When I first came to San Diego and got a job, I interviewed with a company that had lost hundreds of documents from a computer hard drive crash. They expected me to spend about two weeks retyping all those documents. After typing the first document and starting on the second, I noticed that the first paragraph was identical to what I had just typed.

Typing the same thing over and over and over again is not my idea of a good time. As I looked through the stacks of papers that they had given me, I noticed that the file number and a couple of paragraphs in each document were the only things that were different, so I created a template and then just changed the wording in the appropriate paragraphs. What they thought would take a couple of weeks took me eight hours.

I bring that up to reinforce the fact that I just don't like to do the same thing over and over and over again, and when I got my first computer in 1978, I discovered that I didn't have to. The computer allowed me to save things on these huge floppy disks that looked like old vinyl LP records.

In today's world, computers allow me not only to save my previous work but to do various searches on it to find what I want virtually immediately. While the ActiveRain tags are quite useful, they don't provide me as much flexibility in finding what I want very quickly because they don't have a search function associated with them. So whenever I do a blog post, the title of the blog and keywords get entered into an Excel spreadsheet:

Notice that each title is a link, which takes me directly to the post in my ActiveRain blog.

Once I have my titles and my keywords entered, I can do a simple search for what I'm looking for:

If I want to send that link to a past Client who has a question, or a prospective Client who wants to determine what I know about my profession, I can either go directly to my blog and copy the shortcut, or I can copy the shortcut directly from my Excel database.

Since I also like to have backup copies of my work, I have copied all of the text and pictures from my ActiveRain blog into Word files:

Each file is labeled for the month the posts were entered into my ActiveRain blog.

This way, if I want to search on something even more specific than my titles or keywords in Excel, I can use the Word search function.

The first time you set such a system up, it might take you a little while to create your own system. However, once it is set up, adding to it each time you do a blog post is very easy, and whenever a Client or prospect needs information, you can find it within minutes, if not seconds, and send the link their way. I've even been known to send my complete Excel spreadsheet to prospects and let them click on the links to my ActiveRain blog posts. I don't send my Word files because I don't make the posts in Word look all pretty and everything like I do my ActiveRain blog posts.