Creative PRojects
SEO Blog Post Spec Piece: Staples
Generating SEO Blog Content
SEO articles, or search engine optimized articles, are a great ways that quality copywriters can bring business to any site. SEO blog posts are a form of copywriting designed to help bring more attention to your site by leveraging specific search terms used by your audience in popular engines like Google.
Although the following article was not something that I created for a client, I drafted this as a speculative SEO blog post piece for Staples.
Staples is a massive office supplies retailer, specializing in providing businesses and individuals with office furniture, technology, cleaning products, and paper-based office supplies like planners, notebooks, sticky notes, pens, pencils, and a plethora of other items. As a leader in the industry of all things office supplies, the Staples brand is all about making your business — wherever it is — optimized for efficiency and productivity.
While their target demographic tends to be aligned with business owners and corporate employees, they’re also one of the best places to shop for students of all ages. With this in mind, the SEO article below is designed to attract those students who are enrolled in remote learning experiences or prospective students who are considering them.
5 Best Practices for Remote & Online Learning in 2025
In the modern, post-pandemic world, options for online and remote learning have become more available than they ever have been before. There is a vast assortment of different online, remote, or even hybrid style classes out there these days, ranging from cooking seminars to biology lab experiences. Even recreational, non-academic classes now have online learning options available to choose from.
And while there are so many different opportunities to learn online, it can be a little daunting to start one if you’ve never tried an online class before. Because of the unique flexibility of remote learning, it can be nerve-wracking to realize just how much of the responsibility you bear for your own learning experience when you take an online course.
But don’t worry! Here are some of the best tips and tricks on how you can get the most out of your next online learning experience.
Table of Contents
1. Get a planner
One of the biggest struggles with online learning is staying organized throughout the class. There are weekly (sometimes daily) assignments, projects to complete, and events for class that you need to keep track of, in addition to all the other things you have going on in your day-to-day life. Without some kind of system to keep track of it all, it can get overwhelming fast.
The best way to manage it is to use some kind of planner where you can regularly review, track, and update the various deadlines, tasks, and other notable events you have going on.
These days, many people are choosing to go digital to keep everything either on a smartphone or computer where they can schedule meetings, events, or other notifications. This is especially helpful if you have the ability to pull those dates from specific emails or apps that you might be using regularly. A great way to do this might be to incorporate a tablet or iPad where you can manage your planner alongside your email and other apps.
There are some great options available at your local Staples:
However, others may prefer the traditional pen-and-paper style planners or bullet journals. This might be a more helpful option if you tend to dismiss notifications on your phone blindly or even if you want to add more personal touches to your planner.
For those more traditionally inclined, Staples has a wide selection of fun, physical planners to choose from to get you back on track in 2025:
Regardless of whether it’s digital or analog, be sure to choose a planner that has a calendar where you can mark specific dates as well as some space for you to write down day-to-day assignments or tasks.
At the end of the day, the best format is the one that works best for the way that you study and stay organized.
2. Take Notes
This goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the use of a planner as yet another tool to keep yourself organized when it comes to online learning. Just like in any classroom setting, there is a lot of information to absorb and take in. You need to be able to keep track of all the new information you’re learning, and to refer back to it when it comes time for a test or project where all that information can be applied. The easiest way to accomplish this is by taking notes throughout your online learning experience.
Just as with the planner, many learners are transitioning to digital note-taking programs. Some like the robust capabilities of a complex notebook-like program, complete with highlighting, font options, screenshot storage, and other functionalities that may help you locate information afterwards. Others may choose to stay simple with basic word processing programs where just getting the information down is the primary focus. However, the key component of using any digital program is finding the right tech to help you keep it organized.
Laptops can be great options for learning on-the-go because they’re easy to transport and take with you anywhere – allowing for that flexibility that you absolutely need to have as a distance learner.
On the other hand, Chromebooks are quickly becoming one of the most common ways that remote learners like you can stay connected and keep all your Google-based documents all in one place. These can be an excellent choice for learners who want to keep things simple and easy to use.
Devices like these can be especially helpful if you are capturing images or saving resources (like webpages or full text documents) that can only be accessed online using a PC, tablet, or smartphone.
On the other hand, you may also find there is some benefit to taking notes in a traditional spiral notebook. In 2021, group of researchers explored the relationship between note-taking tools and memorization of new material by having the participants use either an ink pen, a digital pen, or typing instruments to learn new words in a foreign language. The results of the study revealed that those individuals who used handwritten tools – the ink pen or the digital pen – showed better memorization of the material in the long-term (Ihara et al., 2021).
One of the great benefits to going this traditional route is that ink pens don’t require any additional apps and allow you to keep your eyes on the content you’re reading, watching, or listening to, without having to bounce between different programs or monitors.
You may even decide to use a mixed methods approach – taking written notes AND saving specific resources to a folder on your computer!
Regardless of whether you choose to store your notes on your desktop or write them down in a notebook, it’s important that you keep all your notes organized along with all your other class materials specific to the course you’re taking with sticky notes, folders, and any other office supplies you might need.
3. Schedule your study time — and your breaks!
As part of your online or remote learning experience, more than likely you’ll find that you bear much of the responsibility for keeping up with the pace of the course you’re taking. This is because many online learning courses tend to be asynchronous these days, meaning that the students and teachers in the class don’t meet online at the same time, rather everyone accesses the materials as their individual schedules allow.
This can be either a boon or a curse for some, depending on your perspective, but generally speaking, you’ve got to be disciplined enough to carve out the time to dedicate to each of your classes.
One of the first things to do with any new class is to check out the syllabus or class schedule to see what expectations your teacher may have. You’ll want to pay special attention to deadlines for projects, any tests or quizzes, and the weekly workload of homework and class assignments. Record these in your planner — or on a calendar — and then plan to carve out time in your own schedule to best meet those expectations.
On a more day-to-day level, your schedule may fluctuate – some days you might have more responsibilities that you need to tend to outside of classwork, which may limit the time you can devote that particular day. In this regard, an online class allows you a little more flexibility to make the time fit in elsewhere.
For online classes, it may be easier to plan your workload on a week-to-week basis first, and then work your way down to the details of the day-to-day once you have an idea of your pacing.
Even if you’re taking an online class for recreational purposes, you should still make some time to study and practice what you learn.
With all the work you’re putting into learning that new material, it can be hard to remember to give yourself downtime. But without breaks in between learning sessions, you can easily overwork yourself to the point of exhaustion and fatigue.
In fact, overworking your brain for long periods of time can do even more harm to your ability to store and recall new information. Buch et al. (2021) conducted a study where researchers found that small breaks allowed for a phenomenon called “wakeful rest” to take place — an event where the brain activity of the participants demonstrated that they were actually rapidly replaying the tasks and information during those breaks.
Without any downtime to allow your brain to recover and replay the information you’re taking in throughout the study session, you might be losing out on critical time your brain could be using to revisit and reabsorb information.
A great way to help break up your study sessions and avoid mental fog is to use the Pomodoro method. This is a form of studying introduced by Francesco Cirillo where you work for intervals of 20-25 minutes at a time on a specific task at-hand, followed by short breaks of 5 minutes in between. After a couple of the 20-25 minute intervals, you should take a longer break of about 15 minutes.
So next time you set aside some study time, grab a timer and start using the Pomodoro method!
4. Talk to your classmates
While the digital age of information provides access to a wealth of remote learning opportunities, it can sometimes feel isolating or lonely to sit behind your own screen as opposed to arriving to the bustling social atmosphere of a traditional classroom. It may even feel challenging to engage with the material on a personal level at times without it. While the methods have have changed, there are still plenty of opportunities to get the same level of engagement in your online class.
Many online classes or learning environments these days will come equipped with a discussion board area that is incorporated into assignments as a way for online learners to exchange ideas and demonstrate their knowledge – along with responses to the posts of peers.
If you find yourself reading through the class materials and are having trouble understanding something, be sure to reach out to your teacher as well as your peers. You can either refer back to one of the discussion boards or reach out directly using chat or email.
Whenever you’re in doubt about something you’re still learning, you should always reach out and ask questions, regardless of how trivial or basic it might seem. Plus, you never know, you might not be the only one struggling with it!
In addition to forum-style discussion boards, there also tends to be a student lounge board that is open to all members of the class for more casual conversation and interaction, as well as questions for the teacher.
If you find yourself reflecting on the material from one of the units that doesn’t quite fit with the motif for a weekly discussion board assignment, consider throwing it up into the student lounge area to start a conversation with your classmates. Or, if you want to break the ice a little more, use it to suggest a digital happy hour or remote coffee break sesh to spend some quality time together.
5. Keep track of your personal progress
The experience of learning anything new is unique in that the takeaways from a class or lesson may differ from person to person, subject to subject, or even unit to unit. At times, it can be exciting and fun. Other times the material can be frustrating and difficult to grasp. Hopefully you have more experiences with the former than the latter, but sometimes there are subjects or topics that you just don’t connect with.
That’s why it’s so important to keep track of how you’re handling the material and your personal progress in your online learning experience.
As you progress through the material in class, try to find some time to journal and reflect on your own personal takeaways as a learner.
Ask yourself things like:
- What was something you did well on in class?
- Are you understanding everything OK or are you having trouble with something?
- If you are struggling with something, is it just once or is it more frequent?
- Are you enjoying or engaged in the material you’re learning about? What have you enjoyed most?
- If the class is part of your major or specific area of interest or potential career path, are you meeting the requirements and enjoying the activities involved?
- Are you improving, maintaining, or struggling with your performance in the class overall? What, if anything, is contributing to your success?
These questions should be like a temperature check that you can use to keep an eye on how you’re feeling about the material and to remind yourself that you’re still making progress. After all, it’s your learning journey and you should make the most of it!
The bottom line
Online learning has quickly become a key method for college courses, recreational activities, and even on-the-job training. Although it comes with its own challenges, there are many different strategies that can help you succeed.
When you’re preparing for your next online or remote learning experience, try incorporating some of these tactics to keep yourself centered and organized. The most important part of any learning experience is to expose yourself to new information and further develop your skills.
References
Buch, E. R., Claudino, L., Quentin, R., Bönstrup, M., & Cohen, L. G. (2021). Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay. Cell Reports, 35(10), 109193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193
Ihara, A. S., Nakajima, K., Kake, A., Ishimaru, K., Osugi, K., & Naruse, Y. (2021). Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words: Evidence From an N400 Event-Related Potential Index. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 15, 679191. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.679191