This is the first in a two-post series about Blog Time Management. See the second post, on Evernote, here.

How Do You Juggle a Blog In Your Busy Day?

One of the biggest pushbacks I get from new clients when I suggest that they start a blog to market their law practices is “I don’t have enough time!”

This is a highly reasonable concern, given the incredible time pressures on your average solo lawyer. In a busy multi-lawyer firm, tasks are often highly leveraged, with a plethora of support staff and junior associates available to take over many daily tasks. But in a solo office, it all falls on you: scheduling, filing, court appearances, phone calls, correspondence. Even in an office with one or two support employees you’re still responsible for a great many diverse functions. So adding something new, like blogging, can seem impossible.

However, there are lots of ways to minimize the time it takes to run a blog. Given the incredible value of blogging to a solo professional services firm’s marketing program, it’s worth it to explore tools that are designed to make the process easier.

Two such tools are Rusty Budget and Evernote. I couldn’t do what I do without these resources. This post will cover Rusty Budget; tomorrow, I’ll address Evernote, and how I put the two together with a text editor to manage my blogs.

My Experience As a Multi-Blog Publisher & Author

After a brief break from blogging last year, I’m back taking care of not one, not two, but three separate blogs with regular publishing schedules. In addition, I’m working on a prelaunch plan for yet a fourth blog. (This isn’t my record, though. Two years ago, I was running six. That? Was kind of crazy, I admit.)

Making matters more interesting (or difficult, depending on my mood), each of these blogs covers very different material, each has a very different targeted readership, and each has a very different purpose. The plethora of source material alone creates a huge challenge. How do I manage each of these diverse blogs, find fresh material and ideas, and develop those ideas into full blog posts?

Rusty Budget: The Editor’s Dream In-and-Out-Box

Rusty Budget is a web-based application that allows editors, journalists, bloggers, and others who work with words and source material to manage their projects seamlessly. This software creates a multi-foldered dashboard for which the principal behind the project can assign varying degrees of authority to her team members. Thus, for example, a newsletter editor could start a different folder for each section of the newsletter, and assign her writers one level of access, and her co-editors a greater degree of access, allowing the latter to enter assignments for the former in the appropriate folders.

How does this relate to blogging? Because that same functionality allows the blogger to keep “blog fodder” neatly organized within those same folders, which can be set up any way that makes sense for the individual blogger, and her individual blogs.

For just one example, a Rusty Budget blogger can set up a folder or “budget” for each of her blogs (or her blogs and newsletter, or blogs, newsletter, and email subscriber list). Then, within the blog folder, she can create individual groups for each of her main categories on her blog. Whenever she sees something interesting on the web, or in email, that she thinks would make a great blog post, she can simply add it to her “budget” for that blog, along with whatever notes she cares to make. Later, when she’s ready to write the post, she simply calls up the information, and expands it in her text editor, dashboard, or other application of her choice. The source information is readily available for citation purposes.

To make it even easier, the blogger can create a bookmarklet — a button in the toolbar of the internet browser window. Instead of logging into Rusty Budget in a separate browser window or tab to create an entry in a particular folder, the blogger can simply click that bookmarklet when she’s on the web page she wants to note. The page is then automatically entered into her budget, complete with link.

Pricing of Rusty Budget

Rusty Budget is free to editors and bloggers. Moreover, each budget owner is allowed to add up to one other author to work on the budget (allowing you to assign rights to a staff member, for instance). If you want to add a third user, that will cost $4 per month per user.

Features of Rusty Budget

You can see the full features list here. Some of the key features that make Rusty Budget so excellent for lawyer/bloggers are:

• Unlimited number of budgets
• History function — allows you to see the last 35 changes made to any particular budget
• Drag and drop between folders within each budget
• Color-coding for different folders within budgets

Make Your Life Easier

I’m all for making life as easy as possible. The appropriate and creative use of tools like Rusty Budget can make your blogging life a lot easier.

How about you? What tools do you use to make blogging a manageable task?