In order to become an effective blogger, you need to refine your process of generating content ideas for your blog. While this normally can be accomplished by building a strong content strategy and an editorial calendar, you may stumble upon new ideas that you weren't able to record on both.
Unfortunately, these ideas come by when you least expect them - while riding the public transport, working out in the gym, and other instances when you are away from your computer. As a result, you won't be able to record these traffic generating, money-making ideas and run the risk of forgetting them.
However, this is where your Android phone comes in. Since there are countless of apps that you can download on your smartphone, you can use some to not only record blog ideas, but also research and draft posts.
Below are the best Android apps you can use to effectively generate blog ideas. Take note that the apps below have a desktop counterpart so you can access the ideas you came up on your phone by downloading the apps on your desktop computer as well.
Finding news and trends
App to use: Feedly
When incorporating newsjacking and content curation into your content strategy, you will need to keep yourself on top of the latest updates related to the industry and niche of your blog by following the relevant media outlets that deliver the best news. However, given the number of sites that provide you the news, it may become difficult for you to follow all the sites.
What you can do is keep all the news in a single source for easy reference. Feedly can do this on your Android phone. All you need to do is add and organize the RSS feed of the news sites to the app so you can view all the updates from the app instead of visiting the different sites.
Collecting posts to be used later
App to use: Pocket
Once you have found the new items that you can use for create your new blog post, you may need to save them on your phone. While you can view the news articles directly on Feedly, the app requires you to be online to see them.
If you find yourself to be offline anytime soon or simply wish to view the articles on a different interface, you can save them to Pocket instead. In fact, Feedly has a Pocket integration so you can painlessly save your articles on your Pocket for later viewing. Also, by following the Pocket hacks in this post, you can save articles by batch and tag the articles for more convenient viewing later on.
Make voice notes
All for this: Tape-a-Talk Voice Recorder
If you're not comfortable with typing down your ideas using the small keypads of your smartphone or if Evernote's Voice Recorder function doesn't do it for you, then you ought to try out Tape-a-Talk Voice Recorder so you can simply blast off you ideas in voice format.
The obviously great thing about this app is that it is faster to get your ideas down in voice than by typing them. This is advantageous if you are busy to expound your ideas and plan on getting back on them once you have time.
Organize ideas based on your research and drafting your post
App to use: Evernote
A consistent Editor's Pick in Google Play and a tech blog's favorite app, Evernote is a robust and all-encompassing productivity app for your Android phone. For the purpose of generating blog ideas, however, you can compile news items you saved in text format. The items can be saved as notes in different Notebooks to keep all related ideas within a single Notebook for easy reference. You can also edit the text file as you would a document file to create outlines, summaries, and talking points for each news piece.
Aside from this, you can even draft and outline your blog post directly using this app to expedite content creation for your blog!
The great thing about Evernote is that you can continue your ideas on your desktop computer (if you have downloaded the app there) so that you don't have to copy and paste your ideas from one file to another. This way, you won't skip a beat in your content idea generation one you're on your PC.
Question: What type of Android app do you mostly use to generate and draft content ideas for your blog?