Managing Your Time And Projects With trello

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Whether you are doing your own online marketing, working in house or working as part of team you need to be organised. To get projects completed we all need a solid way of organising how time is spent and how it is progressing.

When planning a larger project or several different smaller projects contained therein I have found that trello is a tool that anyone can use and most enjoy using!

Oh, did I mention that it is free forever!

What is Trello?

Essentially trello is a collaboration tool that is organised like index cards (or post it notes if you like!). Its beauty likes in its simplicity and its flexibility, allowing users to make it fit to exactly what they need it for.

Broken down into boards, lists and cards you can easily organise your projects to reflect what you are working on, who is working on it and the resources the individuals will need.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here but you can add checklists, comment on cards, add attachments, add time tracking to it, integrate it with other apps and even vote on cards making collaboration worthwhile.

Whether you need a tool for tracking content or creating a roadmap for a project trello can help.

Need further assistance? Here is a great set of videos on Grovo: http://www.grovo.com/trello

What I Use trello For

Working for an agency we have a different system for the top level tasks on any given project but these can get complicated quite quickly - especially if the project is broken down into several different sub-projects.

This is where trello comes in

Create Idea Hubs For Use On Different Projects

Most projects will require some kind of link building, content creation or other similar tactics.

The problem is you don't want to use the same go-to tactic over and over again.

With Trello you can create idea hubs that will allow other members of the team to log in and use the hub as a spring board for brainstorming ideas and tactics.

You can create idea hubs for:

Link building tactics
Content types and ideas
Headline hacks
Tools for creating specific types of content
Lists of relevant guides

Create Plans For An Entire Project

The flexibility of trello means that you can use it to set out your ideas for how any given project may evolve over a certain time frame.

Many businesses or superiors like to see a plan for a set number of months but these kind of documents are often in formats that aren't easy to change or adapt if the landscape or scope of the project changes.

By creating plans in trello you can move the different parts of the project between months (if you have it set up like that) and remain agile.

Create Plans For Smaller On-going Projects

Within larger projects you may find that it is comprised of several smaller projects, be that keyword research, content marketing, local SEO, link building, CRO, UX or any other work that adds to the bigger picture.

I found trello particularly useful for managing content projects, having different lists set up for:

Content Ideas
Ideas that are being worked on
Ideas in production
Finished work
Scheduled work
Live
Work that requires outreach or other promotion

Setting up a sub-project like this allows you to keep track of complicated projects especially if they require input from several people. It also allows you to share the progress with those that are not directly working on the project for full transparency.