How to Set Up the Article Auto-Writer Workflow (n8n): A Complete Guide

If you’ve just gotten your hands on the Article Auto-Writer workflow, you’re holding a system that can take a single keyword and turn it into a fully written, SEO-optimized, publish-ready blog post — complete with a WordPress draft, section-by-section content, a meta description, and even an AI-generated featured image.

All of that from one row in a spreadsheet.

The catch?

Before it can do any of that magic for you, it needs to be connected to your accounts — your Google Sheet, your AI provider, and your WordPress site.

This guide walks you through that setup from start to finish, so you can go from “just imported the file” to “first article published” without getting stuck.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Gather these four things first — it’ll make the rest of the setup much smoother:

• An n8n account (cloud or self-hosted) — this is where the workflow lives and runs
• A Google account, with a spreadsheet to track your content pipeline
• An Anthropic (Claude) API key — this powers the actual writing: titles, outlines, introductions, and article sections
• An OpenRouter API key — this generates the featured image for each article
• A WordPress website with the REST API enabled, where your articles will land as drafts

Once you have all five in hand, you’re ready to go.

Step 1: Import the Workflow

Getting the workflow into your n8n instance takes seconds:

1. Open your n8n dashboard and go to Workflows → Add Workflow → Import from File
2. Select the provided .json file
3. Once it opens, you’ll see 42 connected nodes. Don’t worry — you won’t need to touch most of them. You just need to update a handful of settings, which we’ll cover below.

Step 2: Set Up Your Google Sheet

This workflow uses a Google Sheet as its “control panel” — it’s where you add new keywords and where the workflow logs its progress. Create a new sheet with a tab named Articles, and add these columns:

Here’s the good news: you only ever fill in two of these columns yourself — Keyword and Status. Everything else fills in automatically as the workflow runs. To queue up a new article, just add a row, type in your keyword, and set Status to Pending.

Step 3: Connect Your Three Credentials

The workflow needs three separate credentials wired up before it can run. In n8n, open any node that needs one, click the Credential dropdown, and choose Create New Credential.

3.1 — Google Sheets

1. Open any Google Sheets node (start with “Read Keyword”)
2. Under Credential, choose Create New → Google Sheets OAuth2
3. Sign in and authorize your Google account
4. In the Document/Sheet field, select the sheet you just created — you’ll need to repeat this selection on each individual Google Sheets node

3.2 — Claude (Anthropic) API Key

This credential powers every node whose name starts with “Claude -” (Title, Outline, Introduction, Meta Description, Fill Section, Title Brainstorm, and Image Prompt).

1. Generate an API key from the Anthropic Console (platform.claude.com)
2. Open any “Claude -” node → Credential → Create New → Header Auth
3. In the Name field, type: x-api-key
4. In the Value field, paste your Anthropic API key
5. Save — this credential will now be shared across every Claude node automatically, since they all reference the same credential

3.3 — OpenRouter API Key

This one is only used by the image-generation node, simply labeled “HTTP Request.”

1. Create an account at openrouter.ai and generate an API key
2. Open the “HTTP Request” node → Credential → Create New → Header Auth
3. In the Name field, type: Authorization
4. In the Value field, type: Bearer YOUR_OPENROUTER_KEY (with your actual key)

Step 4: Connect Your WordPress Site

The workflow talks directly to your WordPress REST API — no plugin needed — but it protects that connection with a custom secret key that your site verifies on every request.

First, create a secret key. Generate a random, hard-to-guess string (something like 8f3Kd92LpQ7vNzR1), then add a small check to your site’s functions.php (or a lightweight custom plugin) that confirms incoming requests include a header called X-N8N-Secret matching that exact string — and rejects the request if it doesn’t match.

Then, update the workflow itself. Every one of the following nodes needs two things changed: the placeholder URL swapped for your real domain, and the placeholder secret swapped for the one you just created.

For each: open the node, replace the domain in the URL field, then find X-N8N-Secret under Headers and swap in your real value.

Step 5: Run Your First Test

With everything connected, it’s time for a dry run:

1. Add a test row to your Google Sheet: any keyword, and Status set to Pending
2. Open the workflow in n8n and hit Execute Workflow
3. Watch it move through the nodes — each one lights up green as it completes
4. Once it finishes, check your WordPress Drafts — you should find a new article, complete with a featured image and meta description
5. Back in your Google Sheet, that row’s Status should now read Done, with the rest of the columns filled in

Troubleshooting Common Issues

That’s It

Once these five steps are done, the workflow runs on autopilot: drop a keyword in, set it to Pending, and come back to a finished, published-ready article. If you run into anything not covered here, reach out to whoever provided you with this workflow.