How I use Notion as blog planner
I am so excited for today’s post because I’m going to show you how I use Notion as my blog planner. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’d see how much I rave about this app every single day since I started using it for my blog. It’s seriously life changing and I urge you to try it and see if you like it.
Notion is an all-in-one place to write, plan, and get organised and it’s perfect for my blog. I can pre-write my blog posts here and copy paste it to WordPress, plan my blog posts and store all my blog post ideas, and also organised every single thing pertaining to my blog. How amazing is that?!
Before resorting to digital planner, I have tried planning my blog with a paper planner but unfortunately it did not work out. Blogging is something that you do online be it with a laptop, desktop, or even a smartphone so paper planning is definitely not the way to go for me.
Why Notion? I have tried other note-taking apps but every one of them needs to be subscribed for their premium features which is something that I don’t want to do. I don’t want to spend money on a note-taking app, period. As for Notion, it’s free to use although you can subscribe to their monthly plan if the free personal plan isn’t enough for your use, it’s unlimited where I can enjoy all features without restriction, and the best thing is there is no popup ads.
The only downside of Notion free personal plan is you can only have 5 guests (you can invite people so they can have access to your notes) and you can only upload files of maximum 5MB per file. Not a huge problem for me since I don’t keep large files here.
Now let’s take a peek into my blog planner!
Dashboard
So here’s my blog planner slash dashboard. This acts like a front page for my planner so I need to make it a lil’ bit cute. I uploaded my own sunflower image for the cover. I also have a snippet of my blog and it’s linked to my blog if I click on it.
I have two sections:
Technicality // Everything about my blog such as the login details, cPanel details, hosting expiry date etc. When you click on the arrow, it will show you the information.
Content // My blog planner table of content. It will open the page if you click on it.
At the bottom I just have the HTML code that I use when leaving comments on blogs.
Section #1: Content Calendar
For the first section, I have my blog’s content calendar. This is where I plan and write down ideas for my upcoming posts. I divide them into 4 sections:
Idea 💡 // If I have any ideas for upcoming posts, I will write it down here. The items are called card.
In Progress // Once I’ve started on a blog post, I will drag the card to In Progress.
Adding Visual // I usually add images to my posts after I write them so once a blog post is written, I will drag the card to Adding Visual.
Published ✨ // Self-explanatory, a published post is placed here.
If you click on the card, it will open a popup page like this. I can write my blog post here but I prefer not to. This section is only used for content planning.
Section #2: To-do List
Here’s my very simple to-do list section. I divide them into 3 sections:
Daily // My daily checklist. Everything that needs to be done on that particular day.
Weekly // Things that may take some time to do.
Monthly // Basically things that are not urgent, I will write them here.
Section #3: Blog Series
This next section is my blog series. Currently, I only have one ongoing series which is Friday Favourites and I will be adding more in the near future. When I click on Friday Favourites, it will open up a list of my Friday Favourites posts.
Here’s a list of my Friday Favourites. My next FF is the 10th so when I click on it, a popup page will open where I can list down my favourites of the week. See screenshot below.
Section #4: Blog Posts
The next one is blog posts. This is where I write my blog posts that are text-heavy. If they are image-heavy like this post, I will write them straightaway on WordPress. I divide them into two: In Progress and Published.
When you click on the post, it will open up a popup page and you can go ahead and write your post. My WordPress draft can be daunting and confusing so I prefer writing my post elsewhere because uploading it to WordPress.
Section #5: Blog Post Ideas
Here’s my blog post ideas section. I divide them into categories so I can easily find posts about the category I want to write. If you can see at the bottom of the list, I have More Ideas page. It contains 500 blog post ideas that I have yet to categorise.
When you click on a category, it will open a popup page of post ideas.
Section #6: Theme Collection
The last one is my theme collection. I purchased a lot of WordPress themes and I always lost the files so I had to go and search them in my email. What a hassle! So I uploaded them in Notion and I can easily search for the theme that I wanna use.
It opens up a popup page. When you click on the zip file, it will download them to your computer. Super easy!
Notion itself is great for life planning but I already have a paper planner that I love using. Besides, a paper planner is more reachable than a laptop just in case I need to write down important stuff urgently. I’ve seen YouTube videos of people using Notion for school, work, and so much more. It really is a great app! Not sponsored, alright. 🤪
