Let's be honest. We developers are busy fixing bugs, writing code, and making sure our applications are running smoothly. We don't have time to write content all the time and it takes a lot of time to create quality content. Here is the system that I use to ideate, manage and create content quickly and efficiently.
Getting The Idea
The problem with getting an idea is never there when you want it 😒. I have my second brain system for capturing and curating ideas. The core idea behind this approach is to capture ideas as they come as frictionlessly as possible and then curate them later. Here are the tools that I use to capture ideas:
- Microsoft Todo - It's a to-do app in which you can create multiple lists and folders. I have a list called Blog Ideas. An idea can come at any time and this app offers an android widget that is pinned to my second screen and can be easily accessed by my laptop using windows + W.
- Pocket Automation - When I come across an article that inspires me to write, I save it to Pocket via the browser extension with a tag called To Write. I have an IFTTT recipe that automatically adds the article to my Blog Ideas list in Microsoft Todo.
As you can imagine the Blog Ideas list in Microsoft Todo is a mess.
Curating The Idea
The next step is to curate the ideas. Whenever I feel like writing, I open my Todo List and go through the ideas. I pick the ones that I feel about writing and move them to Notion and ignore the others. Then I mark all the ideas as done. This is important to clear your list in one sitting. My base notion template in broken down into 3 sections and each idea is a page separated by a divider:
- Draft - This is where I add the ideas that I am currently adding a content outline to.
- Backlog - This is where I add the ideas that I want to write about(Yeah I am a Jira nerd).
- Done - The ideas which are published go here.
This page is shared with my content intern and a few friends who work with me. This way I can get feedback on the ideas and also get help in writing. They sometimes add references to the ideas which I can use in my writing or curate the outline.
For Each idea. I use the following template for the pages:
- Title - The title of the article
- Outline - This is a list of sections that I want to write.
- References - This is a list of links either curated by me or my friends.
- Topics - I use this to broaden the scope of the article and make sure I cover the topic in depth.
- Stats - Word count, outbound link count, etc.
Here is the secret sauce 🤫
I have a python script that takes an idea does research, adds references based on a scoring system, writes the outline, and topics to write about with their SERP competition and some stats. My initial draft of Notion is created by this script. It uses a SERP API, some NLP and GPT3.
Writing The Article
Non-developers will be shocked by this. I use VSCode to write my articles in markdown. It's a homely feeling, I know all the shortcuts and It has a dark mode 😎. But the main reason is I use GitHub Copilot and when you write in markdown in VSCode it suggests writing prompts. So sometimes it's like I am writing with a ghostwriter. Not only the suggestions are relevant but are formatted in markdown. Trust me, it's a game-changer. I can write an article in 1-2 hours. If you are on windows like me you can add emojis by this shortcut (windows + .[dot]).
Editing The Article
I use Google Docs to edit my articles(You can create a new doc by typing doc.new in your browser). I use a markdown-to-HTML converter to convert the markdown to HTML and then copy and paste it into Google Docs. All of these docs are in a shared folder which is subdivided into folders based on the month. Here is why I use Google Docs
- I use the Grammarly Chrome extension which now works very well with Google Docs. It catches all my typos and grammatical errors and I can fix them in one go by clicking on the suggestions.
- I can easily share the document with my editor and get feedback in form of comments.
- This gonna blow your mind when you select a word/phrase in Google Docs to hyperlink(ctrl + k). It automatically suggests the most relevant pages by understanding the context from the web and other docs. So it's super easy to add links to the article. If the link is to a Google Doc, I can copy the published link from the notion. It's linking and interlinking at its best. You can even search the web in that input.
- It also has a lot of other nice features like word count(ctrl+shift+c), quick access to a thesaurus, etc.
Publishing The Article
Not much to say here. I either copy-paste the HTML, convert the doc to markdown, or if the article have to go on my website. I have a script that converts the markdown to JSON which is then published to my website using sanity.io(How everything is handled from here is a blog post for another day).
Then I move the notion page to the Done section.
Conclusion
Following this process I can ideate, write, edit and publish an article in 1-2 days. I have a lot of ideas in my backlog and I am working on them.
I hope this helps you in your content writing journey. If you have any questions or improvements, feel free to drop a comment. Subscribe to my newsletter here to get notified when I publish something cool.
Top comments (1)
Good article :) I usually like when people bring up subjects that isn't only about code. I like the secret sauce, would want to get a glance at the recipe😄