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Mohamed El-Moumeny
Mohamed El-Moumeny Subscriber

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Automating My Pinterest Content Pipeline with n8n + AI (Free Setup)

Automating My Pinterest Content Pipeline with n8n + AI (Free Setup)

I was spending way too much time digging for content on Pinterest, so I decided to automate the process.

With a bit of tinkering in n8n, I ended up building a workflow that turns viral TikToks into Pinterest-ready pins — completely free to run.


⚡ What the workflow does

I just send a keyword like healthy recipes, 10, and the workflow:

  1. Searches TikTok using Apify
  2. Filters results for high engagement (1M+ views, 1K+ shares, 20–60 sec)
  3. Downloads the top 3 videos (without watermarks — tricky part 😅)
  4. Uploads them to Google Drive
  5. Generates Pinterest titles & descriptions with a free LLM (DeepSeek via OpenRouter)
  6. Logs everything in a Google Sheet with status = Pending for review

💡 Why it matters

  • Saves hours of manual searching
  • Runs on free tiers:
    • n8n (self-hosted)
    • Apify free credits
    • OpenRouter free tier
    • Google Drive + Sheets

And because I still review before posting, Pinterest doesn’t flag low-quality content.


🛠️ Challenges I ran into

  • Getting AI to output clean JSON (regex gymnastics to strip markdown)
  • TikTok CDN requires Referer headers or it throws 403 errors
  • Deduplication to avoid grabbing the same video twice

✅ Final thoughts

This workflow is lightweight, flexible, and basically zero-cost.

It also reminded me how powerful tools like n8n can be for automating entire content pipelines with just APIs + logic.


💬 Would you like me to share the full workflow JSON in another post?

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