This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

Keeping a handle on your contacts is essential when you run a business and a blogging business is no exception. Most of us have contacts scattered around our online and social media accounts, as well as those stored in different email programs. After a while, finding and managing contact information becomes a headache. Now there’s a site that can help you manage you contacts easily, and adds several other useful features. It’s called Gist.

Collating Contact Data

Still in beta, the site aims to help you collate data about your contacts and it’s very easy to use. If you have Outlook, Gmail/Google Apps or use a supported email program that will export contacts to CSV, all you have to do is import them. It catalogs your emails and attachments and assigns a rank order to people based on how often you email them. In addition, you can import LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, so you can have an almost complete contacts database. Contacts may be viewed by name or by company.

Using The Dashboard

Once that’s done, the key area is the dashboard. This provides an easy way to see the latest from your contacts. Just set the minimum importance level using the handy slider and you can see tweets, blog posts and other news relating to your contact. This means you are always up to date and can respond quickly to new events. It also means you can filter out the less important stuff.

Filtering Email

With a plugin, you can keep track of your Outlook appointments, and you don’t need a plugin to track and search attachments and links sent in your emails. Clicking on those takes you either directly to the link or to the relevant email. There’s even a contact cloud to help you navigate quickly to companies and contacts for more information.

Gist could easily become your contact management dashboard, especially if you get hundreds of emails a day. For bloggers, who have lots of social media contacts too, it provides the chance to merge those with regular contacts, and that alone makes it worthwhile in my book.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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