Last Updated on 4 months by Christopher Jan Benitez
Writing is a very personal practice.
There are millions of possibilities to write a particular thought or idea, and a writer only has to settle on just one. As more ideas pile up, an author sticks to a specific style that defines him or her. It is the beauty that is inherent in writing, which paves the way for distinct storytellers, novelists, and nonfiction writers.
Part of what makes writing unique is the process. Each writer has their quirks and methods that compose how they come up with their content.
The problem starts when the writing process becomes too convoluted and is, therefore, counterproductive to the goal it is set to achieve. The method may work wonders for some, but what if there’s a way for them to make a much more streamlined writing process?
However, is it possible to believe that you can streamline your writing process to concoct much better content in less time?
At least, that’s what this Airstory review is set to achieve.
In this objective and unbiased review, I attempt to take a closer look at Airstory and how it could benefit writers from all walks of life using a set of criteria that I believe are relevant to determine its effectiveness. Also, I will provide my take on why I feel the way I feel towards Airstory.
tl;dr
- Airstory’s drag-and-drop card system is full of potential uses.
- As a tool to help you create better content in less time, Airstory is not that valuable.
- Aside from the card system, the Web Clipper is a great way to annotate content quickly and easily. The one-click import to WordPress saves you time from copying, pasting, and uploading content to your site.
- For $25/month, it’s not necessarily a bad deal, considering how easy it’ll make content collaboration for users. At the same time, it’s not the most affordable deal, either.
- Airstory provides enough tutorials and support on their site to help you get on board with the tool for your content needs.
What’s the story, Airstory?
Pros
- Drag and drop cards to add content, a game-changer
- Templates provide you with keys to success
Cons
- Not very user-friendly
- Ultimately unnecessary
My main gripe with Airstory is that it tries to homogenize the writing process, which is why some people will find the tool useless. I believe that some writing processes can be developed into much simpler tasks. However, if the process works, why fix it? Airstory seems to impose a specific workflow that can be considered radical by others already set with a writing process. Also, aside from the fact that you can create content using free and less constricting tools, why settle with Airstory?
Airstory is an app made for content creators who want to produce content on the go. Whether you’re a blogger, copywriter, or social media specialist, there is something to like about Airstory.
The team behind Airstory are the same people who run Copyhackers.
The ultimate plan developed by Joanna Wiebe is to make writing easy. While there are tools on the market that work perfectly fine and even help aid your writing process to create awesome content, Airstory aims to streamline all the tasks involved in writing to help you create killer content in less time.
“While Copy Hackers teaches you to write copy that converts, Airstory helps you write it. It’s a drag-and-drop document builder. It is to document what LeadPages and Unbounce are to landing pages.1″
In simpler terms, I would describe it as “project management for writers.”
Similar to tools like Trello and Wrike, you can consolidate all your content projects in a single place, so you don’t have to sift through different folders in your local or cloud drive. Airstory is also perfect for multiple writers collaborating on a piece. The tool is agile enough to help writers get on track with their respective projects so they can meet their deadlines.
How to judge Airstory?
It is almost impossible to judge a tool that’s based on something purely subjective. There is no single correct answer when it comes to the writing process. It can be as convoluted and unproductive as it could be as long as it delivers results.
However, for the sake of reviewing Airstory, we need to establish variables to help see the tool from a more qualitative perspective.
- Uniqueness – What sets Airstory apart from other writing tools and even SEO content software?
- Usefulness – How valuable is Airstory as a tool to help you create better content in less time?
- Features – Do the features present in Airstory fulfill the promise of making you write faster?
- Price – Is the cost of using Airstory over a long period justified?
- Support – Are the people behind Airstory providing you enough support to use the tool?
How to use Airstory to simplify your blogging process
Airstory feels like a mystery. It means what it says, and yet it is difficult, at least for me, to visualize how the tool works. The site offers enough support to help you get your feet off the ground using this tool. However, sometimes, it’s better to just push through with the tool head-on and see what you can create with it.
Therefore, instead of laying down the details for you, I published a YouTube video explaining how I use Airstory to write this review and other features you need to know about the tool.
In the video, you will learn:
- what makes Airstory different from usual word processing tools
- why the drag and drop cards innovates the way you approach content creation
- how the Airstory Researcher Web Clipper can help you annotate content from other sites on the fly
- how the different templates available in its library can help remove the guesswork from the writing process
Note from the Editor
This is the first time I’m using video in my reviews. I used Screencast-o-matic to record the video and publish it on Youtube for sharing. If you have thoughts about the review, please let me know so I can work on the kinks and provide you with better video content moving forward 🙂
Pros
Drag and drop cards to add content a game changer
Most of the writing tools offered in today’s market are limited to grammar editors, headline checkers, distraction-free editors, and the like. It doesn’t have the sophisticated UX seen in most project management tools, nor does it have functions that could really that your writing process to the next level.
Airstory is the bridge where writers can cross towards a more automated way of writing. The drag and drop card feature is a brazen way to make content creation possible with just a few clicks of a button.
This feature is perfect for some reasons. If you’re a writer, you can use cards to build your ideas and save citations using the Airstory Researcher Web Clipper Chrome extension that you can use later. Once you save your ideas using the browser extension, you can just drag the cards into the text editor and expand your thoughts from there.
If you like to curate content on your blog or site or build a writing portfolio to show prospects, you can use the Airstory Research to create citations from some of the best posts in your niche and publish a weekly post about them.
If you’re a manager of a writing team or an editor, you can assign them cards to fill out regarding the sections in the content that you are building. After that, you can simply form the content by dragging the cards and repositioning them as you see fit in the content. You can then comment on the sections if you want the writers to edit and elaborate on their ideas.
If you’re not on a desktop and need to create content, you can access Airstory from your tablet and use the pre-filled cards to build your content from scratch.
There are simply endless ways that you can do to create content using Airstory. It’s a very exciting feature that could challenge the way content is written and produced!
Templates provide you keys to success
I am not a fan of templates. The fact that you have the option to use them only makes them prone for other people to abuse them to no one. Therefore, what was once an effective template that aims to increase conversion and engagement or whatnot is now ineffective and run down the ground.
However, I don’t feel the same way about the templates found in Airstory. After all, the best copywriters in the industry developed the templates. So if there’s anything to abuse in this world, it has to be Airstory templates.
To access the templates, you need to download them by opening a new window to all the available files. Honestly, I’m not sure why I had to download them from a subdomain and not just have them readily available from the dashboard. My best guess is that they’re measuring the performance of each template and see which one gets the most downloads so they can develop more templates related to them. If that’s the case, it still bogs down the experience of using the tool.
Going back to the templates, there are currently 26 available ranging from headline hacks to blog post formulas and even an email sequence script. The template will help you build your version of the content without having to start from a clean slate.These allow you to supercharge your content writing so you can finish faster and quicker.
Cons
Not very user-friendly
Upon signing up for an account, Airstory greets users with a somewhat complex dashboard. There are lots of buttons and sections to choose from that it prevents me from a decision which one to click on.
Eventually, you’ll get the hang of the tool after playing around with it for a while. However. I think the tool would benefit from a more useful layout that engages and gets them on board with the tool even without having prior knowledge about it.
Ultimately unnecessary
While it seems like Airstory is reinventing the wheels with its features, it feels like it doesn’t. If you’re fine using Google Docs to collaborate with writers or Trello to manage all your writing tasks, then I don’t see why people have to line up for Airstory. It’s probably cool to drag and drop cards to create your content, or you can collaborate on Google Docs to build the article, which is pretty much the same thing.
It does complement your use of Google Docs and Evernote since both sync up nicely with the tool. However, I feel that something is lacking in Airstory in that you don’t need it in the grand scheme of things, at least for now. It’s a great tool if you want to simplify some of the more tedious and repetitive tasks in writing, which is a great selling point. But I feel that Airstory could be more than what it is.
Qualifying Airstory as a content tool
I sincerely feel that Airstory is something special. The drag-and-drop content cards are something to build on in the future and can probably revolutionize how online writing is done. There are also features like WordPress integration that allow you to collaborate on a post and save it as a draft on WordPress along with the images. This is an excellent way to upload your content on the CMS instead of copying and pasting the text while uploading the photos individually.
Still, I can’t shake off the fact that Airstory is something that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, especially those whose writing habits are set.
Airstory has reiterated that it aims to complement the existing process and make it easier, and it also makes it seamless for non-writers to create content using the tool. Regardless, I feel that it’ll take more than drag-and-drop cards to get more people to buy into the idea of Airstory.
Final words
Video summary above created using InVideo.
Airstory
- Airstory writing software by Copy Hackers, Today, We Are Fools. Happily. (Or why we built and are finally launching Airstory.), https://copyhackers.com/2017/02/airstory/