When it comes to succeeding online, and staying sane in the process, the number one enemy is not a lack of traffic or not knowing which niche to promote or even knowing where to start.
Don’t get me wrong – those are important things. But they are not the #1 killer of success.
The #1 killer of success is information overload.
And today we’re going to solve that problem. Because today you are going to be introduced, or re-introduced, to the best tool on the planet for staying organized, gathering information and keeping things simple.
Best of all … it’s completely free.
The tool is called Evernote. It’s free, it works and it literally changed my life when I started using it.
You should know that there is a paid version but it’s only necessary in very limited cases. I use the paid version because I work with so much data. But I used the free version for about a year before upgrading.
For most people the free version will do all you need.
As the owner of the Directory of Ezines I do a lot of research into ezines to include in the DOE. Lots of ezines want to be in the DOE but they don’t all make the cut. Which means I have to do a lot of research about them, plus the research I do finding ezines on my own, plus my own marketing.
In other words, I visit a lot of sites and gather data.
In the old dark days (before Evernote) I used to bookmark sites. But that was a hassle. I had to organize the bookmarks manually by creating folders. Then the bookmarks would not work on my laptop at home or my iPad.
And if I wanted to include notes about the site, or a PDF or copy of an email, I was out of luck.
There had to be a better way!
There was, and it’s name is Evernote.
Here is a video from the Evernote site, used with permission of course.
Here is one way I use Evernote…
I use Evernote so much that it’s hard to talk about how I use it without writing a novel-sized article. Since you don’t need to spend all day reading, let me show you one way I use Evernote that might apply to you.
Never lose another good idea again!
I use Evernote to write down article ideas as I have them. The process I use can be used for any idea.
I have Evernote on both my Macs (iMac and MacBook Air) and on my iPad and iPhone as well. Yep … I’m a Mac guy.
But you don’t have to use Macs to use Evernote just like I do. It works on almost any platform.
Back to the article ideas. Have you ever had a great idea for an article, or for anything actually, and not written it down and then later forgotten it? We’ve all been there and it’s frustrating.
Evernote solves that.
What I do with Evernote is to write down the article idea the moment I have it. But I don’t try to write the article then. I only make notes about the article and give it a working title. Sometimes I end up writing the entire article in one sitting but most of the time I make notes or create an outline like I teach in Article Marketing Live.
Here are three views of my Evernote to show you want that looks like.
Here is a partial snapshot of my Evernote notebooks.
There are too many to fit on one screen. I’ve covered up the names of people I work with for their privacy.
Notice how the Article Idea notebook is highlighted? That is the notebook we are going to look at next.
Next is my “Article Idea” list.
I currently have 89 article ideas, with notes, that have not been written yet. This is one of the greatest things about using Evernote if you are a blogger or article marketer, or writer of any kind.
Over time you will gather into one place more ideas than you ever thought possible because you are doing it as you go. “Inch by inch it’s a cinch” as they say. It would be very hard for me to create 89 good article ideas in one sitting.
But because I write the idea down immediately I’ve gathered that many quite easily.
Here is a partial screenshot of my 89 article ideas. Please don’t use them! 🙂
NOTE: Notice the blue word “Strategy” in the “Going Broke” listing (the one in grey)? With Evernote you can use tags to find things quickly. So what I do is add tags to my article ideas that match the categories of my blog and then I know at a glance how many article ideas I have for each section of my blog.
Next is a view of my notes for the “Going Broke” article.
You will notice that these are notes only and they are kind of rough. But I can turn these notes into a full article in about 30 minutes because I captured the idea when I had the idea and don’t have to strain to remember what I wanted to say.
This concept alone – making the note when the idea is fresh – will save you hours of time and much frustration as well.
Notice too that I had this idea over 6 months ago (as of the time I’m writing this) and that idea is still fresh and ready to go. Having an arsenal of ideas at your fingertips is incredibly important when doing content marketing.
There are many other things you can do with Evernote, such as …
- Clip entire webpages
- Clip parts of a webpage
- Share notes with others
- Save PDF files inside Evernote
- Dictate notes into Evernote
- Automatically sync between all your devices
- Format notes in almost any way you want
- Drag images into notes
- Print notes
- And much more
I strongly encourage you to get Evernote and give it a test drive. It’s one of those tools that gets better with time — the more you use it the more useful it becomes.
I hope you enjoyed this short review. Please do leave a comment below.
