Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘User Manual For The Brain’ Category

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I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy (although more sci-fi as I get older and bored of so many pointy-eared elf stories), and subscribe to Tor’s newsletter (”Tor-the-publisher” not “Tor-the-proxy-software-creator”).

They recently ran an interview with an author, which I love as I think it contains a lot of insight for people working in this internet marketing/product creation line. One comment stood out:

It’s the production on your worst day that determines your overall production, not your production on your best day.

I loved Evernote… I hate Evernote.

(Evernote is a note-taking application – somewhere to store all those ideas, tips, and other useful info that you pick up online – or offline – complete with tagging, categorisation, etc).

Evernote 2.2 was fantastic. I foolishly upgraded to Evernote 3, which (like  most people) I assumed would give me extra benefits. But no! It’s essentially:

1. The capability to centrally store your data with Evernote.com (which you can then access via other PCs, online, via your iPhone, etc)

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2. A missing set of features (removed whilst they adapt to the centralised data).

A few of those missing features were ones that I used regularly, which was disappointing. However, before I noticed this, I uninstalled evernote 2.2 and I no longer have, nor can I find, the installer for 2.2. So I’m stuck with version 3.

Well, I would be stuck, but I’ve found an alternative. It took me a long time, trying many, many note-taking apps to find one I liked. Then I was playing around with a piece of software, and realised it had all the features I like:

- Category-based notes + a richer tagging facility
- Date-based notes
- Short preview vs the “full view” capability
- A rich and ongoing development cycle to resolve issues, add features, etc.
- A stable platform
- An open and easy-to-use (for me) API (so that I can import all my old Evernote files into it).
- The ability to link between notes
- The ability to (relatively) easily transfer my data between PCs (or to a central web or FTP location)
- The ability to backup automatically.

And much more that I don’t use now, but will do in future, such as:

- The ability to change the view of notes to show titles only for lots of notes, as opposed to titles + previes for a few notes.
- The ability to create handy shortcuts in the side bar or in the “menu” area to frequently used notes
- The ability to auto-capture different versions as I update old notes
- The ability to create draft notes that aren’t visible in the main view.

And what was this wonderful software?

Was it Microsoft OneNote? No.
Was it any other formal note-taking application? No
It was…

Well, see if you can guess. Read that list of features again, and replace with word “notes” with “posts”. What do you end up with?

That’s right. WordPress.

Neat, eh?

Obvious, when you think about it.

And before I say any more, I include myself in that group – at least until recently.

A quote from a report I just read

“When you leave yourself open to all possibilities, you end up choosing none.”

That’s it. Go work it out.

I posted this on the Warrior Forum last week during a spare 5 minutes with internet access, whilst away on holiday, and thought I’d share it with you as well.

It’s easy in this IM business to be busy. Busy creating products. Busy writing articles. Busy reading email. Busy doing research. Busy writing software. etc etc

But one thing that I think many of us might not be busy doing is “thinking”.

I’m on holiday this week. I’ve got some web-access for limited stuff like checking my personal email, checking support tickets, etc, but I’m not “working” as such. Heck, I don’t even have handy the logins for my sites’ cpanel/FTP access, so I can’t really do much.

But my brain has been working. Whilst I’ve been playing with my son and nephew, dining outside in the first bit of really nice weather I’ve had whilst off work this year, walking in the park, vegging in front of the TV in the evening, getting a bit more sleep, etc, my brain has been chewing things over.

And it’s taken one simple idea that I’ve had on the backburner, and fleshed it out. I’ve now got a good, workable, and more importantly – easy to implement – outline of how a new service will work.

I’m sure if I’d been “busy” this week, I won’t have had that outline come to mind quite to quickly, effortlessly, or in as workable a design.

Remember to build some time-out into your schedule!

Some ideas:
* Play – REALLY play – with your family (young or old)
* Get back to nature for a while
* Go for longs walks round the neighbourhood
* Explore new places or try new things
* Sit in the garden
* Grab a coffee in a outside cafe and watch the world go buy

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.