[HELPFUL] How I keep all this software, links, blogs, pbns, sites, articles etc organized

Hey everyone,

I've only been hard at my IM work for about 6 months and prior to that off and on for about 2 years total.

In that time my portfolio size has grown substantially and exponentially as of late.

I'm finding it harder and harder to keep all of my stuff straight, easy to find, easy to understand and organized.

My businesses usually are very tidy, well structured and lean, but with IM you end up with so many softwares, so many licenses, so many usernames, passwords, proxies, articles, vendors, link campaigns, gigs and so on it gets to be immense.

Now let me confess I've grown a bit faster than I should have and so instead of each project becoming incrementally better they are all a bit of a mess which is the result of growing too quickly.

So here are some things I do already to keep things sorted out:

Sites>

I keep each site and all related files that are unique to that project in a folder. I keep this folder inside a main folder that houses all of my projects. That main folder is within a Dropbox account so that it syncs to all of my computers so whereever I am, I can work. It looks something like this

Dropbox > Projects > Unique Folder for each site

Within that folder I keep a few folders

1. RankWYZ
2. Link Building
3. PBN
4. Money Site

Within RankWYZ

In here I keep all of the associated web 2 properties, credentials as well as some spun usernames, first and last names, spun urls and such for creating accounts as well as articles that I use for syndicating to my web 2s.

Within Link bulding

In here I keep all of the things I need to run campaigns in GSA SER and scrapebox. If I plan on creating more than one campaign for this money site using different keywords for example I'l make a folder for each keyword and keep the unique content for each keyword campaign inside it's folder to reduce confusion.

Some files I keep in here are:

Keywords (scraped using Scrapebox)

Anchors Exact (and a spun ver)
Anchors Partial (and a spun ver)
Anchors Secondary (and a spun ver)
Anchors LSI (and a spun ver)

urls (subdomains I want to try to create using GSA campaigns which are my exact match keywords with the spaces removed)
tags (tags to be used as the tagline for web 2 properties created with GSA which are my exact match keywords in all lower case)
titles (titles used for created web 2 properties in GSA which are my exact match keywords with proper capitalization)

Some folders I have within Link Building

Tier 1

Within tier 1 I keep my main article in raw form.

Also I have a couple files that are unique to my tier 1

videos (excel file with 50 youtube urls harvested for my tier 1 campaigns that are related to my keyword)
images (excel file with 100 image urls harvested for my tier 1 campaigns that are related to my keyword)

I keep a spun version of the images and videos which I then manually inject into the spun article before generating 300 uniques via The Best Spinner.

These unique articles are then put into a Genereted Articles Folder within the Tier 1 Folder.

Link Building > Tier 1 > Generated Articles


Lower Tiers

Lower tiers often get quite a bit more messy for me.

I try to keep a few files here that seems to grow on me often without noticing. Here are a few.

Article projects from Wicked Article Creator (scraped using a target keword and saved for use later when I need more content for my lower tier campaigns in SER)

Larger and larger keyword lists that I can use for when SER needs more keywords to target. I name these based on their root keyword so I don't scrape that word again.

Larger and larger anchor text files so I can diversify as lower tier campaigns run to keep the anchors diverse, but relevant-ish.


Within PBN folder

This one I'm just starting but I'm keeping a rolling list of each web 2 property and articles that I've submitted. I have a hunch this might grow, but it's a bit cloudy how to keep this organized well as this number could swell on you me quickly.


Within Money Site folder

This folder often is huge and messy.

It can contain the files such as:

Keyword research such as in Google SKtool

Articles used on the site

Excel files with any charts or table data used on the site

List of all plugins used

Logos, graphics, icons, images, videos and more. This gets to be tricky. We have some sites with dozens of Youtubes we've created and it gets harder and hard to track those with the keywords, descriptions and such. I guess we likely keep too much data, but I'd rather have a backup in case anything is lost.

UPDATED (2015-01-18 4:15pm)

Mapping tools so I can visualize each project

COGGLE.IT

Before beginning and throught the build of a project I use coggle.it (that's the domain, just copy/paste it into a browser)

It's a free app that helps you visualize what you're building, keep it all mapped clearly and colorfully.

It helps to start by mapping your pbn's, then your tier 2 stuff and so on. You can add stuff like link campaigns and such to the tiers to so can see what all you have done and are doing.

I'm going to spend some time doing some in depth mapping of existing projects to help my team visualize what we're building, where we are a what's possibly missing or needs more work.

BUBBL.US

Kudos to THUNDERELVI for the reco***ation.

Free web and iOS based mind mapping tool up to 3 mind maps. Flash based in the broswer. Not sure if you have to pay to use the app or not. $6/mo for more features.


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I'm sure there is a lot more and I may update this thread from time to time so I can see how my progress is doing and keep myself accountable to being organized and taking this business of IM seriously, not just like a messy hobby.

Would anyone care to share how they keep their blogs, pbns, web 2 properties, link campaigns, articles and such all in order?

Thanks for the discussion. I hope we can all help each other keep our money machines running smoothly!

Same as you - structured in a clear hierarchy of folders (kind of like an irregular tree data structure). But, I use freemind software to make mind maps of my projects to better visualize them. It also has icons to mark the tasks with done/undone, priorities, etc.. I really like it, it's simple, fast, cross platform (written in Java) and free to use.

THUNDERELVI said:

Same as you - structured in a clear hierarchy of folders (kind of like an irregular tree data structure). But, I use freemind software to make mind maps of my projects to better visualize them. It also has icons to mark the tasks with done/undone, priorities, etc.. I really like it, it's simple, fast, cross platform (written in Java) and free to use.

Click to expand...

Excellent contribution. I'll look into this.

I've been getting a bit frustrated with coggle.it even though I love it as it's hard to build out beyond my buffer site.

Need something that is more open source and let's me free build projects.

I'll take a look at Freemind. I have something similar, but it's on my iPad and iOS dependent. Too limited.

Use it to map "how to go to the bathroom" once for some employees I had who were useless. HAH! Was genius!

tykesmurf said:

Excellent contribution. I'll look into this.

I've been getting a bit frustrated with coggle.it even though I love it as it's hard to build out beyond my buffer site.

Need something that is more open source and let's me free build projects.

I'll take a look at Freemind. I have something similar, but it's on my iPad and iOS dependent. Too limited.

Use it to map "how to go to the bathroom" once for some employees I had who were useless. HAH! Was genius!

Click to expand...

You could also try bubbl.us I use that one too (the free version with a dummy account).
I use it mostly to make my backlinks tier structures, while I use freemind to make an overall look of the entire project (what needs to be done, tasks, etc...)

THUNDERELVI said:

You could also try bubbl.us I use that one too (the free version with a dummy account).
I use it mostly to make my backlinks tier structures, while I use freemind to make an overall look of the entire project (what needs to be done, tasks, etc...)

Click to expand...

BINGO! Exactly what I needed.

I've been using grafio.com on my iPad without the integration for online access.

bubbl.us looks like a great solution. I'll add this to the top post as a tool for organization!

Thanks for sharing.

tykesmurf said:

BINGO! Exactly what I needed.

I've been using grafio.com on my iPad without the integration for online access.

bubbl.us looks like a great solution. I'll add this to the top post as a tool for organization!

Thanks for sharing.

Click to expand...

You are welcome buddy, if I find any more decent solutions (although those 2 are enough for me) I will let everybody know.

I find asana.com to be quite useful for detailing the steps needed for projects & keeping track of important data. You can create templates out of your task lists to make it easy for you & your team to replicate on other projects. It's free for a medium sized team & the ios app is supposed to be very nice. (my main complaint is the android app is not yet up to par)

edit: they finally updated the android app this week... yay!.... but it's still not as functional as the web version or ios version

Nice write, pretty helpful - Ive used Coggle in past, its pretty useful.

we need some backlinks.