Collating content for e-mail Newsletters

Some of my blogs are 'non-core'.
Like this one.
I set them up so I have a topic related channel and can write up what I need to, without polluting my 'core' brands.
At some point, this might become core, so I try to keep it very focussed and add value.

For my core blogs, I've started writing an e-mail newsletter. And I wanted to collate content for it, over a month, so that when it came to write the newsletter, I had all the content I needed at hand, to make writing the newsletter fast and easy.

There are a lot of services out there now which 'seem' to want to help you do that. Pinterest, Flipboard, etc. etc.

So I tried a few of the popular services that seem aimed at doing this:

• Flipboard didn't seem to want to let me collate individual items, it seems to want to pull in feeds. Well I already use NewsBlur for my RSS feeds. So I don't need that. Account Disabled within 15 minutes.
• Pinterest wants to help you collate individual items so that you have a pin board of 'stuff'. Sounds good. But as soon as you create an account, Pinterest throws up a 'follow 5 people' dialog. I don't really know what to do with the system at this point, so I randomly select 5 people, just so I can move on to see the site. But now I hav a Pinterest home page filled with random junk. Should be simple to fix - just unsubscribe from those 5 random people and... no can do. Account Disabled within 5 minutes.

Clearly, its just me. All I wanted was something to pin things to that I found on the web and share it and ...

So I fell back on the old stalwart. EverNote.

I created a notebook for each newsletter, then started adding items into the notebook.

I tend to copy and paste stuff, rather than use the browser EverNote plugins.

A useful feature I like on my Android devices is the twitter integration. With Twitter you generally have to 'favourite' tweets, but that is a little too public for my sensibilities. But on Android I can 'send to EverNote' and the tweet I want to follow up on, or curate, is added to my EverNote without anyone noticing.

Sometimes, it pays to keep it simple.

Trim your LinkedIn groups on a monthly basis

Linkedin groups are a massive source of frustration.

I was starting to lose all hope of finding any value in them.

But since I was investigating online training, I wanted to find some linkedin groups for that. As I wrote about previously.

Linkedin has a limit on the number of groups you can join - probably to save your sanity. So I had to unsubscribe a few groups.

Linkedin hide the 'leave this group' option. You need to be in the group, then use the 'more...\ Your Settings' link and there you will see the [Leave Group]' button.

My strategy for choosing groups to leave was:

If the number of members is small then, check the recent posts:

• If there were none of interest in the last month - leave the group
• If the questions, or answers annoyed me, leave the group
• If there were no posts in the last month - leave the group

I stayed in a few groups just because of this size of the membership base, and purely for future marketing reasons.

I will repeat the above 'trimming' process on a monthly basis. This will probably help keep me sane.

Working Remotely with Google Hangouts

I recently spent a day working remotely with a team in Romania through Google Hangouts.

We had a few connection issues along the way, I don't think any of that was from Google Hangouts, it was because of local wifi connection issues.

Google Hangouts makes it really easy to setup a group meeting, and remember this is all for free.

You can keep them private and only invite who you want.

The participants can all see each other, and you can share your screen easily. In fact, any participant can share their screen.

There is a chat window for sharing links.

Most impressive of all, was the remote desktop sharing. So I could operate their computer remotely.

I'm not sure I'm ready to use this for webinars yet. But certainly for face to face calls I'll use this as a default rather than Skype,