How I Use NotebookLM as a Content Creator (6 use cases included)
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Hey creators!
Ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of information, desperately trying to distill it into engaging and valuable content? What if I told you there's a free AI tool that's rapidly becoming my secret weapon for every stage of my content creation workflow? It's called Notebook LM, and it's so much more than just a note-taking app.
In this newsletter, I'm going to show you exactly how I use Notebook LM to supercharge my content creation process. Forget endless tabs and scattered documents – Notebook LM lets you train AI on your specific sources, giving it instant expertise in the knowledge you need. Whether I'm diving deep into market research to understand my audience and competitors, effortlessly curating the most relevant industry news for a concise newsletter, or transforming lengthy YouTube transcripts into SEO-optimized blog posts, Notebook LM has become an indispensable part of my toolkit.
Inside, you'll discover how I leverage this underrated AI powerhouse to:
Generate comprehensive SEO content outlines by analyzing top-ranking articles.
Repurpose YouTube videos into engaging blog posts that capture search traffic.
Quickly extract key insights and create FAQs and study guides from research materials.
Organize all the information for specific content projects in one centralized and AI-powered workspace.
Get ready to see how Notebook LM can revolutionize the way you create content, saving you time, enhancing your research, and ultimately helping you connect with your audience in more meaningful ways. Let's dive in!
1. Market and Competitive Research
Notebook LM is presented as a significant tool for market and competitive research. One of the key ways to utilize it for this purpose is by loading various types of information about your competitors, your target audience, and your existing or potential customers into a dedicated notebook. This could include website content, articles, marketing materials, customer reviews (as mentioned later in), and potentially even transcripts of publicly available videos or podcasts featuring competitors.
By having all this information in one place, you can then leverage Notebook LM's AI capabilities to identify key trends, understand your competitors' strategies, and gain insights into your audience's needs and pain points. For instance, you could ask Notebook LM to:
Analyze the language and messaging used by top competitors on their websites and marketing materials to understand their value propositions.
Identify common themes and topics discussed by your target audience in online forums, social media (if you can import relevant text), or customer feedback.
Compare and contrast the features, pricing, and marketing approaches of different competitors based on the information you've loaded.
Uncover potential gaps in the market by analyzing what your competitors are not offering or what your audience is consistently asking for.
One user, Rick Mulready, suggests building a "swipe file" of sales pages or landing pages you admire by adding their URLs to Notebook LM. You can then prompt Notebook LM to analyze these pages for best practices in conversion copywriting. This allows you to learn from successful examples and apply those techniques to your own marketing materials.
2. Newsletter Curation
Notebook LM can be effectively used for newsletter curation, streamlining the process of gathering and summarizing relevant information for your subscribers. The workflow involves:
Subscribing to newsletters within your niche or industry.
Copying and pasting the text content of these newsletters into Notebook LM as separate sources within a dedicated notebook.
Prompting Notebook LM to analyze these sources and identify the key takeaways, trends, and important news.
Asking Notebook LM to create a draft of your newsletter by curating the most relevant information from the analyzed sources, specifically tailored to your target audience
You can further refine the output by providing Notebook LM with information about your target audience to ensure the curated content is pertinent to them.
While Notebook LM can generate a draft newsletter, it's crucial to review and edit it, adding your insights and voice before sending it out. This ensures the content aligns with your brand and provides genuine value to your audience.
This process can save significant time by automating the initial stages of information gathering and summarization, allowing you to focus on adding your unique perspective and engaging your subscribers.
3. Generating FAQs and Study Guides
Notebook LM offers features to help generate FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and study guides from your uploaded sources.
Generating FAQs:
After analyzing a set of documents, such as sales call transcripts, you can prompt Notebook LM to identify common questions or points of confusion that arise.
Based on this analysis, you can ask Notebook LM to generate a list of frequently asked questions along with concise answers derived from the source material. This can be useful for customer support, onboarding materials, or internal knowledge bases.
Generating Study Guides:
Notebook LM has a "Notebook guide" feature with options to automatically generate a study guide from your sources.
Clicking the "create study guide" button within the notebook guide will generate a set of questions based on the content of your uploaded sources, designed to aid in understanding and retention.
In some cases, the study guide may also include answers to the generated questions.
You can further customize the study guide by asking Notebook LM to focus on specific topics or to create questions at a particular difficulty level (e.g., beginner questions).
These features can be particularly helpful for educational purposes, training programs, or for quickly understanding the key concepts within a large amount of information.
4. Organizing Information Related to a Specific Project
Notebook LM is designed as a tool to organize information around specific projects. The fundamental unit of organization is the "notebook," which acts as a dedicated space for all the sources, notes, and interactions related to a particular project.
Here's how Notebook LM facilitates project organization:
Creating Dedicated Notebooks: You can create a new notebook for each project you're working on, whether it's for a client, a business initiative, a piece of writing, a research endeavor, or even personal interests.
Centralized Sources:
Within each notebook, you can upload and store all relevant source materials, including Google Drive documents, PDFs, website links, YouTube videos, and pasted text. You can add up to 50 sources per notebook.
Client-Specific Organization: For example, having specific notebooks for each client, where meeting transcripts are logged. This allows for quick access to past discussions, action items, and evolving client needs.
Project-Based Learning: For projects like creating a custom GPT, you can load relevant books and resources into a dedicated notebook to serve as the knowledge base for your AI interactions.
Note-Taking and Idea Capture: You can create and save notes within each notebook to capture key insights, summaries, or further questions that arise as you interact with the sources. These notes are visually displayed within the notebook.
Source Highlighting and Citation: When Notebook LM generates responses, it cites the specific sources from which the information was derived, making it easy to trace the origin of claims and verify information. The relevant text within the source document is often highlighted.
Combining and Analyzing Notes: You can select multiple notes within a notebook and combine them to create study guides, outlines, summaries, or to identify related ideas.
By keeping all project-related information within a single notebook, you can avoid the need to switch between multiple tools and maintain a focused workspace, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
5. Creating SEO Content Outlines
Notebook LM can be a valuable tool for generating SEO content outlines by analyzing top-ranking competitor content. Here is my step by step approach:
Identify the target keyword you want to rank for.
Perform a Google search for that keyword and identify the top-ranking websites in the search engine results page (SERP).
Create a new notebook in Notebook LM for this content project.
Copy the URLs of these top competitor websites.
Add each of the competitor website URLs as a "website" source to your new notebook.
Use a specific prompt in the chat interface to instruct Notebook LM to create an SEO content outline based on these sources. For example, a comprehensive prompt could be, asking for:
SEO title
Meta description
Headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Recommended word count
Search intent
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords
Any other important elements for outranking competitors.
For more prompts and complete workflows of how I use AI to write blog posts get my AI SEO Playbook
Run the prompt and review the generated content outline. Notebook LM, powered by Gemini, will analyze the competitor content to suggest a structure and key elements for your own content.
Use the generated outline as a blueprint for creating your SEO-optimized content, potentially using other AI writing tools like Claude or custom GPTs to draft the actual text. Remember to refine and add your own human touch to the AI-generated content.
This method allows you to quickly understand the structure and key topics covered by successful content in your niche, providing a strong foundation for creating your own high-ranking content.
6. Repurposing YouTube Videos into SEO-Optimized Blog Posts
Notebook LM can also assist in repurposing YouTube videos into SEO-optimized blog posts by leveraging the video transcript.
Here's a breakdown of the process:
Obtain the transcript of the YouTube video you want to repurpose. Most YouTube videos have a transcript available, which you can copy.
Create a new notebook in Notebook LM for this repurposing project.
Add the entire video transcript as a "copy text" source to your notebook.
Use a detailed prompt in the chat interface to guide Notebook LM in creating an SEO-optimized blog post based on the transcript. The prompt should include:
The target keyword for the blog post.
Instructions to write an SEO-optimized blog post for that keyword.
Specific guidelines for SEO optimization, such as including a meta description, relevant headings, addressing search intent, and incorporating keywords. Ryan Doser provides an example of a comprehensive prompt with various SEO guidelines.
Run the prompt and review the initial blog post draft generated by Notebook LM. The AI will extract information from the transcript and structure it into a blog post format.
Further refine the generated article for SEO and quality. This may involve:
Enhancing the SEO elements: Reviewing and improving the meta description, title, headings, and keyword usage.
Improving readability and flow: Ensuring the article is engaging and well-structured.
Adding more in-depth information or examples where necessary.
Using other AI tools (like Claude or ChatGPT) to rewrite and enhance the content.
This method provides a quick starting point for converting video content into written content optimized for search engines, saving time and effort compared to manual transcription and writing.
This is not all, and actually there is no limit, it is about your creativity.
But let me share some additional ways of how you can use the NotebookLM for your content creation game.
Keeping up with niche information: Transcribe relevant YouTube videos using tools like Descript and then load these transcripts into Notebook LM. You can then use the notebook guide to create a briefing document or listen to an AI-generated audio overview (podcast) to quickly understand the key points of the videos.
Keeping up with general knowledge: Have a virtual assistant collect tech and business articles from sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and add them to a Notebook LM notebook. This allows you to get a weekly overview by reading summaries or listening to the AI-generated podcast while multitasking.
Client management: Create a dedicated notebook for each client. After each meeting, upload the Zoom transcript into the client's notebook. Before future meetings, ask Notebook LM to summarize previous discussions and action items to get quickly up to speed. You can also prompt it to identify recurring themes or unfulfilled needs expressed by the client.
Project work (creating a custom GPT): When working on a specific project, such as building a custom GPT, load relevant books and documents into a dedicated notebook. You can then interact with the AI to help you synthesize information and develop the project.
Recurring internal meetings: Upload transcripts from recurring internal meetings (e.g., leadership or departmental meetings) into Notebook LM. This creates a searchable record that can be shared with team members to ensure everyone stays informed.
Decision making: Load influential books on decision-making, business strategy, etc., into a notebook. When facing important decisions or working through projects, you can consult these resources by asking Notebook LM for insights and guidance.
Presenting information: Even if you don't directly use the AI-generated podcasts, listen to them as a way to understand how to structure and present complex or dry information in a more engaging narrative format.
Analyzing email marketing funnels: Copy and paste emails from successful marketing funnels into Notebook LM. Prompt the AI to analyze the entire sequence and provide an action plan based on the best practices observed, such as tone, value proposition, and call to action.
Optimizing sales and marketing opportunities by analyzing sales call effectiveness: Upload transcripts of both successful and unsuccessful sales calls into separate sources within a notebook. Prompt Notebook LM to identify insights and patterns that differentiate successful calls from unsuccessful ones. You can then ask it to create an action plan or a study guide based on these findings. You can also customize the deep dive audio overview to focus on these comparisons.
Creating a personal coach: Upload self-help or business coaching books (as PDFs) along with audio recordings of your own coaching sessions or presentations. Ask Notebook LM to provide suggestions for improvement based on the book's principles and your recordings, such as refining presentation structure or improving conversions.
Creating private podcast scripts for online courses: Transcribe the lessons and modules of your online course and upload these transcripts into Notebook LM. Ask the AI to analyze the content and write scripts for a private podcast that complements the course material.
Analyzing sales page copy: Input the URLs of successful sales pages as sources in Notebook LM. Prompt the AI to analyze the page for conversion copywriting elements and best practices. You can then ask it to create an action plan for writing your own sales pages based on these insights. Building a "swipe file" of analyzed sales pages in Notebook LM can help you continuously learn.
Analyzing podcast episodes: Use services like Listen Notes to get transcripts or download audio of podcast episodes. Upload these to Notebook LM to get an overview of the content, create action plans for implementing insights, or generate study guides and quizzes.
Analyzing successful meta ad copy and creative: Use Facebook's Ads Library to find ads that have been running for a long time. Copy the ad copy text into Notebook LM and prompt the AI (posing as a marketing expert) to identify the characteristics of successful ads. You can then ask it to create an action plan or checklist for your own ad creation.
Customer feedback analysis: Upload various forms of customer feedback, such as reviews, testimonials, support tickets, or survey responses (or link to a webpage containing them). Ask Notebook LM to summarize key themes, identify areas for improvement in your products or services, and analyze customer sentiment.
Learning from multiple sources: Upload a variety of document types (PDFs, websites, videos, text, etc.) related to a topic you want to learn about. You can then ask specific questions and Notebook LM will draw answers from across all the uploaded sources, citing where the information came from. This is more efficient than using Ctrl+F in individual documents.
Making podcasts to learn: Generate AI podcasts from the multiple sources you've uploaded. This allows you to learn by listening while doing other tasks like commuting. You can adjust the playback speed and download the audio.
Customizing podcasts: When generating a podcast, use the customization options to focus the conversation on a specific topic, question, or target audience, rather than just getting a generic summary of all content.
Analyzing presentations or calls: Upload the slides and audio recording of a presentation or a call. Ask Notebook LM to analyze language patterns, consistency of messaging, and potentially identify trends (e.g., in successful vs. unsuccessful calls).
Creating timelines: If your uploaded sources contain chronological information (like historical documents or project plans), you can use the notebook guide to generate a timeline of events.
Creating briefing docs: Use the notebook guide to create concise briefing documents from your sources, which can be useful for onboarding new team members or summarizing projects for managers.
Combining and analyzing notes: Select multiple notes you've created within a notebook and combine them to create more comprehensive study guides, outlines, or summaries. You can also ask for related ideas or to summarize the combined content.
Analyzing complex code: Upload or paste complex code into Notebook LM to get summaries, explanations, or add notes to your code projects.
Using AI podcast for personal reflection and decision making: Upload personal journal entries or thoughts and generate an AI podcast. Listening to an AI discuss your own reflections can provide a different perspective and help you process your thoughts or make decisions.
Combining multiple niche sources for comprehensive understanding: Add multiple sources with specific, niche information on a topic (e.g., several YouTube videos and a blog post about a new AI architecture). This allows Notebook LM to provide a more comprehensive understanding than a single source would.
Generating briefing documents: Quickly generate a document that briefs you on the main themes, key ideas, facts, problems, and solutions discussed across all your uploaded sources.
Asking interactive questions with source referencing: Pose questions to Notebook LM and the AI will provide answers while highlighting the specific sections of your uploaded sources where it found that information. Clicking on the citation will take you directly to the relevant text.
Focusing questions on specific sources: If you have multiple sources, you can uncheck the boxes next to certain sources to limit the AI's responses to only the information contained within the selected sources.
Generating customized podcasts: When generating an audio overview, use the customize option to provide instructions on what the AI hosts should focus on or how they should present the information (e.g., in layman's terms for beginners).
Interacting with a large number of sources simultaneously: Upload multiple documents (up to 20 Google Drive documents, each with up to 200,000 words) into a single notebook to get a comprehensive understanding of a topic by querying across all of them.
Asking suggested questions relevant to the sources: Take advantage of the AI-generated suggested questions that appear at the bottom of the chat interface, as these are tailored to the content of your specific sources.
Adding new information as notes to incorporate into the conversation: If you find additional relevant information from other sources (like emails or online articles), you can paste it into a new note within the notebook and then include that note as a source for your queries.
Understanding complex documents: Upload challenging texts like academic papers in PDF format. Ask Notebook LM to summarize the main arguments and explain complex concepts in a more accessible way.
Translating information into different formats (e.g., a letter): Instruct Notebook LM to take information extracted from your sources and reformat it into a specific type of document, such as a letter, while retaining citations to the original sources.
Analyzing meeting notes or transcripts: Upload lengthy meeting transcripts (e.g., as Google Docs) and ask Notebook LM to identify the main discussion points, key decisions, and action items, saving you significant time compared to manual review.
Creating proposals based on meeting analysis and other sources: After analyzing meeting notes, you can ask Notebook LM to draft a proposal based on the discussion, even incorporating information from other uploaded sources like your own books or course materials.
Ideation for writing projects: If you're looking for writing ideas, upload your notes on books or articles you've read. Ask Notebook LM to suggest related ideas or potential research avenues based on these sources.
Finding connections between different sources: Load multiple sources into a notebook and ask Notebook LM to identify connections, relationships, or common themes between the ideas presented in these different documents.
Generating opening lines for articles: Once you have a working title and outline, you can ask Notebook LM to write compelling opening lines for your article, designed to grab the reader's attention.
Repurposing written content into videos or podcasts: Copy and paste the text of your blog post into Notebook LM as a source. Customize the audio overview feature by providing a brief summary and key focus points for the AI hosts. Generate and download the audio file, which can then be used as the basis for creating a video with tools that add visuals and subtitles.
Assistance with editing and improving existing content for SEO: Copy and paste the text of a blog post you want to improve for SEO into Notebook LM. Prompt the AI to review the content and provide specific suggestions for optimizing elements like keyword usage, meta tags, content structure, links, and readability to improve search engine rankings.
The list goes on…
So there you have it – a glimpse into how I've integrated the power of Notebook LM into my daily content creation routine.
Ready to take your content creation to the next level and unlock even more AI-powered strategies? I've compiled my most effective tactics and workflows into my AI SEO Playbook.
This comprehensive guide delves deeper into leveraging AI tools, to optimize your content for search engines, drive more organic traffic, and ultimately grow your audience. If you're serious about harnessing the power of AI to supercharge your content creation and SEO, grab your copy of the AI SEO Playbook today and start transforming the way you create!