Organized: A great thing to be when guest editing at someone else’ blog

Last week I had the honour of curating One Degree's Week in Review. My contribution: Meltdowns, Monitizaton and Monks. The week in review: Friday the 13th edition, February 2009

Quick background:

OneDegree.ca is one of Canada's leading online publications about digital marketing, online communications and social media -- penned by some of Canada's most insightful and innovative internet marketers.

Now, what was interesting in this exercise was the fact that I had to gather a week's worth of 'interesting things', keep them organized and ready for review and inclusion into the final article.

What made this process easier is that I set aside time to apply a system to this. It kept me organized and focused...no multi-tasking allowed. Here's how I did it.

1. Scan lots of sources. In my case, I tracked trending topics on Twitter with TweetDeck (and it's super-cool Twitscoop function), reviewed my regular Google Alerts on topics I'm interested in, Scanned my RSS feeds for interesting blog posts.
2. Harvest the best items and add them to my del.icio.us bookmark stream, adding appropriate tags. In my case I used 1degree
3. Repeat daily, or more often if needed

So, on Edit Day, I had a rather large list (60+ items) of del.icio.us bookmarks and other items to review and try and find a common theme or themes (for the title), build the submission and select appropriate categories.

At this point, it was easy to see common threads, themes and categories. Then it was a simple task, based on the number and frequency of similar items, to determine which made the submission.

All told, I likely spent 20-30 minutes each day collecting content. Then on Edit Day, it took me maybe 90 minutes to build the final article.  All in, maybe 200 minutes total; 3+ hours.

Since this is the first time I'd applied this system, I'm thinking with practice and experience I'll be able to bring that time down in future.

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2. Sorry for the mess…
3. Want to get more ReTweets (RT)?
4. 3 things I learned when my Wordpress blog crashed.
5. How to make your Wordpress blog mobile friendly

Tagged as: Business, Communications, curate, guest post, Marketing, online