Tools to Help Manage Your Ideas, Content and Workflow
Once you start running a website or blog, you have to keep “feeding the beast” with fresh, interesting content on a regular basis. Otherwise, your audience will lose interest, and they certainly won’t tell their friends about your great site.
Writing Online as a Profitable Business
Make no mistake – writing online is a profitable business if you treat it as a business rather than a hobby. Organization is one of the keys to any successful business.
If you are a writer, chances are you have more ideas than you know what to do with. If you are a good blogger or site creator, you probably have many ideas for great new content that you would like to add to your site. And if you are like most people these days, you struggle to find the time to get it all done. To-do lists, planners and a calendar can all help you stay on the right track.
There are a number of tools to help you stay organized, especially if you use blogging software, and in particular WordPress. Let’s take a look at some tools that can help you run your writing business like a pro.
Managing Ideas
There are lots of ways to get your brilliant ideas recorded for posterity. A small notebook and pen you take everywhere with you can help. Type up your ideas at the end of each day and start working on this fresh new content.
Some people swear by Evernote and put all of their important ideas into it.
OneNote is also a useful digital journal for recording ideas.
If you love mindmapping, try MindMeister. It’s free, easy, and fun to use.
https://www.mindmeister.com/
Pinterest is a popular social media site where you can create virtual pinboards of things you love to look at or are inspired by. It can also be used as a “vision board” to plan content and projects. You can have public or private boards. They can be all your own, or you can invite collaborators such as your colleagues.
Trello.com is a highly-visual tool for getting your ideas down onto cards that you can then write notes on. It is a very good basic project management tool.
Creating Content
Google Docs is free and easy to use. You can collaborate with colleagues as well.
Google Drive allows you to organize your content, never lose anything, and invite others to view it. It is also free for 15MB of storage.
Basecamp.com is a really robust content management and project management tool that can help everyone stay on the same page when it comes to various projects. It is also affordable, with three different levels of membership for quick collaboration, assigning tasks, and more.
Managing Workflow
A paper calendar and pencil can help you create a rough draft of your workflow and schedule for when the content will be posted. But as we have mentioned already, project management software like Trello and Basecamp can help you track your workload more easily.
Google Calendar can also help you keep track, and collaborate with others.
If you are using WordPress, the plugin Editorial Calendar is a must. It shows you exactly when your content will be published. It also lets you drag and drop to move unpublished content around if you need to.
EditFlow is ideal for managing your workflow and collaborating with others. The feature Custom Statuses can help you track a piece of content every step of the way. Editorial Comments and Editorial Metadata keep you in synch with everyone on the team.
If you find EditFlow a bit too complicated, try Oasis Workflow instead.
Use these tools to make your content production easier to manage.
