✍️
Why should I write a blog with Notion?
tldr; This blogpost looks at writing and publishing tools that you can use for blogging and evaluates them based on various aspects of blogging. By the end of this post, we'll have covered research and writing tools (Google Docs, Notion, etc) as well as publishing tools (Medium, Wordpress, Pageably, etc)!
👉
This post is written by Pageably that helps you publish your Notion blog
You're ready to create a new blog! You're looking for a tool to help you easily write and publish your writing. But there are quite a few options out there to choose from. They range from managed services to CMS systems that you have to manage yourself:
That's quite a list! In order to choose the right option, you'll want to consider:
- Workflow: Where you want to do blogpost research, writing and publishing
- Branding: Whether branding and having your own domain name is important
- Technical maintenance: If you are able to invest time into the technical maintenance of your blog
- Cost: How much hosting your blog costs
This blogpost will explore the different aspects to consider to decide what's best for you when it comes to blogging. By the end of it I hope to have made a case for Notion (spoiler alert!) but what you choose will boil down to preference.
📥 Workflow
Your first consideration might be: how do I want to do my research, writing and publishing? Everyone goes about their creative process differently.
- Research and writing: Some may like to use good old pen and paper to draft ideas for their blogpost and then write their post in a word processor. Others may enjoy researching and writing their entire post in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Evernote or indeed Notion (the subject of this blogpost).
- Publishing: What you choose will depend on how you want to manage your process. When you come to publishing your post, you'll want to choose a platform that best aligns with your needs around branding, technical maintenance and cost.
✍️ Research and writing
While looking at tools for blogpost research and writing, you might ask consider the following aspects:
- Offline experience: Does my writing tool have good offline/iOS/Android support, so I can write while on the go?
- Pen-and-paper is always available offline but you'll always need to carry them with around and copy across your work into digital form
- All of Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Evernote and Notion have offline support to aid your writing while on the go. But some are better than others at it. Evernote has had syncing issues in the past and Notion has been addressing some of its performance issues in the recent past
- Markdown formatting: Is my tool able to understand the increasingly popular Markdown syntax?
- Notion has very good support for Markdown-like syntax
- Keyboard shortcuts: Do I enjoy writing without having to use my keyboard much?
- Evernote and Notion both have good keyboard experiences
- Collaboration: If working with others on a blogpost, which tool is best for collaborating?
- All of Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Evernote and Notion have collaboration support
- Aesthetics: Some tools have a very densely populated interface, others are clean and roomy that encourage creativity
- Notion definitely feels cleaner, with more space than others!
- Organisation: How will your content be laid out and how will your posts be organised?
- Being able to easily lay out your content can be a big win
- You're going to be writing a lot, so you want to be able to go between posts very easily
- Notion definitely scores positively here in our opinion, with its blocks-based design
How you want to research and write really comes down to preference but hopefully this gives you a good idea of the tools available out there.
📰 Publishing
When you've written your post and are ready to publish it, you'll need to decide which tool to use to distribute your work. In terms of workflow, you might be thinking about:
- Ease of import: Will my content easily copy-paste or do I need to reformat everything?
- Copying content from Notion to Medium is a breeze as they both support Markdown-like syntax
- SEO: Will I be able to easily configure the SEO settings for each post?
- Medium does a very good job of making content discoverable and content ranks well in search engines
- With the likes of Wordpress or Pageably (that's us!), you'll add your own post descriptions for SEO
- Distribution: How will I promote my content?
- Some platforms like Medium will help you distribute your content to a wider audience
- In other cases, you'll need to promote your own content via social media, newsletters or any other channels you use
- Analytics: Do I want to see how my blogposts perform?
- Most publishing platforms, including Wordpress or Pageably, will be able to add Google Analytics to your blogposts
- Medium offers very good analytics out-of-the-box that can show you how many opened an article, read it and liked it ("applauses")
These are just some of the considerations for choosing your publishing tool. The other factors to consider for your publishing tool are branding, technical needs and costs.
💅 Branding
Do you need your own domain name for your blog? Does your blog need to look a certain way? These are some of the things you need to ask yourself with respect to branding.
- Custom domain: Having your own domain name significantly boosts your brand
- Unfortunately, this may be Medium's achilles' heel. They are considering bringing back custom domain support but right now, you'll only have a medium.com URL for your blog
- All managed platforms including Wordpress, Squarespace and Pageably can add a custom domain for you if you become a paying user
- For self-hosted CMSes, you'll need to add a custom domain by yourself (which may be a technical challenge)
- Look-and-feel: How your blog's brand is portrayed
- While you can customise your Medium landing page, you might struggle to change the look and feel to something that fits your brand as all Medium articles are made to look the same
- With Wordpress, Squarespace, Webflow, Pageably, etc. you can change the look-and-feel to fit your brand
- Self-hosted CMSes also let you add your own look-and-feel but you may need to code it yourself
Branding is how you portray yourself to the readers and it may be a sticking point for which platform you end up publishing on.
🤓 Technical needs
This is probably the easiest question to answer: do I want to maintain a blog's technical infrastructure and website code? Or do I want to use a managed service?
- Self-hosted options like Gatsby.js or Jekyll will need you to manage your own technical back-end
- If you're comfortable with code, this flexibility may be something you like
- Managed options like Medium, Wordpress or Pageably will not require any coding (or only just a little)
This question might help you reduce your options quite significantly.
💵 Costs
All the research and writing tools have generous free tiers (Google Docs, Evernote, Notion). But among publishing platforms, there's quite a range in pricing as Medium is free, Wordpress is priced at as little as ~£4/month and Ghost starts at ~£22/month. Which publishing platform you choose will depend on what value you get.
- If branding and a custom domain is important to you, Medium will not be an option
- Maintaining the technical infrastructure of your blog by yourself can reduce your costs to zero but remember that there are hidden costs (e.g. back-end breaks and you have no backup or time required to code)
Ultimately, it'll come down to whether your favourite tool is within your budget.
Conclusion
We've looked at how workflow, branding, technical needs and costs need to be considered when you're choosing your blogging tools. What you choose will depend on what you feel most comfortable with. I hope you enjoyed this blogpost and have gained new ideas on how to manage your blogging.
⚡️ Using Notion with Pageably
Shameless plug alert! This blogpost has largely focused on Notion for a reason: Pageably helps you publish Notion pages without code. If you choose Notion as your blog research and writing tool, you can use Pageably to publish your content. You'll be able to write freely in Notion and then import your content into Pageably, with with you can manage publishing your blogposts. Among other things, Pageably offers:
- Analytics, so that you can track how many visitors are coming to your blog
- Branding, such as adding a custom domain or custom CSS to change the look-and-feel of your blog
- SEO and Pretty URLs to improve the discoverability and shareability of your Notion blog
- Call-to-action buttons like "Subscribe to my newsletter" to encourage your readers to join your mailing list
You can watch the below video to better understand how you can use Pageably to publish your Notion blog. If you liked this blogpost and want to stay informed about Pageably, follow us on Twitter.
A quick video intro to creating a blog with Pageably
Thank you
Thanks for reading this blogpost. If you'd like to blog using Notion and want to publish your blog with SEO as well as branding benefits, do sign up to Pageably!
👉
Start your Notion blog today: www.pageably.com
©2020, Pageably. Made by @logicalicy, an indie developer. 🤓