Content marketing is critical to your online strategy. Your SEO benefits from great content. Your social media efforts benefit from great, sharable content. Referral traffic depends on quality content that people want to link to from their own sites. It’s about quality — but it’s also about routine. Want more visitors? Easy answer — just churn out quality content routinely. The question is — how to manage that content creation effort.
There are plenty of options available to you — spreadsheets, project management software, shared calendars, editorial calendar platforms. All of them have their pros and cons depending on how many people need to be working on content creation, your budget, and the level of technical sophistication of your users. Before you jump into a costly and/or annoying option, I highly recommend you give Trello a try.
Trello! Isn’t that a task management tool? Yes but also no.
Trello is such a great, flexible tool. You can modify it to manage many different processes. Yes, the typical board is a “to do” board, but this guide will walk you through how to set up Trello.com to manage your content creation efforts.
Trello For Content Marketing Management Guide
Step One: Create Your Status Columns
Once you’ve created your first board, you can begin editing it to reflect the various statuses you want to track for your content. For Jackson Marketing Services, we use the labels shown in the example image. To edit an existing list’s title, just click on the name. To add a list, click the Add a List link. It’s easier to work with more than three columns when you minimize the side bar.
Step Two: Add Content Cards
Trello lists contain “cards” — think of cards as the place where you track details about your content piece. The first step is to simply click the “Add a card” link at the bottom of the list where you want to add a card. After clicking the link, a blank space shows up where you type the title of the piece/high-level task name. Then click the “Add” button.
Step Three: Provide Details on the Card
To get to the card details, just click the card you want to update. When you do, you will be presented a place to enter a variety of details.
Notice that the “card details” gives you a lot of options for defining specifics about your content that the card represents. You can add a description. You can provide updates in the Activity section, and the buttons on the right of the card offer you the opportunity to add color labels, assignment of the card to another team member, and a set of actions:
- Add Checklist: identify where it should be posted, tasks for creating the post — whatever you want to track.
- Due Date: track the date the content is due
- Attach File: attach files from your computer, Google Documents, and Dropbox
- Move: move the card to another board or another list on the existing board.
- Subscribe: get notified about changes to this specific card
- Archive: archive the card if it’s no longer something you need to track on this board.
Step Four: Work Your Cards
As you see in the detailed card image above, you can track your efforts (and time if you use Toggl and Chrome with Trello) in each card, but how do you see at a glance where each piece of content is in the process? That’s where your lists come in! You simply drag and drop cards from one list to the other, or you can use the Move button in the card details. You can archive Published cards after a couple of weeks (or sooner if you have an aggressive publishing schedule).
Trello is a free, easy way to start getting organized. Give it a shot!
