10 Best Notion Tools to Manage Everything (Really)
Have you ever considered using Notion for more than to-do lists? It turns out that it has a whole suite of tools you might not know about. Let's explore the best ones for blogging, customer support, and even email automation.
Notion has grown popular as a productivity tool among individuals and businesses because of its customizable online workspace. However, the platform's true potential is unlocked with the help of specialized tools that extend its functionalities.
This article features multiple standout Notion tools such as: Feather, Helpkit, and NotionSender, that enhance Notion’s capabilities and provide ideal website solutions for users.
How to Use Feather for Blog Management on Notion
Feather is an excellent tool for managing and optimizing your blog. It combines Notion's powerful database capabilities with comprehensive blog management tools. Here's a quick step-through to help you get started with Feather.
Setting Up Feather
Step 1: Sign up on Feather
Visit the Feather website and create an account. Once logged in, scroll to the bottom of the dashboard and click "Create new blog."
Step 2: Duplicate Databases
The next is to duplicate the Notion database on Feather. Once you click on Duplicate Databases, the Feather template is automatically added to your Notion workspace. This will feature four databases: Content, Pages, Tags, and Authors.
These four databases make up your entire blog with Feather and Notion. Then, click the Share at the top right corner to make your page public.
Once done, go back to Feather and click Next.
Step 3: Connect Database
In this section, you must copy the links to each database from your Notion and paste them into your Feather page.
To do this, return to the databases you duplicated on your Notion. Click the six dot buttons beside each database to copy the link. Paste for each of them on Feather and click Next.
Once you've done this, the page will display blog properties. If you used the default Feather template, you won't need to change anything here, so click next.
Step 4: Choose Blog Name And Domain
Put in your blog name and choose a domain. You can change this later in your blog dashboard or even connect your custom domain. Once you've done this, your blog is ready, and you can proceed to create blog posts.
Customizing Your Blog
With your content on Notion and your blog ready to go, you can explore a wide range of layout options, theme customization, and varying functionality.
Layout Options: Feather has varying layout options, and these templates range from minimalistic designs to more complex, feature-rich layouts. Nevertheless, Feather allows you to adjust your layout preferences to suit your content needs and aesthetics.
Feather is regarded as one of the best Notion tools because of its more comprehensive layout options, which include colors, font styles, spacing, and a customization panel that allows you to make real-time changes to your blog.
Theme Customization: Feather enables deep theme customization, which allows you to add unique elements to your Notion blog. The customization features on Feather let you design your blog to match your brand identity.
This ensures you can add your unique logo and play around with your blog's brand colors and other icons/buttons. This comprehensive theme customization also includes customizing headers, footers, and other design elements.
Feather also offers the flexibility to switch between light and dark modes, further improving the blog aesthetic and aiding user navigation.
Custom CSS: Feather's customization features are built to suit the wide preferences of users, but users can add custom CSS to cover design requirements not covered by the standard options. This feature is crucial for individuals and businesses who want to create a more interactive complex layout. These unique customization features make Feather appropriate for even corporate uses.
SEO Benefits
Feather offers in-site SEO tools that help improve your blog visibility and search rankings.
Creating Sitemaps: By creating a sitemap from Notion databases, Feather helps improve Notion blog indexing on search engines, thereby increasing organic traffic. Sitemaps are crucial, especially for blogs frequently updated with new posts, as they can ensure that your content appears in search results as soon as it goes live.
Meta Tags and Descriptions: Feather allows you to optimize your Notion blog posts by adding meta titles, descriptions, and keywords. The built-in SEO tool also assists with suggestions to improve your SEO, such as adjusting keyword density, adding alt text to images, and improving readability.
Help Center with Helpkit on Notion
Helpkit is another Notion blog tool for transforming Notion pages into a professional help center or documentation site. It’s a simplified tool with a user-friendly Notion blog template for building pages for help articles, FAQs, or documentation.
As one of the best Notion tools, Helpkit improves its offerings with features like custom domain support, SEO optimization, and user feedback collection. Thus, it is ideal for businesses that need a professional look for their support resources.
Getting Started with Helpkit
Step 1: Sign Up for Helpkit
Visit the Helpkit website and sign up. Once logged in, fill in the required information, including your first name, last name, organization, etc. Once you're done, click Next.
The next page will require you to choose your desired layout design and add your logo and brand colors. However, you can skip this section for later.
Step 2: Connect Notion
Duplicate Helpkit's database template is in your Notion account. Share it publicly as the process requires. Once done, copy the link and circle back to Helpkit to paste the link.
Alternatively, you can use a database you’ve previously saved. For example, Help Center is a Notion Template with an extensive database to help you build a solid help page.
Step 3: Create Your Domain
Choose a name to create your help page. You can set up a custom domain later in your settings. Once done, you're ready to explore the suite of tools available for you on Helpkit.
Design and Customization
Helpkit provides a range of customization options to help you create an interesting help center that aligns with your brand.
Themes and Layouts: Helpkit offers two direct layout options, "Help Center" and "Documentation." The two layouts bring varying user experiences to your help pages. You can combine these layout styles with varying colors, fonts, and themes to create a cohesive appearance.
Branding Elements: Helpkit allows you to add your logo and edit the footer to match your brand feel. This also includes customizing the appearance of links, buttons, and other UI elements to enhance user experience.
Managing Help Content
Help articles are not the most complex blog posts to manage, but they still need to be done effectively. Here are some organization tips for your help content. Helpkit serves as a Notion CMS tool and assists with efficient content management and organization.
Categorization: Helpkit allows you to categorize your help articles into categories such as "Getting Started," "Account Management," "Troubleshooting," etc. This makes it easier for users to navigate your content and find what's helpful. At the same time, it helps you to find and sort through articles requiring updates.
Tagging: Helpkit lets you add tags to your help content to facilitate easy search. Tags can include keywords related to the help article or your target audiences, and consistent tagging practices can ensure a well-organized help center.
Regular Updates: Like other content types, help articles require regular updates. These could include modifying the user flow on your product, removing outdated information, or updating underperforming articles.
User Feedback: User feedback is a crucial feedback mechanism for your help articles. This allows you to turn on comments or ratings on the helpfulness of your article. You can use this feedback to improve your content and continually address gaps identified by users.
Email Communication With NotionSender
NotionSender is a Notion tool designed to integrate email functionalities into your Notion workspace. This unique tool facilitates automated and dynamic email communication for individuals and businesses requiring professional communication processes.
Setting Up NotionSender
Step 1: Sign Up On Notion Sender
Visit the NotionSender website and create an account. Oncse logged in, the page brings you to a dashboard that lets you seamlessly connect to your Notion account.
Step 2: Connect Notion
Select an existing Notion database or create a new one where you'd like to send and save emails. Grant access to at least one page to connect with NotionSender.
Step 3: Receive Unique Email Address
Once integration to Notion is complete, NotionSender will provide you with a unique email address linked to your Notion database. This will allow you to send and forward emails appearing in your specified Notion database.
Step 4: Send Emails With NotionSender
Create a new page inside your Notion Outbox database and structure it like an email, including the recipient, subject, and body. When your email content is complete in Notion, use NotionSender to send it straight to the recipients.
Creating Dynamic Emails
NotionSender allows you to create dynamic emails and personalize email content with Notion page properties. You can pull dynamic data from Notion databases, such as recipient names, project details, and deadlines, using placeholders like {{RecipientName}}, {{ProjectTitle}}, and {{DueDate}}. This adds relevance to the email and enhances engagement.
Also, dynamic emails on NotionSender allow you to create interactive emails for weekly meetings/reminders, customer onboarding, invoice and payment reminders, event announcements and follow-ups, and more. This means that users can reply to an invitation, fill out a questionnaire, or browse a catalog within the email.
Automation Email Workflows
With NotionSender, you can schedule emails to be sent at specific times or set up triggers based on changes in your Notion databases. Some tasks that can be automated include the client onboarding process, customer support follow-ups, and project management updates.
For example, you could set NotionSender to automatically send project updates at the end of every week or trigger meetings when a new task is assigned.
Use Cases
NotionSender has proven itself as one of the more versatile Notion tools for individual and business uses to improve your website experience. Here are some popular use cases for the tool:
Meeting Reminders: NotionSender is a pretty efficient tool for sending meeting schedules with automatic reminders to members and all stakeholders about upcoming meetings. You can easily add details like meeting agendas, preparation notes, and other relevant documents stored in your Notion to create dynamic emails.
Event Invitations: With NotionSender, you can send personalized invitations for company events, workshops, or webinars. With dynamic placeholders, you could increase the likelihood of attendance with emails tailored for each recipient.
Feedback Requests: You can automate dynamic emails for feedback requests after completing a course or after an experience. NotionSender allows you to send emails that the recipient can interact with to complete the task without closing their email app.
Invoice Generation: Automating your invoicing process with NotionSender can streamline your billing process as an individual or a business. You can link invoice data from Notion and set a trigger to forward an invoice to your client once a project is done.
Indify
Indify is a Notion tool allowing users to add customized widgets embedded into Notion pages. Indify can help bring more life to your Notion pages and improve functionality and visual appeal.
Several people use Indify to create dynamic interactive pages which feature other elements like a countdown timer, weather forecast, or a habit tracker. Creating a widget with Indify is pretty straightforward; once you’ve created the widget on the tool, you only have to paste the URL into your Notion page to embed it.
Zapier
Zapier is a powerful automation tool that connects Notion with thousands of other applications, enabling users to automate reiterative processes and streamline their workflows. Zapier works by setting up ”zaps,” a trigger button that initiates an action between Notion and other platforms.
Zapier is a helpful tool to automate task updates, data transfer from forms like Typeform of Google Forms, email notifications, posting content on social media, and analytics reports to Excel or Google Sheets. Carrying out some of these tasks manually could be potentially more time-consuming, error-prone, or even labor-intensive in some cases. As such, Zapier has proven to be one of the more effective Notion tools for reducing manual tasks, automating workflows, and improving productivity.
Backups.so
Backups.so is a notable automated and secure backup tool for your Notion workspace. The tool ensures you can store and back up your Notion data daily and have a recent copy of your information. Although Notion provides a data backup should you mistakenly delete a page, it only offers a snapshot of up to 30 days.
With Backups.so, you can restore previous versions within longer timeframes and access multiple versions of your Notion content. Backups.so provides a robust backup solution to ensure that your Notion data is secure, recoverable, and secure.
Snack This
Snack This is a third-party Notion tool that allows you to organize and design beautiful presentations within Notion. You can embed Snack This presentation into your Notion pages, an excellent way to add more multimedia material.
Snack This also serves as an extended tool for motion design, text animation, and story editing. As such, these tools contribute to creating the ultimate slides that communicate your presentation. Also, you only need to provide the text for your presentations and leave Snack This to create perfect complementary visuals. All you are required to do is provide your Notion page link and trust Snack This with the process.
Save To Notion
Save to Notion is a browser extension that allows you to save web content directly to your Notion workspace. This can include web pages, clipped articles, bookmarks, screenshots, and images, and organize them within varying Notion pages. Save to Notion also allows you to create and fill in database properties within the extension to access data more easily later.
This tool has proven helpful for tasks like research compilation, content curation, project management, academic use, and more. Save to Notion also has a pro version to integrate with forms and other Google Suite tools.
NotionCharts
NotionCharts is a versatile tool designed to enhance Notion pages with dynamic and interactive charts. This tool enables you to create various chart types directly within your Notion workspace, such as bar graphs, line charts, pie charts, and more. NotionCharts also helps transform raw data into visually appealing and easily interpretable charts, making data analysis and presentation more effective.
NotionCharts is helpful in creating Gantt charts, progress trackers, resource distribution graphs, and live charts. Integrating NotionCharts into your business and project management needs allows you to convert data into insightful visuals for effective presentations.
Sync2Sheets
Sync2Sheets (previously known as Notion2Sheets) is a valuable tool for synchronizing data between your Notion page and Google Sheets. This enables you to export your Notion databases directly to Google Sheets while the data is synchronized in real time. This is interesting if you want to keep a backup database outside Notion or simplify data analysis and sharing.
Notion2Sheets has also proven efficient for financial reporting, automated workflows, custom dashboards, and collaborative work. You can leverage Notion2Sheets to improve productivity and data management capabilities without hassle.
Summary
Notion tools like Feather, Helpkit, NotionSender, and the several other mentioned in this article enhance your experience with Notion and put on new functionalities for easier workflow. Feather is a comprehensive blogging platform that easily complements the features of Helpkit and NotionSender.
These Notion tools combine to help you manage tasks, content, and communication much better. Adopt these tools to elevate your productivity and create a more seamless workflow.