You Ask, I Answer: Centralizing Content Marketing Ideas?

In this episode, Stephanie asks, Is there a good system for centralizing ideas? What tools do you use? It depends. It depends on what the type of idea is. There's so many different formats and things that you can use to store ideas.

But there's a few tools I think are really essential. The first one, I'll bring this up here, is Snagit. So this is by TechSmith. They make the software, it's screen capture software. And the ability uh to just take screenshots, including parts of your screen, and store them in it next step is really helpful.

So you can see here I've got uh this is the interface, and then if you flip this around, what you can see is it has a library of all the screenshots that you've taken in the past, which is again super helpful to be able to look at what you've done, uh what you've taken photos of and uh catalog them, things like that. When it comes to images in general, though, the absolute best tool by far is Google Photos. Because when you upload images, including like screenshots to Google Photos, its AI has automatic image recognition and it's going to automatically analyze and scan uh what is in the photo. So you could then type into the search box in your Google Photos account, you know, conference room, table, dinner, car, yeah, people smiling, your dog. And in doing so, uh, it gives you access to a huge essentially catalog of your own stock photography and your own ideas.

Um that includes having the Google Photos app on your phone. Because again, if you're out and about and you see something cool, you take a photo of it. Um obviously all your your phone is recording things like uh your location, the time, the day, all that stuff, but more than anything, uh it's indexing it. So you see a great idea on a billboard, you take a photo of it. It does, you know, some fun things happening outside at a uh I was gonna say at an event, but those shouldn't be happening.

Um take a photo of it and it goes into Google Photos for indexing. If you work on a content marketing team, uh setting up a generic Gmail account uh for your team and having it linked to Google Photos is a super powerful way to have your own stock of photography library, right? If you have people taking photos around the office and things, load it all into Google Photos, make sure they're loading only the stuff they intend to and not all their stuff. You don't want people's personal stuff in there. Um and then you have an index.

You have a huge index that you can use uh for your own stock photography. For writing, uh the tool I use I used to use Evernote, um, and I still do somewhat, but when it comes to idea storage and retrieval, uh this one's an open source package called Joplin. Uh I love Joplin for a couple of reasons. One, it's free and it's open source, which is and it's cross-platform. Um two, uh Joplin allows you Joplin allows you to sync with the uh cloud service of your choice.

So drive, dropbox, etcetera. But most important, Joplin supports what's called markdown. Markdown is a scripting la it's a markup language. So what you do is you write in plain text and then use specific characters to denote things like uh typography changes, like this is a bold word, this is an italic word. Um you can break things up like headers with uh a pound sign before the a word and make you know headers, header one, header two, header three.

But it's all in plain text, which means that there's no formatting challenges. If you go to open up a markdown document in 20 years, you will still be able to read it as plain as day as if you'd written it, you know, 20 years ago. It would still be just as compatible. And that's what's so powerful about it. There are rendering engines like uh Joplin has one built in, uh, Pandoc, Calibre, all these different uh free open source engines that can take a markdown document and then transform it into the format of your choice.

HTML, Word document, PDF, uh EPUB or MOBI for screen readers, uh, latex and and bib text for you know uh formal academic papers. Having that ability to write in an easy-to-use format that is always readable, but then transform it into the formats you want is super powerful. So in Joplin, you can see here I've got folders or notebooks, they're called, um, and then text in those. Um and you can see the in this example here, we have this is one of my pandemic newsletters. So there's the markdown on the left side, uh, and then there is what it re looks like rendered on the right-hand side, and that's really it, right?

Um being able to store ideas in different folders and write them down is super helpful. The last thing for centralizing ideas is all of the uh tools that we have with these smart assistants and the ones on our phones. There is nothing better than being able to just literally yell out in the air, hey smart assistant, remind me about uh content marketing uh vectorization. That may not necessarily get the words right, but being able to just yell out into the air, hey, this is the thing that I'm trying to remember, and then having the system dump it onto you know uh an app either on your phone or in your desktop, uh, is super powerful because you don't have to write anything down. You don't have to remember to carry a piece of paper with you.

You can just open up um either a reminder, if it's a short idea, or a voice memo app for a longer idea. So again, you know, hey, uh hey Siri, open up uh a voice memo, start a new voice memo. And what the system will do then is start recording, and then you can speak your idea out loud. That is really really helpful for when you're uh walking out and about, uh, especially if you're driving somewhere and an idea comes to you and you don't want to be doing something other than like safely operating the vehicle. Um is uh just invaluable, especially if you wire it up to a system like if this then that or Zapier, um that will allow you to take ideas from one system and move them to another system.

There's a uh an if this then that routine that lets you take your Amazon reminders and sync them to your Apple reminders so that all your ideas still flow into one area where that you can you can get at them. At the end of the day, it's just having tools available that can capture ideas as you have them, because as we all know, they don't last a whole lot a long time. They they come in and they're they're gone like that. Um a lot of folks will keep like a journal or something right by their bed in order to be able to do the same thing. And you know, certainly if that works for you, great.

Um again, being able to just yell out into the air, hey, hey, smart assistant, you know, remember this idea or remind me of this idea allows you to do that. In terms of being able to index it all, Google's photos is probably the best overall indexing solution. And then again, one of the things that's nice about Joplin is that because it writes essentially markdown files to your computer's disk, um, any of this the things on your whatever your operating system you're on to just find content in files will help you will find those Joplin documents if you're not um you don't have them in the interface and identify the specific document and then again because it's all plain text, you go in, you look at it, and go, that was the idea I was working on. So those are the the big tools that I use. Um would love to hear about what tools you use for centralizing your ideas, how you capture all these ideas together and turn them into uh content later on.

Uh leave them in the comments box below. Also with any questions you have or follow-up questions. Um subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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