Evernote itself is a very powerful tool that has been discussed elsewhere (8 ways to Plan a Wedding with Evernote). The first time I used Evernote it just didn’t make click to me, so I forgot about it a while ago until I found the iPad and Android apps for it. As one of my goals for this year is to blog more I needed a tool to help me keep track of ideas and topics for the blogs and also help me organize a post before publishing it. And here comes Evernote.

What this post is not

This post will not describe how to install Evernote to your computer or your mobile device or how to sign up. It will however show how I use it to write my blog posts, such as the one you are reading right now.

The title and tag(s)

A note in Evernote has a headline/title that I always use to imply what a specific note is about. For the occasion of a blog post a title for example would be: “Blog: How Evernote helps me blogging”. To make it easier to filter for blog posts I add the Tag “blog” to all the notes regarding blog posts. This enables you to use the Tag-Filter inside each app that is available for Evernote.

Inserting images or files

Blog posts are more fun to read if they contain pictures. Each Evernote app has the ability to add pictures (or files) to a note, you can also insert them within the text, so you have a nice view of how your blog post will look like:

This is a picture of this blog post inside the Evernote desktop application for Mac OS X. Pictures (jpg, png) are not the only files Evernote can handle. You can add voice note, text note, PDF file, screenshot or a web page.

Using it anywhere anytime

As I have ideas about blogs not only when I am at home, it is really easy and nice to keep track of your ideas using one of the mobile apps, the deskto app or the website. You can also take notes if you are offline with one of the software clients, Evernote will then later sync all the devices for you as soon as you get online.

Using drafts in your blog instead

I am not a Wordpress user, so I can not say anything about the mobile clients they now have. As far as my blog goes, there is no mobile or desktop client. That would mean to take a note about a post or to edit one that I started before, I would have to be online. Evernote in that way makes my blog usable offline (at least for posting). Another positive side effect is that you can keep a “backup” of your blog outside of the blog database.

Better (other) solutions

There are probably better solutions to this, but it is the way I keep track of my posts. If you wanna share the way you handle this feel free to leave a comment here or contact me via twitter and/or email. Now, if only I was able to hit a publish button inside the Evernote desktop app to post this to my blog … ;-)

Further readings

1. Learn more about Evernote
2. Getting started guide by Evernote
3. Evernote on Crunchbase