Do you know what is the single and hardest thing that prevent you to publish a new blog post? It’s not time, nor your business agenda. It’s keeping track effectively of all your ideas and resources as soon as you get acquainted to. Let me explain.
You want to publish a terrific blog post in the next week. What do you do then? You start by outlining your basic idea, specifically by setting some key points you want to communicate. Then you start scanning the web for detailed information, stats, images, quotes and whatever resource that enforce your statements. Then you add your punch line as the perfect conclusion.
In this pretty standard approach to writing a blog post, the weakest link is in the researching aspect because there are plenty of interesting contents out there but you have limited resources by your side: limited time and limited memory.
So how do writers, bloggers and people who publish content for business manage blog post ideas?
Every writer has his own “system”, whether is an a app, an online service or an “analog” solution to this issue. Some of the most used techniques and apps for keeping track of online resources are:
- Evernote
- Google Docs
- Sending emails with links
- Notes on paper and notebooks
The problem with these apps and ways to store links, is that they can’t be immediately integrated in a more complex activity, such as a content marketing strategy. I’ll show in a second what I mean.
That’s to say, once I stumble upon one hellofa content that make me say “yeah, that’s what I need” and store it, the benefit of using one of those apps has already run out.
Sure, it’s not that bad because without it I’d have probably lost that useful link but I’m just halfway my path. What about my goal, which is collecting links and turn them into blog post ideas for my client’s strategy?
How can I turn that single link into a single brick of information for my client’s content strategy?
My solution: Trello, + Chrome + Card this to Trello
As limited as a browser extension is (no ubiquitousness), this is the best set of tools to effectively collect links for future blog post ideas. Picture this: I’m seated at my desk doing many researches and, as soon as I find something worth citing/linking/reading again I can save it directly onto one of my boards by right-clicking on it or selecting some text and then right-clicking on it.
The outcome is a single detailed card with the name of the page I’m saving as a link as the card title, the link itself as the card description together with the selected text (if any).
One downside: this approach isn’t mobile-ready, but still is effective. When you’re on your mobile phone, you can send an email to your Trello email address with the link you care about and get it automatically saved it as a card onto one of your list.
How this approach is useful to your clients
Since Trello is based on boards and lists, you’d be now able to create a board for each of your client and manage relevant blog post ideas and resources as cards more visually. Another thing that would immediately help you is to look at cards in calendar view an get an overview on a time frame.
Conclusion
It’s hard to set a specific time or day to write a blog post and it’s even tougher to stick to a publishing schedule. If you look at the discovery phase, doing researches takes tons of time and a big part of it is based on the very first step to perfectly save what you’ve found into your app or web service for future reference. This is the major issue: you need to save quickly and easily whatever content, storing it in an effective way for your future reference because from there only you’d need to start working on your next blog post.
With my approach, the immediate benefit you get is to have an always up-to-date overview of your blog post ideas, your clients’ editorial strategy, along with relevant links, correct resources and deep information about the different steps involved in the current content strategy.
[Image: Shawn Rossi]
This is a great little system. I’ll try it myself
Out of curiosity: why not using Evernote? You can do exactly the same right? Or am I missing something?
Hey,
I don’t know that much Evernote, but, yes, I think you’d able to accomplish something pretty similar.
Enjoy reading how people use systems in their business – content creation is one system still working on so these are useful ideas:)