The WP Autonomous YouTube plugin uses YouTube search keywords, YouTube Channels or YouTube playlists to automatically add YouTube videos to the website.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can set up all the automated campaigns in the admin panel of the website -> WPA YouTube-> Campaigns.
To set up a new automated campaign click ‘Add New Campaign’. Tip: If there are already existing automated campaigns active, I recommend opening an existing campaign in a new browser tab, so you can see the settings used from those campaigns and copy them over.
Settings explained
Title: Enter a title for the campaign. This title is only visible to you inside the admin panel and has no impact on any of the settings.
Manual Posting: Ignore this section for now if you didn’t finish setting up the campaign yet. Once your campaign is ready and published, you can post articles using the “Post Now” button, to see if everything works correctly. This way you don’t need to wait until the automatic posting has started to see if it’s posting correctly.
Keywords: If you want the plugin to automatically search for videos related to a certain topic, then you can enter your keywords here. Start typing a keyword and suggestions will be displayed. Click on the keyword so it will be added to the keyword list. You can also add multiple keyword phrases. If you want the plugin to post from a specific YouTube channel or playlist, make sure to leave the keyword section empty. More on YouTube channels and playlists can be found below.
Rotate Keywords: When using multiple keywords, you can select how the plugin should handle them. Either “Rotate keywords to post 1 video per interval” or “Post 1 video for each of the keywords per interval”. An interval is when the plugin is set to automatically run.
Posting Interval: This options allows you to set how often the campaign should run automatically. I recommend between 8- 24h. Setting it to just 1 hour is not recommended as receiving 24 posts per day for a campaign is a lot. This adds up to 720 posts per month for just 1 automated campaign. This can be seen as spam by Google.
Post From A Specific YouTube Channel: If you want to post from a specific YouTube channel, enter the ID of the YouTube channel (not the YouTube channel name!). You can find the YouTube channel ID when open a YouTube video and then click on the owner of the video and the channel ID will be at the end of the link after the word slash. For example for the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU when you click on channel, the link will be https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug and the channel ID is UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug
Post From A Specific Playlist: If you want to post from a specific YouTube play list, enter the playlist ID. The play list ID can be found when you click on the actual playlist where you see the entire overview of all the videos inside the list. Example: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOGi5-fAu8bEF6ukwKoQ98iii13Hm82dE the ID of this playlist would be PLOGi5-fAu8bEF6ukwKoQ98iii13Hm82dE
WordPress Date & Time: This is the time used for the date & time of the post that the plugin will create. I recommend to use “current time”, otherwise if you use “original time of the video” and you get a really old video, the post will use that old date and the post will not show up on the front page of the website because the front page only list the newest posts.
Featured Image: The features image is the image that is displayed on the top of each article as well as on front page of the website and in the category pages. If you are using the DisruptPress theme, I recommend to set this option to “Keep Image External And Add As Featured Image”. If you use another theme, make sure to select “Download Image And Add As Featured Image”. Keep in mind if you download the images and your website has dozens of automated campaigns, your web hosting account can fill up very quickly across several months.
Hide Featured Image On Page: This will hide the featured image on the post page. This is recommended as it can be confusing for visitors to see the image of a video and then they have to scroll down to the video. This option only works when using the DisruptPress theme.
Categories: On the right side of the screen you will see a section called “Categories”. Here select the category to wish you wish to post a video. You can also create a new category. When creating a new category or using a category that is not yet visible in the menu on the front page of the website, make sure to add the category to the menu. Go to WordPress Admin Panel -> Appearance -> Menus. Here you can manage your menu. From the right side in the section “Categories”, select the category you just created and add it to the menu. You can drag and drop the menu items around to rearrange the order. When done click save.
That’s it. Hit the blue “Publish” button on the top right side.
Once published, you can click the “Post Now” button in the “Manual Posting” section. This will create new videos from the YouTube channel or keywords straight away and you can click on them below to view them.