Note taking Simplified

byTheresaHorn

519 followers

Updated 5 years ago

Note taking madness

I have been with Wealthy Affiliate for less than two months and already I am surrounded by notes, notes, and more notes! They are everywhere! I have notes scribbled in binders, on post-it notes, in a folder, and on my computer. There is no method to my madness; when I think of an idea I write it down. Somewhere.

I don't know about you but I have a tendency to be an "out of sight, out of mind" sort of person, so the likelihood of these notes ever being seen again is pretty slim.

An easier method of taking notes

Recently, I rediscovered a new way of keeping my thoughts straight. OneNote was already installed on my computer but I rarely used it. Until yesterday. During research for an article, I was busily jotting things down on random slips of paper when I accidentally opened the program instead of another that I use regularly. The icons are right next to each other and I clicked the wrong one.

Wow! My world changed immediately! With OneNote, I can create a different notebook for each article idea. As I research, I can have a different page in my notebook for each category or section in my article. It allows me to copy and paste directly out of a website and automatically includes a link to the site so I don't accidentally include someone else's work as my own.

Free download available

There are other helpful options with OneNote and other similar programs so it you are looking for a way to organize your thoughts, it's worth looking into. You can download it free but here's the link for information: https://www.onenote.com/?404&public=1 (This is not an affiliate link.)

Keeping up with keywords

Another helpful technique that I discovered combines the use of Jaaxy with Site Content. Since I am using the free version of Jaaxy, I lose the QSR results every time I close the window. Sometimes I save my best searches as a draft but when I go back days or even weeks later, I have forgotten what my numbers were under the average searches or QSR and I find it cumbersome to go back and refresh my memory.

Here's my solution. When I find numbers that may be worthy of a future article, instead of saving as a draft I use the "Write Post Now" option. Next to the title, I include the numbers representing average searches and QSR. Then I hit the back button to continue my research.

I save my drafts in buckets, separated according to websites. Unfortunately, when I tried to include a picture to show you what it looks like, my computer froze up so you'll just have to imagine it and experiment within your own platform.