I am subscribed to about 100 blogs and it can take me the whole day to check the list. But to read that all (plus to check articles shared with me by my friends) is not a real issue. I’ve learned to ’scan’ posts and to quickly find useful information and news. What is challenging is to benefit from what you are reading. Like Vinny correctly pointed out in his recent post on grinding it out, we are not paid for reading blogs. But there is another worthy (for me) reason to daily spend time on my feeds: while reading I can come across really good tips and tools and also get new ideas for my own future posts. But how to remember all that? I’ve tried the following:
- storing bookmarks in folders in my FF
- clipping posts in my Google Notebook and sort them by sections
- keeping new ideas in notebooks (online, offline, and desktop versions)
However, it always ended up in a mess. A few days ago reading through Gab’s SEO blog, I smiled at his words that he seldom bookmarks posts because it is easier to find things in Google than in his bookmarks (or something like that). I decided to go ahead and share with you my method of effective information organization.
Why is it essential? Effective knowledge categorization:
- saves your time
- makes it easy to always find a link to refer to
- can always inspire (if you are just out of post ideas today)
- lets you remember things easier (while categorizing, you arrange your thoughts)
- etc, etc (offer your own)
To organize the wealth of material I go through daily, I mainly use Excel (or Google’s spreadsheets to let my colleagues and partners contribute). Well, you might have noticed I am a bit obsessed with tables and categorization. 
Here’s a sample of my link collection that helped me to quickly write a post on keyword research tools here, on YOUmoz:
I have plenty of sections like above – all on one page. Once I come across something on the topic, I go ahead and add this to the corresponding section. This speeds up the process of creating a new post immensely. All I have to do, is to open my spreadsheet and see all the information I need.
Hopefully, this will be useful.
Please share your methods of storing and organizing information you daily spot!
