Not all photographers feel comfortable with the idea of content creation. I’m not referring to photography content, of course. I’m talking about text or video and even audio content.
In this video, I will be sharing two simple workflows that can help make your blog content creation process easier.
Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar
Content creation is something that a lot of photographers struggle with and as somebody who creates a ton of content for a living, whether it’s videos like this one, blog posts, photographs, podcasts, and much more, I totally understand the struggle that can come with creating content, whether you feel comfortable with writing or being in front of the camera or no, what equipment to use for a podcast and what to talk about on the podcast. Content creation can be hard and that’s why today I want to share a very simple workflow that I use myself that has really come in handy. Now, you may not know this, but I’m actually dyslexic and I do write for a living, so a lot of the content I create is in words form, so some of the tools that I’m recommending can help you if you struggle with the same disability that I’m struggling with.
Now. A lot of people are used to writing with pen and paper and I’m. I’m not that type of person. My handwriting stinks. As you may know, I am actually a karate student now and I have to learn some Japanese words and well, I use this pad for that and good luck reading that. The workflow I’m about to share is one that I use for all the places that I create, content, youtube, imagely, tesla themes, show themes, photo focus, digital photography school, wherever I guess post the photo frontier. The list can go on and on and on. Let’s go to the computer and we’ll check out this process. So my first stop in my workflow is sometimes it’s hemingway, sometimes it’s grammarly, but as you’ll see as we go through, this actually could be combined in a way, but let me first start with hemingway.
Hemingway is a free service at HemingwayApp.com where you can type your content, you can create your entire blog post or whatever and under the right section, and then you can go to the edit section. It gives you your readability score, your word count, and it gives you a variety of ways to improve your content by simplifying it. As you can see that the blog posts that I am creating for photo focus associated with this video is a six of the 70 sentences are very hard to read, 12 of the 70 are just hard to read and there’s a variety of other things that could be improved. But the overall grade for this blog post is a seven, and that is a really good grade. If you can get five to seven, that is pretty good, and that’s hemingway APP. Again, it’s free, but if you want to be able to save your work, then you can actually buy their desktop app.
It’s like $10. And then you can download your computer windows and Mac and you can actually save everything you do right from hemmingway. You can go back to it and insulin. Now, the next thing I do is grammarly. Now this, as somebody who’s dyslexic is the ultimate tool. Grammarly is a paid service, uh, that there’s some advantages, which again, you’re going to hear in a second, but basically you can take whatever you wrote in hemingway or wherever and you can pace it into grammarly. And it gives you this full, full, um, ai based proofreader and you could even have a human proofread this if you want to go beyond just the Ai, but it gives you complete a analysis over every piece and gives you tons of suggestions to improve your content from spelling to grammar to fluency in an all of that great stuff. And it’s just such a great tool.
My favorite part is that there is a chrome extension and a safari extension, so you can see, and there’s probably a firefox extension I guess, but that means you can actually use this in practically any place in your browser. Okay. So as we get through this work content creation workflow, you’ll see that you can actually use this in what I wind up using most of the time anyway. I’m right without having any men to go into grammarly.com. You can just use it from the chrome extension. That’s what I used to create content. I use grammarly 100 percent of the time, just not always on grammarly.com. I use hemingway editor when I’m not 100 percent sure if it is, um, as readable as it could be. And so I will bring it into hemingway just to confirm some things or if I want to really fine tune a specific paragraph, sometimes I’ll just bring in the paragraph to hemingway and things like that.
Now for actually organizing your content creation, there are two ways that I recommend. The first is using Trello. Trello is free. You can actually upgrade for more features, but Trello is free. You can basically create this Kanban board and you’ve got these columns and these columns. I’ve created our ideas in progress and completed. And then you’ll see here I’ve got a bunch of cards. This is the first idea as a card and you can click on it and see. You can start adding people to this. You can create a due date for this, for this card, and think of each card as a new piece of content so you can label, you can create reminders, you can do a variety of things you can add to your attachment. So images that you want to have associated with this blog post and then when you’re ready to actually start it, you can literally drag from one to the other and have your, your, your content now in progress and when it’s done you can drag it to complete it and that is how you can keep everything organized and what you’re working on at any given time, what is done and things like that.
Now of course you can’t actually write the content in here, but you can organize it in there. So the next workflow I’m going to show you is one where you can not only organize it but also write in it. And this is what I is, this next one is my sort of go to on a daily basis for anything going on at any given time. So in my google drive I have a content creation folder. And in there are subfolders. I’m using a lot of sub folders as, as you’ll see in this, in this workflow. And in this, in this content creation folder, uh, you could see photo focus. And if I click into photo focus, I have complete an in progress. Now, if I go to in progress, you’ll see I have three articles I am currently working on. This is the one that we’re talking about right now.
So let’s go into this one and you’ll see I now have the article that is written and then I have a bunch of videos, a, sorry, a bunch of images associated with this article. Now if I go into the actual article, which is a Google doc, then you’ll see that I’ve got everything laid out, sort of how you saw it in hemingway and how you saw it in grammarly. And uh, what you’ll also notice is that down here there’s something showing that showing for things needs to be looked at. And these. Now here’s the thing. This is grammarly. This is the chrome extension for grammarly. Grammarly works inside of wordpress in the wordpress editor. It works inside of Gmail. It works inside of Microsoft word. There’s their web based version like Google docs. The grammarly support for Google docs is brand new. It’s in Beta technically.
So if I was to click on this, it’ll give me a little thing about it being in Beta so it doesn’t give me the sort of pop up thing that you would see that you see here on grammarly itself. It does when you are on wordpress, it does when you’re in Gmail and so on. But the support for Google docs is brand new, so it’s in Beta and there’s no popup, but you can take advantage of it when you hover over, it gives you suggestions when you hover over whatever is in red. So if I scroll down, you’ll see Trello is also in red, but nothing else is in red because I’ve already gone through and I’ve already corrected everything I need to correct one of the reasons why right now I am still using grammarly. Uh, the website, the grammarly itself is because I can’t get this sort of overview right this like, like I can hear or in wordpress, uh, I can’t get that in Google docs yet, but that’s coming.
Once it’s out of Beta and grammarly is happy with, with how it’s working, then they’ll be able to unlock that. So that you can see a complete overview of everything. So basically I write the content when everything is done. I’ve got the images here that I can then share with photo focus or, or whoever I’m writing for. Um, I can, you know, upload and download images and you given time. Now when I am completely done. And by the way I can also share this. Of course you can share the entire folder or just the doc with whoever your need to share with so that I can get it a proof read and edited by a third party, which is really good. Now when everything is done, I will take this, let’s say is this article which I’m working on right now. I will move to, I will go up a folder, go to completed and then I will move it.
Now I’m not going to move it right now because I’m not done. But that is basically what would happen. It’s that simple. I just keep everything organized into folders. And the cool part is you can also color label everything. So I can change the color if I want to. Ah, if I want to, if you’re a fan of of color labels, if you’re a fan of starring things, just like in lightroom, you can do colors are stars, you can do all that in Google drive, so think about that for your content creation workflow, utilize the tools that more enhance it, like grammarly. Use those tools that will enhance your workflow and make things easier for you. Oh, now I just have to thank mack worldwide warranty because every piece of electronics or camera equipment that I own, like my laptop, I will actually get a mack worldwide warranty on those products because it gives me that peace of mind that it case something happens if I drop my bag and my laptop’s in it or some it gets crushed in storage on an airplane or something like that. I have the peace of mind that it will be repaired or replaced as needed. As long as I have the proper warranty to covers damage like that. I’m covered. So next time you’re getting a new piece of equipment, electronics, something like that. Consider the mack worldwide warranty. It’s available at electronic stores and camera stores all around the world. If you like this video, click on the subscribe button below. Now. I publish new videos every Monday and Thursday whenever possible. You don’t want to miss it.
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