My Rig: Connecting the Dots

Every tool I list in this post can be used for free!  Some of the services have paid options, but I have yet to upgrade to any of the paid options.  The free versions work just fine!
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This post outlines the service and tools I use and how they interoperate with each other.  By recording this information, I gain the ability to streamline my activities.  Each service and tool becomes part of a flow of activities.

Once you can see your activities as a flow, you can analyze them in relation to your ultimate goal.

The goal of this post is to address how I do it [not why I do it, though I will address why to some degree].  If I get enough comments indicating that you would like me to elaborate on the why, I will gladly go into more detail in a subsequent post.

Blogging is the fulcrum of my daily activities, a prerequisite of which is learning and testing.  One of the main reasons I blog is to help our members grow their businesses.  I also really enjoy the process of learning and testing.  I don’t fancy myself as much of a teacher, but I am a learner and a tester, lol.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I just published articles to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog [the blog you are reading now].  I have since made the realization that some of the content I produce doesn’t belong in this blog.  So, I launched two additional blogs: 1) FollowFlywheel.com as my business notebook/journal; and 2) FollowFranco.com as my personal notebook/journal.  This way, people have the choice to tune into the channels that interest them.

I publish mainly business and marketing related articles to this blog.  While FollowFlywheel is my notebook/journal, I also use it as a sort of chronicle.  FollowFranco is purely for personal things and has an emphasis on my studies into quantum theory as it relates to human potential.  Putting all of these topics into one blog would most likely lead to traffic dilution due to a lack of focus–the noise/signal ratio would be high for those people who want to tune into just one channel, or even a sub-topic within a channel.

This blog runs on WordPress.org.  This allows us to fully-customize the appearance and gives us access to tons of plug-ins and widgets.  FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco on the other hand run on Posterous which is superb if you need a quick and easy way to publish content to the web.  You can publish text, audio, and video by simply sending an email to a Posterous Blog.  This makes for uber-fast publishing.  Posterous also allows me to auto-post my blog posts to several other services as well.  This is very handy!

Here are some notes on how I use my Posterous Blogs and how my auto-posting is setup:

FollowFlywheel

A business orientated notebook.  Anything noteworthy gets published to this blog, for example: spur of the moment thoughts, business related purchases, what I am reading, where I am going, interviews, any tools I find, and more….

• Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
• Write a blurb in FollowFranco for very occasional for noteworthy posts.

My FollowFlywheel Posterous Blog auto-posts to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook Wall
3. LinkedIn
4. FriendFeed [lifestream]

Blog Commenting

1. Disqus
   1. Makes an update w/ a link back to the post on:
      1. Twitter
      2. Facebook Wall
      3. Yahoo Profile
2. Non-Disqus, setup a profile, or comment and then paste comment into FollowFlywheel blog w/ a link

Twitter

1. Seesmic App for G1
   1. To run more than one Twitter account from a single app, you need to upgrade to the pro version.  So, I use two different apps (see FollowFranco below).

1. Save stuff to read w/ ReaditLater
2. Firefox Toolbar for Quick Links Only (e.g. Infusionsoft Login, jiveSYSTEMS Blog Admin, Twitter Login)
3. Delicious is my primary bookmark archive, I then add and annotate the best resources and references into my Diigo account
4. Digg noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post
5. StumbleUpon noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post

Other FollowFlywheel Items

1. Video
   1. Vimeo
   2. YouTube
2. Lifestreams
   1. FriendFeed
   2. Profilactic
   3. Lifestream.fm
   4. BackType
   5. MyBlogLog
3. Ping.fm sends status updates to:
   1. Twitter
   2. Facebook Wall
   3. Flickr
   4. LinkedIn
   5. Friendfeed

FollowFranco

A place where friends and clients alike can get to know me on a more personal level.  I also publish things about quantum theory as it relates to human potential to this blog.

• Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
• Write a blurb in FollowFlywheel very occasionally for noteworthy posts, mainly human potential focused ones.
• Remove the double post because Twitter and Posterous auto-post to my Facebook Wall.

My FollowFranco auto-posts to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook Wall
3. FriendFeed [lifestream]

Twitter

1. Posts to Facebook Wall
2. Twitdriod App from G1

FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco

Each have their own unique accounts.  For example, I have a FollowFlywheel Twitter account and a FollowFranco Twitter account.  I keep the channels completely separate.  This starts with creating unique emails addresses.  I then use an email filter to segment the inbound emails accordingly.  In this manner, I prioritize and batch my inbound email activities.

Lifestreams

A lifestream is a comprehensive record of one’s daily activities.  They pull data from many services into one big stream of information.  You will note from above that I only use a FriendFeed account for FollowFranco.  [For FollowFlywheel, I use: FriendFeed, Profilactic, and Lifestream.fm]

Blog Commenting

I mainly use Disqus.  It has two components; a plug-in to manage comments on blogs for publishers, and a profile for commenters.  If you would like to learn more about Disqus, after reading the rest of this article, I suggest you take a gander at this post We Migrated from IntenseDebate to Disqus for Blog Comments.  Whenever I comment on a blog with Disqus comments, it auto-publishes my comment to my Disqus profile, Facebook Wall, and Twitter account.

I also have a BackType profile.  It’s aggregates all my comments on blogs into one stream by using my social accounts and both the URL/Website field.

Central Profile

To further connect everything together, I created a central profile WillFranco.com.  I use this link as my website URL whenever I sign-up for a new service, for example, my Twitter accounts link to WillFranco.com.  This makes it easy for people to understand my value proposition and potentially select one, or more, of my blogs to read.

Online Storage

Dropbox is the winner, hands down. My goal is to centralize and streamline. Unlike almost every other online hard-drive service out there, Dropbox is super simple.  It works just like a regular hard-drive and shows up like one on your computer as well.  Any files you place in your Dropbox hard-drive store locally, sync across all of your computers, and are stored online as well.  Dropbox works seamlessly and silently to accomplish both backup and storage. 

SEO Monitoring

I found ExactFactor several month ago.  I signed up for a free account, and I typed in our URL and the keywords I wanted to track.  Now, I get an email letting me know our position for each of the keywords I am tracking, each week.

RSS Feed Subscriptions

Google Reader does me well.  I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds and Google Reader makes them easy to manage, annotate, and even share.  Subscribing to RSS feeds and then reading them all in Google Reader is the easiest way I have found to stay in-tune with the blogs I follow.  Just recently, as in, while writing this post, I added a Firefox plug-in called AidRSS which helps me sift through the many feeds I subscribe to by assigning each post a rank.

When I want to see what is going on in the news, I use Google’s FastFlip.  It’s a super cool Google Labs project that does exactly what the name implies, allows you to flip really fast through the headlines of major newspapers.

Closing Thoughts

I use many other tools and services.  For the purposes of this post, I have stuck the ones I use the most frequently.

Notable items that I did not mention in the post include my jiveSYSTEMS account which I use to send video emails to people, and Infusionsoft–the CRM software we use to manage our company.  Since both are paid services, I did not mention them in the body of this post.

Also, I have been building a system to leverage video sharing sites for free publicity, the backbone of which is TubeMogul, a video syndication service–you upload a video to TubeMogul and it distributes it to your chosen video sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and more…).  I didn’t address video sharing in this post because I haven’t thoroughly road tested it yet.

I hope you found this post useful.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions please leave them below.

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