As part of its upgrade to version 4.0 of its service, Springpad on Wednesday unveiled a notebook-embedding feature for publishers and brands. The idea is that brands will create notebooks full of relevant content for their customers and then post those notebooks on their websites. Customers can browse and interact with those notebooks just as they would through Springpad’s web and mobile apps, and if they find something they like they can save those notebooks into their own Springpad libraries.

For instance, one of Springpad’s new partners, Glamour, is using embedded notebooks to aggregate everything from beauty tips and shopping list suggestions to specific articles on fashions or product pages. Customers never have to leave Glamour’s site to explore that notebook, but if they want to save the notebook it will be copied into a new or existing Springpad account. There the notebook lives on the user’s library – every time Glamour updates it, the customer’s digital copy reflects the new content.

Springpad co-founder and VP of Business Development Jeff Janer said that brands have long been taking advantage of social media and curation services to promote their content and products, but while Facebook and Pinterest generate an awful lot of traffic, there’s limited follow-through. For instance, many customers may “like” a brand’s Facebook profile, but there’s little chance they’ll return to it after the initial liking. Pinterest is a great way for brands to display their wares in a visually appealing way, but beyond the visual, there are few options for displaying other forms of content.

While embedded notebooks are initially targeted at companies  and advertising agencies that will pay Springpad for the service, Janer said they’re just a first step in the startup’s strategy to make all of its user-organized content portable. Right now a lot of loose information flows into Springpad, gets organized and then stays in Springpad. The company wants to encourage users to take those notebooks outside Springpad’s confines and show the world their organizational labors, Janer said.

Right now, anyone can embed a notebook into a Facebook page, but Janer said Springpad is working with blogging platforms and other social networks to increase its reach. Eventually Springpad hopes to make posting a notebook anywhere on the web as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

Springpad 4.0 isn’t quite a facelift of last year’s 3.0 upgrade, which effectively turned Springpad from a note-taking service into a social networking and collaboration tool. But it is supporting another nifty new feature: intent-based search. Springpad has created new search categories that parse a user’s content based on specific interests or activities.

For instance, if you want to be entertained, you can hit the “watch something” button and Springpad will dig up every movie or TV show you’ve ever “sprung” and display them in a menu. Any movie or show that is available instantly through Netflix will pop up on top. Movies that are available for rent or purchase on iTunes or Amazon will appear next. And finally showtimes and prices for films in the theater will appear at the bottom.

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“Facebook ‘likes’ can be valuable for people seeking recommendations from friends who share similar interests, but today they’re not discoverable,” CEO and co-founder Jeff Chow said in a statement. “The persistent and enhanced nature of Springpad’s notebooks and powerful filtering capabilities cut through the social clutter to make it easier for you to make better decisions filtered by interest and those you trust.”

Once placed into the appropriate notebook, Springpad embeds information about the artist, movie or restaurant drawn from its content partners. It embeds review data from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant hours and reservation links through Open Table, and consumer goods pricing and availability alerts through online retailers. Springpad users can access these shared notebooks, and notebooks can be made public for the Web to see. Or the notebook’s creator can post them back on Facebook as a single “movies I like” timeline entry. The Springpad app is available through Facebook’s App Center.

As I wrote in April, Springpad is evolving from a note-taking, online-information-capture service into a quasi-social network – sort of a Pinterest with a lot more organization tools. The interesting thing about these new Facebook features is that Springpad seems to be acknowledging it will never replace a Facebook or other mammoth social network, but it can work within those networks to layer on context and organization features to the stuff consumers are already sharing on their social graphs.

We’re starting to see other examples of companies utilizing social media content rather than trying to replicate it, for instance Silicon Valley food startup Say Mmm. Instead of requiring customers to save their recipes within its portal, Say Mmm is organizing the recipes you store in Evernote and like on Facebook into an easy-to-use interface, where it provides meal planning and cooking tools Evernote and Facebook simple weren’t designed to supply.

The big benefit for Springpad is referral revenue it gets from all of this cross-platform sharing. If a friend finds a restaurant you liked on Facebook in a Springpad notebook and then books a reservation through the convenient Open Table link, then Springpad collects a commission. The more traffic it can generate between social networks and its notebooks the better off it will be.

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Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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Dear Email, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with email, but I know that the majority of my issues with it are a result of user error more than a problem with the technology itself.

User problem #1: Elaboration and niceties

At this minute, I have over one hundred emails in my inbox that need an action or response. Any time I get the nerve to tackle them, I think about having to read through paragraphs of explanation and niceties in order to get to the meat of the message so that I can take action.

As a regular sender of emails myself, I’m just as guilty of adding unnecessary elaboration and niceties to my messages as the next person. I feel the need to start with the typical, “How have you been” and “Here’s the latest this way” chitchat, followed by a detailed explanation of why I’m emailing, but as a reader (and someone with 100+ emails to process right now), I’d love to know I could open each one and find a simple and direct message that tells me what the sender needs. “Hi, Amber. I’m emailing to see if . . .” Ah, wishful thinking.

User problem #2: Deceptive and inadequate subject lines

How great would it be if everyone started using more helpful and direct subject lines? Even just adding simple lead-ins like “Quick question” or “Urgent” could help us hone in on those messages that need attention more immediately than others.

User problem #3: Abuse

We all have to pay the price for those who abuse email, like spammers, contacts who automatically subscribe us to their newsletters, and others who use this more personal and private medium for uninvited messages.

User problem #4: Poor filtering

One big mistake I make with my own email usage is not using filters effectively. There are many types of emails (messages from social networks, newsletters, and other notifications) that could easily be marked as read and archived without my ever having to touch them. The only reason they’re not is because I don’t take the time to set up filters to sort them.

User problem #5: Using the wrong medium

Instead of sending five emails back and forth to set a single appointment, it would be more effective to use another service that streamlines appointment-setting, like TimeTrade, Google Calendar, or SkedgeMe. As with this example, a lot of our communications could be cut down or eliminated, if we’d choose a better medium for them.

But what about the technology?

While user error is a big part of the problem, technology is not completely in the clear.

Technology problem #1: Poor spam filtering

Until we get to the point where spam is successfully filtered out each and every time (which, let’s face it, is not likely to happen), email will always be somewhat of a nuisance, no matter how effective we get with our use of it.

Technology problem #2: Inadequate sorting

Some messages are notifications, some are spam, and a tiny portion are actually important enough to warrant our attention more immediately. It would help if these messages were automatically separated somehow.

It would also be helpful to have smart sorting based on people (example, important people, new people, companies). When I can zoom in on emails from clients and important business contacts, I’m much more likely to stay on task and not get distracted, but by the same token, I’d also like to see a filter to sort out new people, which could help with identifying new prospects and opportunities.

Fixing the world’s email problems might be a tall order, but the good news is that developers are listening. Even better, they’re asking us what we want from the applications we use on a daily basis and how we would like to see them improved.

What suggestions do you have for fixing email?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com

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Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising.

Works with all providers

SaneBox works with most email services that use IMAP or WebDAV, including Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, so you can keep your current email address and software. It works within your current email program by accessing your account and adding unique folders for sorting.

Better layout than Priority Inbox

SaneBox seems to work a lot like Priority Inbox, except that sorting takes place using folders instead of using a multi-section layout, which I think makes it easier to compartmentalize and maintain focus. With Priority Inbox, you see all messages in the same pane, making it tempting to jump around or check out less important emails. With SaneBox, you view one folder at a time, and other messages are displayed as a count within your sidebar.

Smart, easy sorting

When you sign up for an account, SaneBox takes your most recent 5,000 messages and sorts them. All other messages are sent to the archive. The most recent emails are then sorted, based on importance, to either your inbox or to a “SaneLater” folder. As you go through your messages, you can drag and drop messages that you’d like to process later into folders such as “SaneTomorrow” or “SaneNextWeek.”  They’ll automatically be moved back to your inbox at the appropriate time.

Simple tweaks and adjustments

SaneBox learns from your actions. You can sort mislabeled messages into the folders where you would like them to go, so for instance, if you get mailing list emails, you can have them sent to your “SaneLater” folder instead of your inbox, or you can send them to the “SaneBlackHole,” if you would prefer not to see them at all.

This functionality works in reverse, too, so if you see that an important message got sent to the “SaneLater” folder by mistake, you can drag it to the inbox so that it gets a higher priority with future sorting.

SaneBox refers to these adjustments as “trainings,” which you can access and adjust within your control panel at any time. (Side note: Afraid you got a little trigger happy? Go to the “trained contacts” section of your account and remove any rules you’ve set so that emails are filtered based on the original settings.)

Added features to improve workflow

The main sorting capabilities of SaneBox make it worth a look, but there are several added features that help to improve workflow and email management, including:

• Social network refinement, which helps to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of sorting, based on the strength of relationships and connections within social networking platforms.
• Spam folder monitoring that acts more like a temporary black hole, rather than a permanent one like other email programs.
• Multi-level email importance, which allows you to organize emails into five levels to maximize your workflow.
• Encryption and “outside-the-envelope” examination of messages (SaneBox does not read your email) so that sensitive information remains protected and private.

A monthly subscription costs $4.95 and the app comes with a 30-day trial.

What tools and tricks do you use for managing email overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Evil Erin

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Cord Chaos

If you’re like me, you avoid cleaning or rearranging your office due to the dread of having to sort through dozens of cables lurking behind your desk. Fortunately, there are some gadgets on the market to help with this pesky little problem.

• Cordies Cable Organizers Cordies desktop cable management system keeps all your desktop cables straight by snugly holding cables so that they don’t slide off your desk when disconnected. Each loop holds multiple cables at once and can support power cords, USB cords, phone chargers, and audio and video cables. Cost: $12.99 from ThinkGeek.
• BlueLounge CableDrops CableDrops offer another solution for keeping cords and cables in place. They come in packs of six and in a variety of colors. Cost: $9.95
  from BlueLounge.
• Applecores. Keep cables organized and in place with AppleCores. They come in three size, multiple colors, and can hold everything from earbuds to household appliances, and the best part might be that you can simply unplug and they’re ready to go when traveling. Cost: $1.99-4.99 from Applecore International.
• Dreamfarm Jot. Jots work a lot like CableDrops, but might be a little more versatile (the Dreamfarm website shows Jots holding everything from cables to sets of keys) and are only slightly more expensive for packs of two. Cost: $4.95 from DreamFarm.
• Ziotek Color-Coded Surge Protector Keeping cords straight on top of the desk is one thing, but what about under it? How many times have you played musical cables trying to locate one of a half a dozen? The Ziotek color-coded surge protector is just the fix. It includes color-coordinated slots and cable markers to keep all your devices straight. Cost: $10.99 from CyberGuys.

Cell Phone and Charging Stations

What a difference ten years makes! I can’t remember ever needing to charge anything before cell phones and MP3 players came on the market, but charging stations are now a permanent part of our work life.

• Breffo Spiderpodium Stand. The Breffo Spiderpodium stand is a cool little gadget that holds cell phones, iPods, and other devices on an eight-leg “octopod” (instead of tripod). It mounts to car vents or mirrors, stands on desk or counter tops, and wraps around bike handlebars, backpacks, or baby strollers. It won’t leave marks and can easily be moved to another spot. Cost: $17.25 from Amazon.
• G.U.S. Phone/PDA Charging Station. If devices are taking over your counter tops, especially if multiple people in your home or office need to charge them at the same time, you might like a phone/PDA charging station. This one can stand on a desk  or counter top, or be mounted to a wall so that phones are out of the way and in one place. Cost: $39.99 from GreatUsefulStuff.
• Chargepod. For even more devices, you might prefer the Chargepod, which can charge up to six devices on one outlet. It claims to support over 3,000 devices, including phones, PDAs, cameras, and mp3 players, and it’s also available as a car charger. Cost: $49.95-59.95 from Callpod.

Notes and To-Dos

While I love technology and all the conveniences it often brings, I’m still a compulsive note-taker, and although my filing needs are nearly non-existent these days, I still use a few tools to keep paper in order.

• Dreamfarm Gripet. Another Dreamfarm creation, the Gripet holds notes and reminders using friction. It attaches to a wall, filing cabinet, or refrigerator with magnetic or adhesive mounts. Cost: $19.95 from DreamFarm.
• Tear Away Planner Mousepad. In recent years, I’ve  made use of my mousepad by buying a small desktop calendar to fit to it. Although I use Google Calendar for keeping track of dates and events, I like having a month at a glance and right under my computer mouse. If you use a paper to-do list, you might opt for a tear-away planner mousepad instead, which covers a full week of to-dos at a glance. Cost: $9.99 from ThinkGeek.
• NeatReceipts. If you hate tracking paper documents for taxes and record-keeping, NeatReceipts can help. It organizes receipts, business cards and other documents by scanning and then using optical character recognition to extract key information. Cost: $199.95 from NeatCo.

What are your favorite gadgets for staying organized?

Photo courtesy Flickr user yprime

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These days, everything is distributed: our teams and co-workers, our customers and clients, and even our networking efforts. You can live in San Francisco, have an assistant in New York, and serve clients in London. It’s also possible to have many followers on Twitter and Facebook, and tons of posts and comments written about you or your company on a daily basis around the web. Somehow, you have to find a way to manage all that interactivity, and keep your team, your customers and your followers in the loop as well. It’s a lot to handle, and it can easily become overwhelming.

Postling enables you to post to your blog, schedule tweets and respond to comments using virtually any social media outlet. You can write a post once and publish to all your social media accounts at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr.

Organize and Schedule

You can group your social media accounts by brand so that you can stay organized and work efficiently, which comes in handy if you own more than one business, have multiple locations, or want to manage your business and personal accounts from the same place.

On top of that, you can also connect multiple users to your accounts so that assistants and team members can post to your social networking and media outlets, too, and with granular permissions for every person, you can easily protect your privacy by only allowing access to certain accounts.

Another helpful feature of Postling is its ability to schedule posts, which means you can write posts ahead of time, then schedule when you want them to be published.

Monitor Comments

Postling also gathers all the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and organizes them in a single place, making it easy to respond across all social networks without having to access multiple sites.

The Postling dashboard provides an overview of your recent posts and the comments they receive, and each comment gives you the option to reply directly to the correct account. Comments are threaded, so it’s easy to understand the flow of a given conversation and chime in at any point.

You can monitor what people are saying about you and your business by tracking your streams, RSS feeds and reviews from around the web, such as Yelp and CitySearch, and with email alerts of comments, you won’t miss anything.

The Postling analytics dashboard allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media and networking efforts by showing which days your posts are most effective, as well as your post-to-comment ratio.

Postling currently supports integration with most social networking and media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — most major blogging platforms, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Bit.ly, Yelp and CitySearch.

The starter plan is free and includes one account per social network; if you need more users and accounts, Postling’s has plus ($9/month) and premium ($49/month) plans.

Of course, Postling’s not the only app that enables you to work with multiple social media accounts. Alternatives include tools like TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite, and Engage121, but Postling’s ease of use, along with the number of platforms it supports, makes it my preferred choice.

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This survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but the folks at Intermedia add these suggestions:

• Work off your business priorities, not your email inbox. Highly productive workers use email as a communication tool for business results, rather than responding to emails as they come in. Focus on what needs to get done for your job and prioritize email review and response with that in mind.
• Collaborate online rather than simply sending messages back and forth. Email is great for communication, but not always the best tool for collaboration. Tools for document management solve this problem and are available online.
• Unify communications to get back one hour of your life per day. Rather than use separate tools and devices to check email, make phone calls, and instant message colleagues, businesses increasingly use “unified communications” to combine them in one tool. Sage Research estimates this system can increase productivity by over 12.5 percent, or one hour per day for each worker.

The survey also found that workers resolve to respond more quickly to business communications. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

How do you plan to get more organized in 2011?

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First Step: Set Days for Set Projects

I had several main projects that were most important to me at the time, so I decided to reserve certain days of the week for each of them. Here’s a rough overview of how I set up my week.

• Mondays: Project A
• Tuesdays: Projects B and C (since they’re closely related)
• Wednesdays: Writing and Project D
• Thursdays: Projects B and C
• Fridays: Project A

Second Step: One-Stop Organization

It was important that I had one way of tracking what needed to be done, rather than using five different tools to manage bits and pieces of my schedule and to-do list, so I started condensing things down until I was left with just a couple of tools to keep me in line.

I started using Tom’s Planner (which I also use for managing my editorial calendars) for organizing my recurring weekly schedule: those things I have to do every week on a set day (for example, write my WebWorkerDaily article every Wednesday).

At the start of each day, my first stop is Tom’s Planner, which gives me an overview of the “big rocks” that need to be moved that day.

In addition to Tom’s Planner, I use Google Calendar for managing set appointments and events (for example, phone calls and birthdays), and I try to only book phone calls and other set appointments during specific time frames on certain days of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 1:30 to 3:30 PM, for example). This makes me far less likely to overlook something or get my days mixed up.

Great News, It’s Working!

Immediately, I can say that my mind is a lot clearer lately, but there are several other advantages I’ve found so far for compartmentalizing my days.

1. I’m focused and staying true to my priorities. A quick glance lets me know what my top priorities are, as well as the rough percentage of time I’m giving each one. If I want to take on a new project, I quickly think, “What do I have on my plate right now? Well, Mondays I have…, Tuesdays I have…,” which keeps me from over-committing and straying from my top priorities. If I want to take on something new, something else has to go.
2. I’m not constantly shifting gears. Before I started using this method of organizing my time, I jumped from one project to another and felt like I wasn’t giving enough time to any of them. Now, I don’t worry about not giving enough time to any one project. I know, for example, that I will work on Project A tomorrow, so there’s no rush to take my attention off the project I’m working on today.
3. I’m getting more done. At first, I was worried that this strategy might leave me working less on my top projects, and while that has proven to be true in terms of the absolute amount of time I spend on them, I’m actually getting more done for each project, since I’m a lot more focused.

I’m also way more particular about the things I do for each one. On a given day, I know I have to pick the top tasks and hustle to get them done, since I’m not going to pick this project up again for a few days. I’m a lot less likely to get distracted by email, lower priority to-dos, or other things vying for my attention.

The proof is in the pudding. In the past three weeks, here’s what I’ve accomplished.

• Designed a new logo/banner for a new project
• Created a business plan for the new project
• Built a website for the new project
• Wrote and published 13 articles
• Created and published seven audio pieces
• Created and published two newsletters

In the three weeks prior to starting this strategy, here’s what I accomplished.

• Wrote and published 12 articles

Big difference! Plus, I’m spending far fewer actual hours working on any given project, and I feel like I’m working less, even though I’m getting more done.

So, what’s your strategy? Do you have a set way of working to help you move more rocks in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Helico, licensed under CC 2.0

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The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution