Tweet

After years of being a member of various professional content, marketing, and freelancer communities where I have the opportunity to brainstorm with professionals—whether they be independent freelancers, members of large organizations, or small business entrepreneurs, and one of the most common questions I’ve come across in the few years I’ve been actively engaged in these groups is “what’s the best project management tool?”

This is pretty common, regardless if you’re independent or part of a massive organization. With such a large influx of content whipping around these days and the many content writers, copyeditors, and project managers that need to touch it, it’s difficult to “processize” the whole situation.

I found a tool that works for us here at Insomnicat, and I’ve been using it for years. The really cool thing about this tool is that I can use it at the most basic and free level and still get so much out of it.

I will preface this by saying, I’m not a spokesperson for Trello and I don’t get paid to say I love Trello, I’m sharing this because I’ve found the tool incredibly helpful and I’d like to offer others a solution that’s worked for us.

I started using Trello as a freelancer some years ago. The publication I was working with had a team of different beat editors that were assigning content through the tool and there were opportunities to grab content items that needed to be written, as well as pitch different ideas, collaboratively, right on this board.

When I was on the flipside years later, assigning content out to my team of writers, I brought Trello back into my life. At the time, I was working with a team that was spread across the U.S., so I needed a way for us to collaborate quickly and in an informal environment.

Now, as we manage so many different types of projects at Insomnicat, we’re faced with the same need. We need to manage freelancers for editorial sites because we provide a lot of backend media services. We also need to manage client-focused content marketing pieces and hard deadlines. We’re working with almost 40 different contractors on any given week – ranging from content writers to designers, to copyeditors, to sources for interviews, so I need a way to bring it all together.

So, we use Trello—the freest version you can get. When you invite others to the boards, you’re given an opportunity to gain some additional features, or as Trello calls them Power-Ups like calendar views, attachments, Google Drive options, image insertions, and some other helpful niceties.

When I’m working with freelancers that are part of my ongoing, monthly team, I invite them to these boards so they can see if there’s content that needs to be written or to attach documents right in Trello. In some cases, I am unable to grant access to a CMS we use so it’s a handy way to make sure everything is in one place. It also gives them a chance to comment back and forth and tag each other. For example, one writer has a lot of sources around a topic so maybe we shout that writer out and let he or she tackle that piece since it’s perfect for them. Or maybe someone is going away and has a few news items that they’d like to offload because they’re super interesting and should really be covered. He or she can tag others on the board.

We also use it for content marketing projects when we’re creating custom content for clients. We can assign due dates and view in calendar view to see what’s coming up for the week or the month. (I tend to lose things so I also like to store all of my freelancer information here, as well as links to ideas or resources that might be useful to the writers I’m working with or even just for myself, so I don’t forget.)

In general, Trello at the most basic level has changed my life and allows me to manage multiple projects. I create different boards dedicated to the company or type of project I’m working with, so for example, if we’ve got a big client that we’re creating a lot of content for, they’ll get their own board, while all other content marketing articles go on a main content marketing board.

Feel free to ask us any questions about setting up your content management tools and let us know what alternatives you’ve found to be helpful to you.

Take a look at how we use Trello in the video below.

Tweet