I’ve been creating content online since 2018. This started on YouTube and Instagram, sharing my photography and videography work, but since the start of 2023, this has grown to online writing as well.
This expansion coincided with me developing a personal system in Obsidian to help me with producing work. I wanted to share the plugins that have the most impact on my ability to create and share value with the world.
These include options for writing, idea capture and synthesis, as well as organisation.
Let’s get started…
My 4-step process
I split up the production of articles into four steps for each piece:
- Idea capture — I’ll continue to preach that this is the foundation of creativity. Ideas are unpredictable, and you need to write them down to make use of them. Remove the pressure to come up with ideas by having a system in place to capture them as and when they arise. I’ll guarantee you’ll generate more ideas than you can create content by doing this.
- Outline — take one of your generated ideas and create the scaffolding from which to build your content. This step makes sure that your work is in a logical order and contains all the sections that you want to include. You follow the outline when drafting the article.
- Draft — I move outside of Obsidian for this, and start writing into Medium’s editor. Following the outline, I don’t have to think much about the structure of what I’m creating. This leaves me free to focus on writing in a clear and engaging way.
- Edit — a step that turns the article from chunks of text into a presentable piece of content. I add formatting such as headings, text emphasis and spacing. I tidy up grammatical and structure errors using ProWritingAid, add a cover image and press publish!
I wanted to focus on the first two, idea capture and outline, because these are the stages managed by Obsidian. I recently published an article on how I capture ideas from the different corners of the internet and turn them into notes for inspiring creation of content, but this article I’m going to focus specifically on the Obsidian side of things in the full production workflow.
Here are the four most useful Obsidian plugins for online content creators and writers…
Readwise Official
One of three irreplaceable plugins in my second brain…
As a content creator, you still have to consume the content of others. The difference is, you must consume content with the intention of synthesising ideas and using these to inform your own work.
Having a system in place that stores this inspiration from the internet so that you can access it when required is critical.
I use the service Readwise, so that I don’t have to worry about importing pieces of content from each service I use. I get ideas from websites, podcasts, books and tweets, so having something that seamlessly gathers highlights from all these platforms is well worth the investment because of the time that it saves.
The Obsidian plugin Readwise Official imports your highlights from Readwise into your vault, following a template that you define. This means that all of your inspiration is readily available, in a defined structure, in your vault.
This means you can link to notes and resources when you’re outlining or brainstorming, allowing for deeper context and detail when you’re writing the draft.
After a while of creating your own notes and content, new pieces write themselves because of how you can reference the old work to create
So how do I manage all the different ideas I have for unique pieces I want to write? Here’s where I rely on one of the newer plugin additions to my Obsidian vault…
Kanban
I must confess…
I was skeptical when deciding to try out this plugin in Obsidian for the first time…
I thought it wouldn’t smoothly integrate with the other features in my content creation system, but how wrong I was!
Kanban has become the foundation of my online writing workflow — I can organise pieces of content into lists and assign dates for when I want to have them produced by, holding me accountable for keeping the volume of output high.
The plugin adds the ability to create a kanban board that has all the features you’d expect, as well as some that make it even more of a joy to use. I’m talking about creating notes from added cards and customisable list widths here. You can make use of these features so that you’re one click away from all of your outlines in one view.
You can also create a column that serves as an archive, where everything you move there is marked as completed. You can periodically clear this column so that you don’t get flooded by links to pieces you’ve already published.
I’ve grown to like this way of organising things when it comes to content, because it means that I don’t have to create Dataview lists that organise all the categories one after the other.
Best of all, this works well with the Folder notes plugin that I love using in Obsidian. I have a project that’s called ‘Grow online income streams’ — this holds all my files to do with content production. When I click the folder, I’m greeted by the well-organised kanban board above that shows me everything I need to get done.
Once I’ve selected what I’m working on each day, I move on to the outlining stage of the workflow…
Outliner
I add a chance to outline to the production of every article because it allows me to separate the steps of content production for more clarity…
I’d be overwhelmed if I had to think about word choice and sentence structure at the same time as building the overall order of the article within the drafting step.
The outlining stage means I can forget about sentences, grammar and engaging vocabulary and focus on building a framework to add all these elements to, later down the line.
This plugin is a gem that makes outlining much easier in Obsidian. It binds keys to bullet indenting and out-denting, making creating your outline faster and more intuitive.
As well as this, it sticks the cursor to bullets and checkboxes, so creating or removing a line is as simple as pressing Enter or Backspace. I like to indent the different bullets because it allows me to see what points belong in what sections.
Recently, the developer added the ability to pick up your bullets and drop them at a different point on the outline. This is a significant upgrade for when you want to build a more detailed outline of a longer piece of work. You don’t have to cut and paste or rewrite different sections anymore, instead just click the bullet and drag them to the new point in the outline.
Once I’ve created the outline, I move off of Obsidian and start drafting my work into Medium, so this is where the article ends. I hope that you’ve gained value from this insight into my current workflow for creating articles. Thanks for reading!