When it comes to publishing regular content, one of the biggest challenges is getting organised so that you can stay consistent.

I tried a number of tools for this over the years and often the tools are either complicated or not set up for the task.

Recently I’ve been using Notion to organise my content and in this article I thought I’d show you how I’ve been doing that.

Notion is an online project management tool. Actually it’s a lot more than that. It’s almost an entire ecosystem that allows you to work undistracted on a range of tasks.

If you’ve ever used Asana or Trello you’ll be familiar with the drag and drop style boards that allow you to organise project tasks into ‘To Do/In Progess/Done’ categories.

Notion allows you to create boards like this. But it also includes content calendars, document & brand asset storage, notes, reading lists and a range of other useful spaces that you can customise to your needs.

I’m not going to go into all of those features today but I’d like to focus on how I use the Boards feature to organise my content.

Content Verticals

Anyone who tells you they know what your audience wants is lying. As creators and businesses we need to discover our audiences needs through testing and responding to feedback.

As a result I have around five content verticals that I’m currently trialling to see which yield the strongest results.

Currently they are:

• Video production skills
• Content ideas and tone of voice
• Publishing and content management
• Strategy and analytics
• Industry moves/the big picture/my philosophy.

 After I’ve collected enough data on each of these verticals I’ll cut two of them and double down on the others, depending on which resonate with my audience.

So when I set up the board in Notion I start with labelling each column as one of the verticals.

Like this:

Then I create a new ‘card’ for each content idea. Within that card there is room to add notes, attach images and chat with team members if relevant.

Also use emojis to tag each idea. These signify what category the post is. In my case that would be a story, an experiment with results, some teaching or a challenge to the norms. I keep a key of these so I don’t forget which is which.

 When I come to create content for the week I’ll pick one of the topics and label it as ‘planning’.

I can also drag that particular card to the top of the list for easy access. Once it’s in progress or complete I can change the status accordingly.

I’ve also set up other labels to let me know which social channels the content has been published to so I can keep a track of it.

With premium packages you can actually set up Notion to automatically schedule content to your social scheduler.

The labels are also important to keep a track of content because I don’t want to delete cards once the content has been published.

The reason for this is because when it comes to tracking the success of the content I can arrange the cards in a new order to look for patterns and learn from that.

There’s also a calendar view which is potentially useful (although I use the calendar on my scheduler, Metricool).

If you set a date on any of the cards it will appear in the calendar view, which allows you map out posts for the week and see what goes where and when.

An additional happy thing about Notion is that there is a really good free package that allows you to use most of the basic functions and tools.

If you’re struggling to organise your content, give it a try.

If You Need Help

You can book a 60 minute 1-2-1 call with me to discuss your strategy and content.

I have three structured calls to choose from (but if you need to discuss something else let me know).