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About this lesson
If you’d like to create a more organized approach to your blogging, Evernote is just the tool to help you.
Exercise files
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For Bloggers.docx55.5 KB For Bloggers - Solution.docx
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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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