database item into the notification database, notifications.

Let's look at the name here, and I'm going to have a little star at the beginning and say username. Actually, let's do full name shared your content! Inside of info, I just want the tweet text. Inside of tags, let's click community and the link is the URL link. URL, I'm just going to turn it on. It's pretty sure it'll work.

Yeah, I actually did this test yesterday, didn't I? Now, before we go over to automate.io, you'll notice that I have set up my properties to show me the link and that's just going to these three dots and going to properties. I'm showing a link and I can open the link right here. I also have a checkbox to force archive, so it'll disappear whenever I click that, and then I have that sticker there.

So just a reminder, you only get five free bots with Zapier. We have three here and a hundred actions. I feel like we're going to be well under a hundred for what I have set up. Let's go over to automate.io and create a bot.

We're going to connect to Notion. It looks like I have not connected yet. Super easy process in automate.io, very different from Zapier. It's just going to ask you to log in, select pages, and I'm going to select my red gregory page, which is our content creation page. Allow access. Now, all the databases within this page will be available to update. So, in this case, I don't have to go to every single database and invite automate.io like we did with Zapier.

Let's again go to search tweets like we just did in Zapier, and I'm going to connect to Notion. Now the search query for this one is essentially whenever someone adds Notion, like their official account, and includes the word database in their tweet. So, the search query is going to be in this, and what I'm going to do is filter out me again. So mine is from me.

We're going to go over to Notion, select the action to be done, which is going to be add page content, and we're going to go into this list of queries page and update the body of the page. So, we're not adding new database items, we are updating the inside of the page.

What we'll have to do here is find the page ID. Let's go into list queries, open this up as a full page. We're going to go up to share and just copy this link. Paste it in, but we don't need the whole link. Just go up to where the assortment of letters and numbers begins. That is your page ID.

So, what I want to do is add paragraph style and within this paragraph, I'm going to set up the tweet. So, I don't want to see the whole tweet. I just want to see basically the context of the tweet. Let's say tweet text and from and let's have the user ID below this. I do want the user's full name and a link to the tweet. Now, this link will not be clickable, but we'll put it there anyway.

Like I have in the example, go to save. Let's turn the bot on. I'm done with what it's going to do. It's going to check for this search tweet query, and if nothing comes up, it will just say nothing came up. But that doesn't mean it's not working. It just means it couldn't find any recent posts under these search query. It's going to show up in this style for me and I do like this. It's just giving me a little snippet of what people are tweeting about in general to notion.

Like for this one up here, is it possible to use Zaps to create database items using a template? I would like to know as well. Um, and if that's something that can happen in the future. So I gave it a yellow coloring because it is sort of something that probably could happen in the future. I'll probably just keep this on the back burner and try to look at that API to see if coding can make this happen. Green is something that I feel like I could make right now.

Now, a lot of these tweets to notion are usually questions, which is great for me trying to find content because then I can answer these questions through the form of an article or a video. And yeah, we'll see that update over time. So that one's really valuable for a page like this. Let's do something that's super easy and really anyone could have use for and that's a reminder. So, every Friday morning, I want to be reminded to start brainstorming video ideas.

I'm going to copy this emoji here and we are going to use Automate.io. Search that in here, timer. And the trigger is going to be every week, and the action is notion, of course. But every week on Friday, the time of day is going to be 7 a.m. and then my time zone, of course, which is Eastern U.S.

Now let's look at the notion side of things. What I want to do is again, just add an item. We're going to choose the database notifications and fill everything out like we did in Zapier. What I'm going to do here is pretty simple. Let's go to tags and choose reminder. I could also link to another database. Like I could link to my content calendar database by just copying the link from that page and putting it in here. I have this dot and say "start brainstorming video ideas." So this should be sent to my notification database every Friday at 7 a.m.

Okay, so how do we automatically make this stuff disappear if it gets a little bit out of hand? I did make another database view called archived notifications. Firstly, what I have is a force archive checkbox, just a checkbox. What I did was I created a filter inside of notifications that essentially just says "force archive is empty." And you're going to find those filters inside of the menu. Now, inside of archived notifications, I have another filter that just says that "forced archive is checked."

Let's look at that formula though. So with this formula, it's a very simple formula. Let's zoom in one more time. We're just going to say "date between." This is the date between function. Date between right now and the time that this database item was created, which is automatic. In the number of days, I just want it to be greater than zero.

All right, we do need to add another filter to this that basically says "archive is checked" or "forced archived is checked."

Forced archive is checked, so let's look at that formula. It's a very simple formula, so we're just going to say date between right now and the time that this database item was created. I just want it to be greater than zero. All right, we do need to add another filter to this that basically says archive is checked or forced archived is checked. In notifications, we're just going to say forced archived is unchecked and archived. The formula we just made is also unchecked.

Okay, so that's it. This might have been a long one, sorry. I hope you guys were at least a little bit inspired on how to just get started using this API and using these connections and integrations. I will, like I said in the beginning of the video, be going way more into the API in different ways to connect data to your Notion workspace.

But for right now, I am just testing everything out and I'm assuming you guys are too. The API just came out a few days ago, so I didn't get a ton of time to work with it yet. But I am super excited to see what I can do with it. I will see you guys the rest of the week on Twitter. I was supposed to put out a video last week about my content calendar, and it's almost a good thing that I didn't put it out because now I want to add a little bit from these API connections into that system. So I might put that out in the middle of the week, or I might put it out next Sunday. It depends on my schedule. But other than that, I'll see you guys the rest of the week on Twitter and next time with a new video. See you then.

‍