EVERNOTE… IF YOU DON’T KNOW, NOW YOU KNOW!! This program is ONE of my business lifesavers that keeps me sane and organized. I literally use it for every aspect of my life, but today I will be talking about how I use it to organize my business. Think of it as your second brain. You can save notes, clip things from the web and organize information. The beauty of Evernote is that there are thousands of uses for it and you can customize it however you want in order to make it work for you. The downside is that you can do so much that it can be overwhelming when first starting out on how to get it all in order.

~ SO WHAT IS IT? ~ 
Evernote is a multi-platform (meaning you can use it on your phone, computer, iPad, etc and it syncs across all of these devices) application designed to organize everything from notes, images, text and presentations.

~ EVERNOTE PRICING ~ 
The Basic Service of Evernote is Free 99!! When I first started with Evernote, I had the free version, but have since upgraded to the Premium Version ($49.99/year), as you can turn notes into presentations, scan and digitize business cards, annotate attached PDFs to name a few. I love receiving business cards, but they were really starting to pile up and keeping them organized was becoming a headache. Now I can just flip through them virtually and find exactly what I am looking for!! Also being able to annotate on PDFs…. yaaassss! So now if a client has questions about a service or the contract, I can just annotate onto the PDF instead of writing the email saying look at page 3, section blah blah blah. The client can now just scan the PDF and all of your notes are right there.

~ THE BASICS OF EVERNOTE ~ 
Basically Evernote is on fancy online notebook! What you start with in Evernote are…

NOTES – These are the actual files you add or write in Evernote. You can have as many of these as you need. Think of notes as a page in a notebook (a page that can be as LONG as you need it to be). Notes can hold documents, files, text and images. Whatever you need to access or store goes into a note. You can add tags to every note that you write.  Tagging allows you to find notes A LOT faster than going through notebooks or notes!! And I highly suggest tagging EVERY note that you write. It will save your sanity later. Notes can then be put into…

NOTEBOOKS – Notebooks hold your notes together. You can add as many notes as you need into one notebook. Things that fall into the same topics or categories usually make good notebooks. For example, I have notebooks for blogging ideas, blogging posts in progress, blog post completed, marketing, financials, creative action plan, planning clients, and on and on and on!! I have a TON of Notebooks. Then Notebooks can be put into…

STACKS – Stacks hold notebooks together (I look at them as master categories). Stacks can be made by dragging one notebook on top of another and adding additional notebooks as needed, but you cannot add individual notes to a stack. I have stacks for Blogging, Business Management, Canned Responses, Planning Clients.

~ SETTING UP A SYSTEM ~ 
Whether or not you love Evernote will pretty much depend on how well your system is setup. Everyone has a different way of organizing their thoughts and ideas. I wanted to share my set-up to give you an idea of one option.

Before you start saving any files, you will want to get some basic notebooks setup. Because having just a stack of notes that you will have to scroll through is… NO BUENO! Setting up some notebooks will help get you organized right away and have a place to put things you want to save. You can change the name of a notebook after it’s created so don’t get too caught up on having the pretty category/title for every notebook. As a wedding planner, I have the following stacks for my business:

The next bonus of Evernote is their Web Clipper. This is a Chrome add-on makes life a little easier. It allows you to save or share as an article, simplified article, full page, bookmark or screenshot. You can also use the markup tools to highlight parts or make notes.

If you haven’t given Evernote a try yet, I definitely would. Using this program has helped me in being more organized and more efficient in my day-to-day activities. One of the biggest things I use Evernote for is blogging!! Between Evernote and Trello, I think I finally have my blogging life in order.

Set-up an Evernote account (if you don’t already have one.) Create a few your notebooks and stacks and then start collecting your ideas and research for your website, product, service, blogging, etc.

Do you have any Evernote tips that you love? Share them below.