Jun
07
Keep A List Of Your Assets
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Here’s a question you should always be able to answer: What are your assets?
By which I mean:
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Contacts
- Software
- Data
- Websites
- Other Purchases Made
Take some time now, and make a list of your assets.
Then sit down over a coffee and see how you can use some of them to enhance the effectiveness of others.
Literally go through that list one by one. Start with the first item (#1). Then with every other item on the list (#2, #3, etc), ask yourself “How can #1 help me to use #2 more effectively?”, “How can #1 help me to use #3 more effectively?”, “How can #1 help me to use #4 more effectively?”
Once you’ve gone through the whole list, move onto the next item and repeat
“How can #2 help me to use #1 more effectively?”
“How can #2 help me to use #3 more effectively?”
“How can #2 help me to use #4 more effectively?”
And so on.
Let me give you an example:
One of my assets is the Auto Social Poster and my enhancement to it. I ran through my list of assets to see how Auto Social Poster can increase the effectivenes of other assets. Obviously, for some of these, it’s not possible: Auto Social Poster (a plugin for Wordpress) can’t help me use my copy of XSitePro more effectively.
However, I then got to “How can Auto Social Poster help me use Best7DollarReports.com more effectively?”
And then it dawned on me. That website has an RSS feed of the latest $7 reports I’ve added to it. (NB: I’ve kind of let that site slide a bit, so nothing’s been added for quite a while). Wouldn’t it be great to take the output of that RSS feed, and have Auto Social Poster automatically post about the new items added, to the various bookmarking sites I’ve got set up in Auto Social Poster (ASP for short)?
But that’s not how ASP works. ASP only posts WordPress posts to those other sites. And the website is a directory, not a blog.
But my brain stopped me: What if I could take the RSS output from the directory software, have WordPress automatically read it and create posts from the RSS feeds, and then have ASP pick up those posts and publish them to the bookmarking sites?
A little while later, a search result turned up FeedWordPress, which does just that. It takes an RSS feed and copies the contents into posts in your copy of WordPress.
Job jobbed.
All I need to do now is carry on setting up that WordPress installation: picking a template (hopefully one that will match the directory itself, although I might need to do that manually); installing and configuring the other plugins; etc.
But the hard part is done.
I’ll make a habit of updating it regularly, and then I’ll share the traffic results, as I’m hoping the social bookmarking will have an impact….
So, take some time out this week to write down all your assets, and start thinking about ways they can be used together.
June 20th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I should add a note.
If you want to use FeedWordPress like this, the trick is:
1) To make sure that the feed contains the link to the item you want to post (eg, if it’s a feed of ebay auctions for a certain search term, then the link in the RSS feed should be direct to the ebay auction).
2) Make sure that the Options->Syndication section of your WordPress admin has “Permalinks point to:” set to “Original Site”.
This will make sure that it’s the RSS feed links that are posted, not the WordPress pages.
Hope that helps,
Andy
June 21st, 2007 at 8:03 pm
[…] Yesterday, I wrote about keeping a list of your assets, and I mentioned some ideas on what I meant by assets. I thought you might find it useful to get […]