In my last post, I introduced Evernote as a valued tool for any inbound marketing professional to stay organized. In this post, we’ll dive a little deeper and explain the best way to use Evernote for marketing and project management and reduce the time spent searching on Google or other search engines. Let’s get started. 

Learn the language

To begin, here are four key terms that you’ll need to know.

Note – this is best compared to a file. It is simply a single document containing text, images, or other documents.

Notebook – very simply, a collection of Notes.

Notebook Stack – Again, nothing too tricky here. This is a collection of Notebooks.

Tags - a secondary form of organization, which allows you to organize by context. You can apply as many tags to a note as you wish, though it is most useful to only use 1-3 per note.

Power Users Have These 3 Notes/Notebooks

For beginners, limit yourself to these three categories until you gain a little more proficiency with the tool.

1. Inbox – this is the default catchall for anything you send to Evernote. This way you can spend the appropriate amount of time reviewing each new item and deciding what to do with it when the time is right, not at the moment you find the article. Schedule some time, ideally every day, to process your inbox and decide on the appropriate next actions for each Note.

Pro Tip: Begin the title with an asterisk to make sure it stays on top of the other Notes/Notebooks in the navigation pane.

2. Next Actions – this is the Note in which your To Do list lives. Once you’ve processed the items in your Inbox, add any action items to a list in this Note.

Pro Tip: Add context to your Next Action list by creating separate Notes by project, topic, or any other category you choose.

3. Reference – this is where all the Notes go that are too important to delete, but contain no actionable information. Keep things in here that you may need to access later for reference. Make sure to tag appropriately for easy search. 

Pro Tip: Create different reference Notebooks based on focus area. 

Vertical and Horizontal Organizational Structure

Use this for project management across multiple clients and/or focus areas.

This is one of the great advantages of using Evernote for project management – the ability to filter and view Notes/Notebooks by various contexts. This makes collaborating with your team on that next ebook or whitepaper much simpler and more efficient.

A great way to understand this is to think of Notes, Notebooks, and Notebook Stacks as a vertical form of organization, where you organize things by task/project/campaign (or client). Tags are the horizontal aspect. This allows you to contextualize your notes across topics, time, or any other qualification you choose to use.

As an example, consider the following. Imagine you are working on several different projects with several different teams. You want to be able to view your Notes by project, so that when it comes time for your next meeting, just open the specific Notebook dedicated to that project. You can even share this Notebook with the other team members working on the project. Everyone can edit in real time, making for easy collaboration.

But say you’re having a one-on-one meeting with a specific team member and you want to review each project you’re working on together and only the specific aspects of that project that involve the both of you. No problem, if you’ve tagged all notes with the team member in charge of that aspect of the project, simply run a semantic search for the tag you’ve dedicated to that person so that only the relevant notes pop up.

Remember Everything by Saving to Evernote

The Web Clipper

With Evernote, curating content is simplified because you can use Evernote's Web Clipper Chrome extension to save images and articles as you read them. Simply click on the extension in the Chrome Bar and then choose Save at the bottom to send to Evernote.

Pro Tip: Send all new entries to *Inbox, to be reviewed and processed later.

Emailing to Evernote

Every user gets their own unique email address. Add this to your address book and forward important emails that include action items or reference material. This has the added benefit of keeping your inbox free of clutter.

Check out these Bonus Pro Tips

Table of Contents

For enhanced organization or for selective use on bigger projects, create a table of contents. In the PC version of the desktop app, simply Ctrl + Click all of the Notes you want to use and then right click and choose Copy Note Links. Then open a new note, titled “Table of Contents” and paste the links to that Note. The links will be named after the title of the note, so choose their titles appropriately. Clicking on these links will automatically open the Note, without having to search for it. This comes in handy when you have lots of reference material that needs to be sorted through quickly and often.

The Mac version is a little more intuitive in that it has an option to create a table of contents which appears when you select two or more Notes.

Use Evernote to Make Google Work Better for You

Turn on the simultaneous search option in the Evernote Web Clipper browser extension to see Evernote results alongside your Google search. You’d be surprised how often you search for a solution that you already have.

Evernote has so much potential for inbound marketing project management that your imagination and creativity are the only limits to its effectiveness. With a little discipline and these tips, you’ll be Evernote efficient in no time. Tell us how you use Evernote!

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