ASK AN AMBASSADOR: How To Find Posts You've Written
The more we blog, the harder it can become to find a post you KNOW you've written! It's handy to have those posts for ready reference. Why reinvent the wheel, write it once and send the link when the question comes up again, right?
But FINDING that one post, ahh, there's the rub! We're getting close to 2000 posts and frankly there are times it's tough to find the post, ESPECIALLY if we got cute with the title and it doesn't really tell us the subject matter!
So how can you find a post you've written?
Actually there are quite a few ways to get from here to there, some easy, some tedious!
Well of course you could do it the hardcore manual way. Go to your blog and go backwards ONE POST AT A TIME! So unless you've started in the last two weeks, that's just not going to work is it?
The next best thing is go to your My Home page, then on the left menu bar click Traffic (it's just a bit below your photo). Now you'll get your blog traffic stats and did you know that you can reverse sort by date by clicking on Date? Or alphabetize your titles by clicking on Title? From there click the page numbers at the bottom until you find the right page. Again, this can still be a bit tedious, but beats one at a time, and if you know pretty close on the date, you can zoom in pretty quickly.
Another idea we're personally working on is using Excel (or any spreadsheet program you want). Did you know that if you scroll over and highlight a page of your Traffic grid, you can right click copy, then go paste that page into Excel? Repeat for your other pages of Traffic and you can create a database of your posts. And copying over carries over the LINK for that blog post, so you can copy that link without having to go to the original blog post. Add a column or two on the right side to categorize your post topics (e.g., Subdivision, Mason, Event, Buyer, Seller, etc.).
From there, apply the Filter function to the top row. Now you can use the Filter function drop down menu on Topic to select ONLY the terms you want a response for, then scan the results for the posts you want:
And once set up we can periodically go in and copy a new Traffic page and add it into Excel and update again.
Okay, another method to use assumes you use TAGS to identify your posts. Click TAGS to go to a superb post by Craig Daniels about tags and how to use them. This is one the Feature Fairy missed, so bookmark this one! Cliff note's version, to get to your tag cloud, type: activerain.com/blogs/YOURUSERNAME/tags into your browser search bar. You'll find the results interesting, with a link for each tag you've used, and the BIGGER they are, the more you've used them! And if you haven't been using tags, after reading Craig's post we think you'll start!
And one last handy dandy method and perhaps the easiest of them all (unless your last name is Smith, or Jones, or Johnson, or if your last name is the same as a town or city that gets a lot of blogging here in the Rain, then sorry about your luck):
Go to the Active Rain search bar in the top right. Type your last name, then : then the search term. e.g. Spear: patio homes.
That search should get us posts we've written about patio homes. Now the search results may be extensive or right to what you need.
You can apply the same search method to someone else's post. E.g. I want to find Melissa McKinney's post about installing social media buttons? McKinney: social media buttons finds that one post I need.
And for another secret method to search that we're holding in reserve, click HERE!
Happy searching!!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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