All posts by user

Make your SEO Blog Content Planning easy

Best Practices, Technology

If you’re a business owner or a freelance content writer, it’s important to have a content strategy. Without a solid content strategy, you end up wasting a lot of time managing your content.

By having a solid plan and sticking to it, you won’t have to spend time coming up with new ideas or scrambling to meet deadlines. One of the best ways to build a content strategy is to use a content planner.

Whether you’re working alone or with a team, a good content planner can really boost your productivity. So, let’s see how this company uses a content planner to plan and publish its SEO content.

Click to view this live Template

1. Gathering resources

If you’re a serious content writer, then you already know the importance of gathering resources before you start writing. After all, you need to have something to write about!

One of the best ways to manage your gathered resources is to use a content planner. A content planner can help you organize your thoughts and ideas, and it can also help you find new and relevant information to write about.

2. Research Content Ideas

Before you start writing, you need to have an idea of what you want to write about. Make a list of content ideas that you think would be popular with your audience.

You can get content ideas by checking out your competitors, looking for news stories, looking for guest post ideas, and brainstorming ideas with your team.

3. SEO optimization

Without SEO-optimized content, your articles and blog posts will never be seen by search engines, and you will never get the traffic you desire. Therefore, you need a solid SEO strategy.

4. Drafting

Now it’s time to start writing your content. Keep your keywords in mind as you write and try to include them naturally in your text.

5. Designing graphics content

Graphics in blogs capture your reader’s attention, communicate your message more clearly, and overall make your blog more visually appealing.

Once the article is ready, the next step is to add graphics to it. Graphics are important to capture your reader’s attention and make your blog more visually appealing.

6. Integration/Schedule Content

Once you’re finished writing, you need to integrate your content into your website. You can do this by adding a blog to your website or by scheduling your content to be published on your website later on.

7. Promote Content

Finally, you need to promote your content. You can do this by sharing it on social media, writing guest posts on other blogs, or by paying for advertising.

If you want to set up a board like this, we have a free Template ready for you.

A new template: Career Development for your Employees

Kanban & Lean, ,

We have a new Kerika template for folks who need to manage Career Development for their employees, in the private, public or nonprofit sectors.

Career Development Template

This template contains all tasks you need to complete, and it also comes with document templates, like this one for doing a Performance Appraisal:

Performance Appraisal

This template was prepared for Kerika by an experienced HR professional; we hope you find it useful!

Let us know what other templates we should be building.

 

How to import boards from Trello

Kerika, Technology, Usability,

We have added an exciting new feature: if you were previously using Trello, you can import that data, completely, into Kerika!

We have been testing this as a convenience feature and based upon positive feedback we have expanded this for everyone.

New users will be offered this as an option when they set up their Kerika accounts:

Screenshot showing how new Kerika users can import boards from Trello
How new Kerika users can import boards from Trello

All users will have this option whenever they want to create a new Kerika board:

Screenshot showing how all users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board
All users can import from Trello when creating a new Kerika board

We built this feature because we have heard from many people switched over from Trello and really liked Kerika’s user experience, features, and support. In the past they had to manually recreate their work inside Trello; now that’s all automated!

Everything is handled nicely: your Trello cards, lists, people, task details, etc. come over. Once you are done, a single click can then send out invitations to all your old Trello colleagues to join you in Kerika.

Enjoy.

 

A change to our Privacy Policy

Kerika,

We have updated our Privacy Policy because we have decided to use Microsoft Clarity, at least on an experimental basis, to understand better how visitors navigate our website.

Microsoft Clarity uses cookies (see here for more details), and you can reject or block them if you want; it won’t affect your use of the website or the app.

We have a lot of different website pages, but we still need a better understanding of how people actually view them, and which parts seem to be most important to our users.

Google Analytics provides some of that information, but not enough, and it looks like Microsoft Clarity will help us optimize our website content.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

How to make sure someone sees your Chat

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , , , , ,

With our latest update we have made it easy for you to ensure that someone on a board team always sees your chat message, even if they are not assigned to that card.

The old rule was that everyone who is currently assigned to a card would get new chat pushed to them as emails.  Now, you can make sure someone gets that email notification right away, even if they aren’t assigned to a particular card:

Screenshot showing examples of directed chat
Directed chat

Using this feature is simple: just type the letter “@” anywhere in your chat message and Kerika offers all the matching suggestions:

Screenshot showing example of sending new chat
Sending new chat

“@All” lets you push your chat to every Board Admin and Team Member — something you should do only rarely to avoid annoying people!

Try this feature and let us know if we can improve it.

A simple weekly calendar

Kanban & Lean

Here’s a simple template that you can use to plan your work week: for yourself, and the team.

Screenshot of simple template for Weekly Schedule
Click to view this template
How to use this template:
  1. As tasks land on your desk through the day, add them as separate items (cards) in the left-most To Do column.
    • At least once a day make sure everything in the To Do column is sorted by priority, with the most important items on the top of the column.
  2. Every Monday plan out your week by dragging tasks from the To Do column to one of the days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc.)
  3. When you plan your week, consider any deadlines for your tasks. Not all tasks will have firm deadlines, but if they do, you should open the task and set a due date.
    1. Click on your face/avatar in the top-right corner of the app and use the Sync Calendar option to make sure your due dates from Kerika also show up in whatever calendar you use: Apple, Microsoft or Google. This needs to be done only once: after you connect your personal calendar with your Kerika account, any changes in due dates that you make in Kerika will automatically show in your calendar as well.
  4. Consider whether this is a personal calendar or a team calendar: if you want to plan out the week for an entire team, add them as Team Members to this board by clicking on the Board Team button. This is a great way to keep an entire team in sync.
  5. If you are using this as a team board, when you pick up tasks one by one make sure you set the status of each to In Progress, or whatever is relevant. This makes it easy for everyone on the team to know what’s happening, which is especially important in these days of remote work.
  6. When a task completes, mark it as Done! If you decide that a task doesn’t make sense anymore (maybe it is no longer needed?) you can move it to the Trash.
At the end of the week, hopefully, everything in the Monday through Friday columns will be moved to Done.
At the beginning of the next week, you can repeat the process: pull items from the To Do column into the other columns as you plan your next week.
New tasks will, of course, show in the middle of the week: the best thing to do is add them to the To Do column unless they are urgent; this will help you and your team not get disrupted too often during the middle of the week.
Try this template and see if your workweek gets less hectic.

How to manage an Email Marketing Calendar

Kanban & Lean, Tutorials,

Here’s another new marketing template for our users: a complete Task Board for folks that need to manage an email marketing calendar for their business or nonprofit.

Screenshot for Quarterly Email Marketing Calendar template
Click to view this template

As with all other templates we have been building, this one comes with tasks that are ready to go, with details of the work:

Screenshot showing Example Task
Example Task

Handy checklists of subtasks so you don’t miss anything:

Screenshot showing Example Checklist
Example Checklist

And links to useful resources for completing the task:

Screenshot showing Example Attachments
Example Attachments

Check out this template and let us know if we can improve it!

How to manage your Job Search

Kanban & Lean, Tutorials

We continue to add templates that we hope can help our users get more done with Kerika, and today it’s a Task Board Template for managing your job search:

Screenshot of template for Job Search
Click to view this template

Folks are changing jobs at a faster pace right now than we have ever seen, and while some people are highly organized and proficient at job searching, others can do with a little help, and that’s what we had in mind with this template.

Check it out and let us know if we can improve it!

How to Plan your Social Media Content

Kanban & Lean, Tutorials,

Another Marketing template for our users: this time, for folks that need to plan and execute on a social media content strategy.

Screenshot of the Social Media Content Planner template
Click to view this template

You can use this advance your marketing goals using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

This template comes with a bunch of useful resources, like this card on listing your Call-To-Actions (CTAs):

An example of a resource card
An example of a resource card

We have also provided sample task cards for managing your posts, like this one for posting on Facebook:

Screenshot of Task for Facebook Post
Task for Facebook Post

This task, like the others, also comes complete with a checklist of subtasks so you don’t miss anything:

Screenshot of Checklist for Facebook Post
Checklist for Facebook Post

These sample task cards can be easily duplicated as you move through your social media content strategy.

Check out this template and let us know what you think!

How to Plan a Virtual Marketing Event

Technology

Marketing events are all virtual these days, everywehere, as we all wait out the pandemic and try to figure out the shape of the “new normal”. To help our users who need to plan Virtual Marketing Events, we have a new template for you:

Screenshot of template for planning a virtual marketing event
Click to view this template

This is a very comprehensive template: it contains all the tasks you need to handle to make your virtual marketing event a success. Here’s an example of a task:

Screenshot showing an example task
Example Task

This template is rich in detail: tasks like this one also come with a checklist of subtasks to make sure you don’t overlook anything.

Screenshot showing an example checklist
Example Checklist

And links to useful online resources:

Screenshot showing example attachments
Example Attachments

The workflow is straightforward: Pre-Planning → Launch Preparation → Promotions → Operations.

We are making a big push to increase the quantity and quality of templates so our users can get started faster on their boards, because at Kerika it’s all about “getting more done”.

Check out this template and let us know if you think we can improve it!