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If you’d like to create a more organized approach to your blogging, Evernote is just the tool to help you.

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Quick reference

Topic

Evernote for Bloggers.

When to use

If you’d like to create a more organized approach to your blogging, Evernote is just the tool to help you.

Instructions

Blogging is a process, it’s not a single item on your to-do list.  Once you break blogging into phases it will be that much easier to manage the process. 

Blogging can be broken down into five distinct phases:

Phase 1: Gather ideas

Phase 2: Refine the list of ideas

Phase 3: Write your blog post

Phase 4: Format and upload your blog post

Phase 5: Share your blog post

 

Now, look how each phase can be simplified using Evernote.

Phase 1: Gather ideas

You must have a single blogging information vault.  Otherwise, you’ll be spending more time collecting your thoughts and coming up with topics than actually writing.

Evernote is perfect for this phase, because it allows you to add information into it in a variety of ways:

●Create it directly in Evernote

●Drag the files into a Note

●Clip paragraphs, articles, or URLs

Plus, you can work in Evernote when you are offline and regardless how many devices you installed your Evernote on, the changes you’ve made or information added will be synchronized across all your devices the moment you go back online.

Create a Notebook (or define a set of tags) in Evernote where you will be collecting your blogging-related information.  Call it Blogging or anything else that you like.  If you’ll be using it on a regular basis, I suggest dragging it into your shortcuts area (by the way, you can drag not only Notes and Notebooks, but tags into the Shortcuts area, too!)

Moving forward, ensure that every time you get an idea for a blog post--whether you saw an interesting article online, received an email from a reader, or was on a walk--all of  your great ideas end up in your Evernote. 

 

Phase 2: Refining the list of ideas

This is when you review saved ideas and decide which ones you are going to use for blog posts.  You can do this by scheduling 30min of your time every two-three months and combing through your blog post idea Notes.  Here is when uniform tagging of those Notes or collecting them into a single Notebook will tremendously help to find what you are looking for quickly and painlessly.

 

Phase 3: Writing your blog post

If you take your time to decide on the blog post topic ahead of time, you will minimize the number of occasions when you sit staring at a blinking cursor not knowing what to write about.

You can make the process of blog post writing even more streamlined by using a template.  It can be as simple as:

1.Enticing title

2.Opening paragraph to introduce the topic

3.Subtitle that echoes the title

4.List of tips

5.Conclusion that references the main topic and summarizes how the above tips can help to remedy the situation

6.Call to action

 

Phase 4: Format and publish your blog post  &

 

Phase 5: Share your blog post

Much of what needs to happen during the last two phases is mechanical and repetitive.  To manage these phases with ease create cheat sheets and checklists to rely on.

To create the blog post formatting and publishing checklist, list everything you can think of:

●What day and time does the blog post go live?

●What categories/tags do you want the posts to fall under?

●How big should pictures be, and where in the post should they appear? Who will source them? From where?

●What pre-programmed headers will be used (and where) in your posts?

●What social media needs must be met, like shareables for Facebook and Twitter?

●When must the completed post be available for formatting and where will it be stored?

 

Approach creating the blog post sharing cheat sheet in the same way--list all social media platforms where you share your blog post and any other ways.

Having a checklist will ensure that if/when you get interrupted, you will remember where you left off.  And the benefit of having your checklists in Evernote is that you’ll be able to easily share them with someone who could help you format, publish, share your blog posts.  

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  • 00:04 If you'd like to create a more organized approach to your blogging,
  • 00:08 Evernote is just the tool to help you.
  • 00:11 So, in this lesson, we are going to take a look at how
  • 00:14 Evernote can help you manage your blogging process.
  • 00:18 And that's actually the key.
  • 00:19 Blogging is a process, it's not a single item on your to-do list.
  • 00:24 Once you break blogging into phases, it will be that much easier for
  • 00:27 you to manage them.
  • 00:29 So the phases you can break blogging into are gathering ideas, refining the list
  • 00:35 of ideas, writing your blog post and then formatting, uploading and sharing it.
  • 00:41 So let's take a closer look at how every note can
  • 00:43 help you simplify aach one of those phases.
  • 00:48 First, gathering ideas, well that's pretty straightforward.
  • 00:52 You know how quickly and easily Evernote can become your information hub.
  • 00:58 So, for that, you can create parent notes with your blog post ideas,
  • 01:03 directly in Evernote.
  • 01:05 You can clip paragraphs, articles or URLs and send them into Evernote.
  • 01:10 You can forward e-mails into Evernote with your readers' questions.
  • 01:15 All of that can go into Evernote.
  • 01:18 And the best thing to do would be to either collect them into a single blogging
  • 01:22 notebook, or uniformly tag them, so when the time comes to sit down and
  • 01:29 refine you list of ideas, you can quickly pull up that list.
  • 01:33 How often that happens is really up to you.
  • 01:38 You can try with sitting down every two, three months and
  • 01:43 setting aside 30 minutes of your time to pull up your blog post idea notes.
  • 01:49 And go through them to decide which ones you want to keep,
  • 01:53 which ones you don't want to keep, add any notes.
  • 01:57 But this way when it's time for
  • 01:59 you to write your blog post, you are clear what you want to write about.
  • 02:04 So you minimize the number of times when you sit in front of your computer,
  • 02:09 staring at a blinking cursor.
  • 02:12 What you also might want to do is to come up with your blog post template,
  • 02:17 so that you know how you're going to structure your blog posts.
  • 02:22 So you can even start with a simple outline and
  • 02:25 then I'll kind of fill in the blanks.
  • 02:28 You will find that you will start writing blog posts that
  • 02:33 much faster and you will start creating much better content.
  • 02:40 So the last two phases formatting, uploading and
  • 02:43 sharing your blog posts are rather mechanical.
  • 02:47 So what you can do here is create in Evernote checklists for
  • 02:51 every single activity.
  • 02:52 A checklist for formatting your blog post, for uploading your blog post.
  • 02:57 Checklist that lists all social media platforms where you share your blog post,
  • 03:03 all of that will be helpful to you.
  • 03:06 So if you get interrupted, you will know where you left off.
  • 03:10 But, another benefit is that, whenever you are able to bring someone
  • 03:16 else on board to help you, you will be able to share those checklists
  • 03:21 with them and ensure that whenever they format, for example,
  • 03:26 a blog post, they get the same exact outcome as you do.
  • 03:30 So, if you use Evernote to help you manage your blogging process,
  • 03:35 you will find that you will get much more consistent and
  • 03:40 you will create much better content time and time again.

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