How to Create a Content Machine in Notion

I use Notion to organize my whole life including my job, side hustle, personal stuff, and home. Even students like to use Notion as a student operating system to get their life and studies organized.

I hear you—these seem like big words, but they’re not.

When it comes to creating content, Notion is often the go-to tool. Its capabilities, however, stretch way beyond a simple content calendar.

You can leverage Notion databases, relations, templates, and advanced building blocks to create a content machine that delivers high-quality blog posts like a content factory.

Read on to find out how to create your content machine in Notion.

Why Use Notion to Create Content?

Notion is an all-in-one workspace. It has been among the pioneers of the all-in-one tools, and not without a reason.

Here’s why Notion is the best tool for content creation:

• Flexibility: Notion is a non-coding, fluid environment. In Notion, everything is a block, and you can put together these blocks as you want.

• Visualization: If you’re a visual type of person, you know what I’m talking about. Notion is like a Christmas tree—you can hang on all kinds of visual blocks.

• Surfacing information: there’re a ton of ways to easily find and surface information in Notion.

  • You can use the shortcut key Cmd + P (Ctrl + P for Windows folks) to search your entire account and quickly find what you’re looking for.

  • You can use all kinds of sorters, filters, rollups, and relations in Notion databases to surface what you need, when you need it, even from different databases.

  • You can use linked databases to gather and surface information from larger databases.

  • You can open multiple tabs to focus on your writing.

• Superior editor: Notion’s editor is getting better each year. I’ll show you how to supercharge your writing with Notion’s powerful keyboard shortcuts later.

• Website builder: You can even use Notion as a website builder.

Let’s see the content machine in action.

My Notion Content Machine

Creating a content calendar in Notion is boring stuff. But creating a content machine is way more exciting.

My content machine builds on Adam Enfroy’s content assembly line method.

No surprises here; my Notion content machine leverages relational databases and templates within those databases.

There’re three core databases:

1. Keyword database

2. Content calendar

3. Guest post database

Let’s figure out how they work together.

Keyword Database

I use this database to collect, organize, and leverage my keywords. The majority of data come from my SEO tools, RankIQ and Ubersuggest.

Here’re the properties of my database:

• Keyword phrase: this is the keyword you want to rank for in Google.

• Competition: This is a Number property showing how competitive the keyword is (how hard it is to rank for this keyword). A small number indicates that competition is low. Numbers go from 1 to 100.

• Visits per year: This is a Number property indicating the predicted traffic to the target keyword.

• Time to rank: This property forecasts how fast you can rank for the targeted keyword.

• Word count: My SEO tool calculates the average length of the ranking posts; a good target to aim for.

• Content calendar: My keyword database communicates with my content calendar via this Relation property.

• Notes: Any occasional notes come here.

Content Calendar

This is at the heart of my content machine. My content calendar houses all my content.

Importantly, my content calendar doesn’t hold my content ideas. (At least not many of them.) When a new content idea pops up in my head, I use my task manager to jot down the ideas.

This is much easier than entering data into a Notion database.

Let’s see the properties:

• Headline: the headline of my blog posts.
• Target keyword: this Relation property shows my target keyword from my Keyword database.
• Status: this Type property indicates the status of my blog post (idea, drafting, in review, published, paused).
• Type: this property shows the type of content, which follows Adam Enfroy’s taxonomy (transactional post, informational post, guest post).
• Publishing date: this Date property indicates when my post is published. It’s an important one because the next property pulls data from it.
• Next update: this Formula property calculates the date when I need to check on and update my content for better rankings. This is set up to 12 months as I learned from Brandon Gaille.
• URL: I add my publishing URL to easily reference my blog post in the future.
• Word count: this Rollup property takes my target word count from my Keyword database to give me an aim.
• Guest post: this is a Relation property that connects my content calendar with my Guest post database.

In my content calendar, I created multiple templates for different kinds of content. For example, I’ve a dedicated template for the versus-type posts.

Each template contains different checklists that help me come up with powerful headline ideas, structure and write my post, and upload it to my WordPress site.

These checklists serve as the oil to my content machine and help me work more effectively and adhere to high standards.

Guest Post Database

My third database serves a single purpose: to gather, organize, and leverage information for writing quality guest posts. The content of my guest post lives in my content calendar.

Database structure:

• Site: the targeted site to land a guest post on.
• DA: this Number property shows the domain authority of the website I want to publish on (how trustworthy is it in Google’s eyes; number ranges from 1 to 100.)
• Status: this Select property allows me to quickly identify what to do next.
• Link: this URL property makes it easy to navigate to the target site and find guest posting guidelines, contact information, and topic ideas.
• Email: this Email property contains the contact information (if I could find a working email address).
• Request sent: this Date property shows me the date I pitched my guest post.
• FUP: this Formula property shows me when I should do a follow-up.
• Content calendar: this is a Relation property displaying my related blog posts.

How to Style Your Content in Notion

You can save 2 sec per minute if you’re using shortcut keys instead of your mouse. This is more than one hour over a week.

In Notion, there’s a shortcut key for pretty much everything.

Here’re some of my favorite ones for writing:

• Creating H1 heading: Opt + Cmd + 1 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 1 (Windows)
• Create H2 heading: Opt + Cmd + 2 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 2 (Windows)
• Create H3 heading: Opt + Cmd + 3 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 3 (Windows)
• Create a checklist: Opt + Cmd + 4 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 4 (Windows)
• Create bullets: Opt + Cmd + 5 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 5 (Windows)
• Create a numbered list: Opt + Cmd + 6 (Mac) / Ctrl+ Shift+ 6 (Windows)
• Swap lines up and down: Cmd + Shift + Arrows (Mac) / Ctrl + Shift + Arrows (Windows)
• Duplicate a line of text: Cmd + D (Mac) / Ctrl + D (Windows)
• Create a clickable table of content: /toc
• Add a blockquote: “ + Space
• Add an emoji: : + emoji name

At first, it may feel intimidating, but over time it becomes automatic, and you’ll find yourself often in the flow.

And the best thing about Notion is that WordPress likes it. All your formatting and styling will be preserved in the WordPress editor, even the blockquotes.

Pro tip: If you wonder if there is a shortcut for something, use the slash command: type “/” followed by the style or block you’re searching for.

Let’s Get Your Content Machine Working

This approach to content creation needs a big effort upfront, but once you get the ball rolling, things get much easier. Plus, your content will heavily benefit from the templates, structure, and fluidity that your Notion content machine offers.

Nothing must be set in stone. I often tweak and update my databases and templates when I hear something useful and actionable from the content and SEO industry.

Cover photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash