Small business owner: How do you stay organized?

Are you a small business owner struggling to keep track of worthwhile, relevant business information, tips or emails that you’ve received from clients, prospect or online marketing ideas?

I have tried many ways to organize the information I need to communicate with my business clients, share social media information with my social media tools and keep snippets of websites, blog posts and even content from a few emails in one place.

Initially, I bookmarked everything. But then I realized that I never went back to the bookmarked articles and my bookmark filing system became so huge it was unwieldy and hard to cull through. My next idea was to create file folders on my computer with various ideas and then any time I saw a link that was worth referring to again, I would save that link in a text file in the file folder of the same name.

Even though both of the above solutions are easy to organize, I found them difficult to manage. You might be thinking to yourself, get a Virtual Assistant and have someone else do all of this for you! Guess what, I needed to create a system before working with a Virtual Assistant so I kept looking into better options.

And, now, I think I’ve found it: Evernote. Yup – the online filing system that lets you create notebooks online and then as you see articles, blog posts, PDF or ebooks worth saving, you can save them in Evernote using their nifty web clipper tool.

What the heck is the web clipper tool? Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re reading a blog post that is relevant to your industry and there are several valuable ‘golden nuggets’ of information that you’d like to save for future reference. You simply click on the Evernote web clipper tool that you’ve installed in your browser and voila, Evernote will ‘clip’ the article (or blog post or email) and then you choose the notebook (you’ve already created in your Evernote account) and the tags (you can create at the time that you ‘clip’ the article). The next time you have a meeting or a conversation and you’d like to reference that article, you can head to your Evernote account (or app installed on your mobile device or tablet) and find it there.

There are so many fabulous features to Evernote.

Check out more details about Evernote here. How do you organize your important articles and files? Share your tips and ideas here.