The All-In-One Note-Taking and Publishing Tool That Inspired My Return to Blogging

I've been writing online for nearly 15 years.

I started back in 2010 with a fitness blog. There were a couple dozen fitness bloggers starting out around the same time as me. We all had the same mentor, Rusty Moore, who was and still is a very successful fitness blogger making a full-time income through affiliate marketing and selling his own courses and training programs.

Rusty’s training helped me make my first dollar online through affiliate sales and eventually my own ebook. Fun fact: One of Rusty’s proteges, Greg O’Gallagher, went on to create Kinobody: a very successful fitness YouTube channel and multi-7-figure business.

Over the span of nearly 10 years, I started countless blogs, one idea after another. Most of them were health and fitness-related, but for some reason, I could never get any of them to stick. Then, I kind of got burned out of blogging altogether. This was around five years ago. I haven't blogged in the traditional sense since then, but I never stopped writing online.

The last few years, I've focused on short-form writing, mostly on Twitter.

Unlike a blog, on Twitter it just takes 30 seconds to write something. I just riff ideas off the top of my head. Some of them take off and get 20-30 thousand views overnight, which is more than I got in an entire month on my blog. You can also engage with like-minded people on an almost real-time basis, which is really cool. There’s no other platform quite like it.

I've enjoyed my Twitter journey and don't plan on stopping anytime soon. In the past 4 years, I've grown my account to nearly a thousand followers. However, I do kind of miss blogging. So, I‘ve decided to experiment with a return to blogging on a platform called Listed because it offers a unique "public journaling" experience unlike anything I've seen before.

In the rest of this post, I’ll discuss what Listed is, why I decided to give it a shot, and some thoughts on audience building, distribution, and monetization. Let's jump in.

What is Listed?

For the longest time, I blogged on WordPress. It was great—easy to set up, easy to publish, and everything I needed in a blogging platform. But lately, I've been fascinated by informal, micro-style writing which can be either private or public. Here are two examples (one of each):

Private: Digital note taking, popularized by Tiago Forte’s “second brain” concept, can include brain dumping ideas, journaling, taking notes on podcasts, expanding on interesting tweets, and documentation of any kind.

Public: The “atomic essay,” an informal post 200-300 words in length that can fit into a screenshot and added to a social media post for widespread reach and rapid feedback (h/t Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole, creators of Ship 30 for 30).

Both of these lend themselves well to note taking apps, but not so much blogging platforms. However, with Listed, I found a unique opportunity to merge the two worlds and combine them.

This is because Listed is the only blogging platform I know of that is connected to a note taking app called Standard Notes.

How I Plan to Use Standard Notes and Listed

I've tried many note taking apps, including popular ones like Evernote, Roam, and Bear. They all have their unique angle. Standard Notes offers popular features like bidirectional linking, good search functionality, and top-notch security and privacy.

But for me, Standard Notes’ biggest differentiator is the Listed blogging platform connected to it. Anytime you write a note, you have the option to publish it as a blog post on Listed. When you sign up for Standard Notes, you can set up your Listed blog in just a few clicks, complete with a username and profile. Since all posts are notes, they can be anything from short ideas to longer pieces.

For the first time, I don't feel like I have to separate note-taking and blogging.

• I can write everything, capture all my ideas, and take all my notes in Standard Notes
• I can turn the ones I want into blog posts
• They can start out as short, one-idea blog posts, but I can expand on them later by simply adding to the note
• With one click, I can update the public-facing blog post

It's a seamless process.

Newsletter and Distribution

Another cool thing about Listed is the built-in newsletter functionality.

I'm big on newsletters because they are the most direct way to get your writing read by your audience. I always wanted to have a newsletter tied to my blog, which is why Substack was so appealing to me. I still use Substack for my newsletter, but it isn't great for short-form writing.

Listed combines a blog and a newsletter like Substack, but it functions more like a public journal. With one click, you can choose to email your note (post) to all your subscribers. Or not.

Listed has some distribution built into its homepage, but nothing nearly as big as Twitter or even Substack. I have no idea how good its SEO is. I don't expect to grow an audience on Listed (although I’d happily be wrong). I’ll probably continue cross-posting my short-form ideas on Twitter, even if I'm writing them on Standard Notes and publishing them on Listed.

What About Monetization?

Monetization is another thing I'm thinking about long-term.

How can I monetize my writing, either through selling ebooks or digital products of some kind?

From what I've seen, Listed does not have a feature where you can easily monetize your writing.

It doesn't have a content-gating feature like Patreon or paid newsletter subscriptions like Substack.

It does have a donation feature where you can connect your PayPal, which is nice. But for now, I'm thinking I’ll still need to use something like Gumroad to monetize my writing and sell digital products.

How Much Does It Cost?

Overall, Standard Notes and Listed provide an all-in-one home base for writing, publishing, basic newsletter functionality, low-stakes, high-frequency publishing, and some built-in distribution. I haven't found anything else that does all of that, and it's reasonably priced too.

Standard Notes has 3 pricing tiers including a free plan that's limited to plain text notes only. This isn't the best for publishing, so I upgraded to the annual "Productivity" plan. With this plan, you get a ton of useful features for about $90 a year. I secured a discounted New Years rate, so I paid less than $70 for an annual subscription. This is perfect for me to run a one-year experiment.

I told myself, let's do this for a year and see what happens. Like all other writing tools I’ve purchased, the deciding factor on whether I keep paying for it will be whether it helps me write and publish more consistently.

If you want to follow along with my experiment, you can sign up to get my Listed posts through email, bookmark my site, or even add it to an RSS app if that's your thing. I plan on publishing more frequently than on Substack, but less frequently than on Twitter.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on all this. You can reply to any of my Listed emails or sign my guestbook, which is Listed’s comment feature.

Thanks for reading!