How do you keep track of your contacts, project notes, files, status updates, and sign-offs? For many years I relied on a combination of tools such as an Excel spreadsheet, my email, an address book, folders and sticky notes. As my business has grown and become more mobile (meaning some days I work from Panera Bread, some days from the patio, and others in my main office) I have found these tools just aren’t working for me anymore.

I have looked high and low for a solution that would fit my needs (here are some I tested) and after talking with Leah from Working Solo, I have finally found  my answer - Highrise and BackPack from 37 Signals.

The team at 37Signals has created a series of web-based products that help you and your organization stay, well, organized! Each of their products serves a slightly different purpose and a slightly different audience, allowing you to get only the functionality you need in a lightweight, web-based application.

I use Basecamp with some clients when managing a large project that requires input, file sharing and deadlines with more than one person. Basecamp is perfect because all the communication is done in one place, thus eliminating the lost emails, constant forwarding and CC-ing that frequently happen with larger projects. You don’t have to worry about missing anything - Basecamp emails you when someone adds anything to the project.

The product I am hooked on that really works for me as a freelance designer is Highrise. Highrise works as a contact management package with a kick. Not only can I keep track of my client contact information, but I can add notes for each one, create my to do list (and get email updates on what is due or past due), and use the dropbox as a back up feature too. When you pull up a client’s name, you get all of their information and notes all at once which is such a nice feature.

BackPack is a great way for your organization to stay on the same page or for you to keep all your notes and files organized. It is a beefed up calendar, file cabinet and white board all in one place. Use it for one person or the whole organization. Get your reminders sent to your phone or email - so you have no excuses.

Campfire is a great way for organizations to stay on the same page even when you are working from multiple locations. Think of it as your own private group IM. The look and feel is no nonsense, elegant and easy to use.

37 Signals has other products that make collaboration and organization work for you - it is just a matter of checking each of them out and seeing which one fits you best. For me, the answer is Highrise with a bit of BackPack on the side. Each of the 37 Signals products comes with a free trial and depending on the size of your organization and project needs, some of the solutions are free.  You just have to give them a try.

Do you use any of these products? Which one(s) do you use the most?

Image details: 2008 CMT Music Awards - Red Carpet served by picapp.com

Guest Post by David Peralty

Something often overlooked by bloggers are images for their content, but with recent reports that most readers skim content equal to around one quarter of what is actually written, an image can sometimes be your only opportunity to hook a reader into really reading all that you have to say.

Just like with all other content, the images you can get for your posts can come from legal or illegal sources. Most people don’t pay attention to this fact, but with companies seeing decreasing revenue, protecting intellectual property is on the rise, so taking images you found from a Google Image search isn’t the best idea.

There are many free and legal sources for images, but you have to be willing to look around.

Currently, I work for PicApp, a company that provides access to high quality images from companies like Corbis and Getty. PicApp allows you to easily embed images in your posts.

Some others worth mentioning that I have used before include Flickr’s Creative Commons images that users have uploaded and given open access to, as well as stock.xchng.

The only issues with these sites are that they don’t always have the highest quality images, nor the latest editorial images.

Some other reasons you might want to make adding an image to your posts a regular endeavor is to break up the content, which can allow it to flow better, or helping convey thoughts, ideas, opinions, or even the overall mood of the text around it.

It allows you to differentiate from your competitors as many bloggers aren’t spending the time and energy finding images worth posting, and this opens up an opportunity for each and every one of you to make the most out of your content and how it is displayed.

One last thing I wanted to note that is special about PicApp, and incredibly useful for me as a blogger is the ability to subscribe to my searches via RSS. If you are a celebrity blogger talking about Miley Cyrus, it can be hard to keep up with everything that is happening with regards to her and her brand, but by subscribing to an RSS feed of your image search, PicApp will let you know when there are new photographs that you can use, and I have already been told that it has helped inspire posts, and I can see it helping some bloggers beat their competition in releasing an article.
About our Guest Blogger:  David Peralty has been a full time blogger for the last three years, and now works as Community Manager for PicApp while also building his own blogs like eXtra for Every Publisher.

My favorite statistics package for my sites just got even better. Honestly, I didn’t think it could, but it did. The team at pMetrics have added a Traffic Source module to the pMetrics dashboard which gives you a quick overview of what the source of your site traffic is including:

• Search traffic
• Direct/Bookmark traffic
• Link traffic
• Social Media traffic (oooh, this is particularly cool)
• Email traffic

Of course, this is in addition to the other information on the dashboard such as how many visitors, actions, time spent, bounce rate, the inbound links, top searches, and top content page information.

pMetrics offers a free version of their product, but the paid version is very affordable and worth every penny.  For more reasons why I love pMetrics, check out:

• pMetrics - The Best Stats Package for Bloggers
• Making pMetrics Even Better