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

If you’re running more than one blog on more than one subject, then you need a way to keep track of the research you do for your posts. I blog regularly on writing, travel, blogging, tech stuff and parenting, as well as writing guest posts on other blogs. That means I need to read a lot of blogs that cover related material and do research for new topics. After a while, it’s difficult to keep it all in my head. So I don’t. Instead, I use two great tools that do it all for me: Delicious and Evernote.

Tag And Save

Delicious is the best social bookmarking site there is. It’s easy to use and you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. You can tag, save and share the interesting sites you find at a click of a button. Delicious has been extensively reviewed, so I’m not going to duplicate those efforts here. Instead, I’ll point you to this description of the site’s best features.

Custom Tags

For research purposes, I use some custom tags for labelling the stuff that I find. If it’s something I need to read and digest, I label it ‘to read’. If I want to remember to write a blog post about it, I label it ‘to blog’ and if I need to do something else with it, I label it ‘to do’. This means I can easily access blog ideas at any time. Even more important is to use the notes function so you can remind yourself why this resource was important to you.

Private Bookmarks

The private bookmarking function in Delicious is a great advantage, as I am not always ready to share my finds with the world. I usually keep my research private, then share the resulting blog post. If something in the ‘to read’ category turns out to be good, then I have the option of sharing it later.

Evernote’s Features

So if Delicious is so wonderful, why do I need Evernote? Evernote works in much the same way, is available for several platforms and is easy to use, but it has two features that make it a must for the researcher. One is the ability to arrange the items you save into notebooks, so that you can sort items into collections, perhaps labelling them by project. Each item you save has a medium sized thumbnail, enabling you to see at a glance which resource you need. All items are private.

Save Full Articles

The second is the kiler feature. Evernote saves whatever you highlight and bookmark, so if you find a useful article, you can save the whole thing in Evernote, rather than taking the chance that it might be removed at some time.

Between them, Evernote and Delicious give me everything I need to keep track of research. Which tools do you prefer, and why?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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