I don’t know about you, but when I sit down in front of a blank page it can take some time getting started. And that’s just starting to write the blog post. Once the post is done, edited, and published, then comes the part I dread the most: marketing.
This is what takes the absolute longest time for me, to try to market the post so that it gets found by Google and in turn viewers and readers. So I thought, can using the AI in Notion help bloggers and writers?
SEO and How Pinterest Can Help You Drive Traffic
First of all, how do you drive traffic to your website? Usually, it is by using some kind of SEO tactics, which is how Google finds you. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And if you have some basic knowledge of how this works it can help you drive traffic to your site.
If you’re not sure where your traffic comes from, start by finding this out. I’ve tried some different things to analyze where the traffic comes from and for my page, most traffic comes from Pinterest.
Pinterest is a search engine that is based on images, to those images you can add descriptions and hyperlinks. These are the things that makeup what is described as a pin. People can create boards and pin things of interest or that they want to save for later.
Since Pinterest is my greatest source of traffic, I need to remember to post pins regularly. These pins have to have a description matching where the pin will take you.
Example of Workflow for Writing Blog Posts
My current workflow is as follows:
- write a draft
- go to a Google document, try to write four versions of pin descriptions
- decide on where the pin should be published
- research hashtags to use
I also need to grab the link to the blog post. Even if I schedule it in advance, I still need to grab the correct link.
I also need to look for images, I usually do this using Unsplash. Once I have the resources I need, these have to be put together and scheduled as pins to go out into the world.
There are different tools for this as well. You can schedule pins from Pinterest, but I use Tailwind and schedule both pins and Instagram posts from there.
Researching or writing four versions of pin descriptions is what takes the longest time for me. I also try to include some hashtags that can be used as pin descriptions. This is also used for pins that are used or rather created for Instagram.
Why Use AI to Help Out?
Recently I tried something mostly out of boredom, but it can be useful for someone else. This is why I decided to create a blog post about it in the first place.
Maybe you’re like me and you don’t mind doing the actual writing or talking out your posts. But the promotion part of the process is just not what you want to do. If that is the case, this trick could be handy.
As I mentioned before, marketing my posts is what takes the longest. Writing pin descriptions? That’s probably the part I dislike most at the moment. This in turn sometimes makes me procrastinate and it can be hard to get past this.
To make things easier, I remembered something I read in Atomic Habits about habit formation: make it easy. In this case, what is the smallest step I could take? I needed some help to get started on something that I had put off doing for a while. AI can be helpful in this case.
Why Use the AI in Notion for Pin Descriptions?
There are plenty of tools out there that you can use, the one I use for my drafts is Notion. The thing that I tried last time was this: I started writing my draft as I usually do. When I sat down to edit my draft, I was just so bored and I didn’t have any inspiration for writing pin descriptions. I tried to use the AI in Notion to give me a description or a few versions of it, and it worked kind of well.
I already knew that the AI was doing a decent job of summarizing things, so I thought “Well can I ask you to do this as well?” Turned out it could. The AI in Notion uses the information that you have already put into the program, which means that is a good option for me to use.
The information used won’t be based on any other data. I’ve tried using Copilot in Microsoft Edge a few times, but it adds an extra step. I have to explain more to the AI and say “OK I have a blog post written about this. Can you give me some suggestions for hashtags that I can use?”
Sometimes these are relevant, sometimes they do not suit the context that I’ve written about at all and become unusable. This gives Notion points, and the AI in Notion is doing a decent job.
Things to Remember When Using AI
When working with AI, there are some things to keep in mind. One is that you need to set the limitation for the AI when you give your prompt. If you need a specific length you have to tell the AI “I need this many characters or these many words”. If you need a different version you need to tell it that “I need you to write rewrite the prompt that you just gave me” or “I need two or three versions of this, can you do that?”
Sometimes it gets stuck in a loop where you get back the same answers that you previously got. Other times it works just fine so I’ll keep experimenting with this.
Conclusion
Using AI in Notion to help out with pin descriptions is my most recent find. If you’re a writer and enjoy the writing process, but you don’t like the marketing aspect of writing this could come in handy.
Have you tried using the AI notion to summarize your text, give you a description that you can use, or something else? It would be interesting to get a few more things and ideas that you can use the AI for, so please share your own experience in the comments.