As I'm not a professional blogger, I need to maintain my blog while having a full-time job ( and a life for that matter -)). I've been looking into several ways to become more effective in maintaining and writing a blog. All the time I spend with blogging can actually be divided in 4 large chunks :

Setup and maintenance of my blog : setting up the blog, installing plugins, blog design, ...

Traffic generation and analysis: search engine & directory submission, search engine optimization ,..

Sourcing : finding good sources or material to write about

Writing posts : writing new posts from the collected information

After your blogs construction phase, there is obviously ongoing work on maintenance & traffic generation but relatively less then time spent with sourcing and article writing. Especially so when unique content is intended as a traffic generator ! Sourcing is the most obvious part to save time and involves :

Collecting enough relevant fixed sources ( writing about related content) which are typically RSS feeds, mails or links to sites.

Collecting link or RSS directories as a starting point to new related sources

Search engines

Of course, finding the right sources can be time consuming but even more is reading through all your existing sources. Although I used some very good tools to read E-mail, browse RSS feeds and organize bookmarks, I have been looking for the one tool that bundles all of these ( for free ). I found this combination in My Yahoo and more ...

If you sign up for a Yahoo account, you start immediately by customizing your own http://www.myYahoo.com . You define your own layout and theme, create one or more pages and select the content of your interest for each page. Reordering can be done by simple drag & drop. To understand how powerful this tool can be in optimizing your sourcing productivity, I'll explain how I optimized my own page to optimize productivity :



To start, I divide My Yahoo in several pages : a home page where all my key content appears and some side pages where I put focussed content on.

The home page is divided in 3 columns : 2 sidebars and a larger middle section.

The left sidebar contains 2 modules :

A Search box which allows you to immediately start searching topics using the Yahoo search engine. Searches can be personalized in order to find the most relevant content according your preferences.

A Calendar that lists your tasks to do, Eg. Plan to research on a certain topic or to write a new article at a certain day. Besides using it as a blog time management tool, it can also be synchronized with your existing appointments on your palm or outlook.

The middle column contains :

A mail preview box to preview your incoming mail

A notepad to list new ideas or draft concepts for your next posts

A list of modules previewing the latest posts from your key RSS sources

The right sidebar contains :

A module to Add content from Yahoo's listings or any other RSS feed. An even more valuable sourcing technique is the possibility to create your own custom RSS feeds based on keywords !

A message center to list incoming messages

A bookmarks section where you can links to your favorite blogs or sites

A module that allows to browse Yahoo's directory

Besides my home page, I've created a number of pages which contain news for specific topics. For these pages, I choose to have a two-column layout with only a right sidebar which is pretty much the same sidebar as on the home page, except that I also inserted the search box. The left part contains only news items on a specific topic, from an existing RSS feed or one or more custom feeds containing keywords, relevant to that topic, Eg. Adsense.

Last I'd like to sum-up what I believe to be the key benefits of using My Yahoo as a blogging productivity tool :

It bundles several tools in one : mail reader, RSS news reader & aggregator, agenda, sticky notes, search engine, online bookmarking and browsing Yahoo directories.

RSS feeds can be easily added and categorized using pages, preview preferences can be easily customized ( Eg. Preview posts from last 3 days ). A single topic can be completely previewed by scrolling down which I find more responsive then browsing different folders and clicking an RSS feed to preview it's topics as most RSS readers do.

It is web-based and thus can be easily accessed from any pc you are working on. On top of that, the tool is very performing and responsive, in contrary to most web-based applications !

Yahoo is continuously developing new amazing programs which provide more and more usefull tools like alerts when new content is found on a topic of interest, Yahoo 360 which includes the ability to blog, Yahoo groups to build your community and much more ...

Last but not least : it is completely free !!!