5 Unexpected Ways To Build Your Personal Brand [Shared article]

Here's an article I came across which I thought was worth sharing with you:

Sometimes, effective personal branding requires nixing conventional wisdom. Here are five tips to help you increase your visibility, influence and success. 1. Be Lazy. One misconception about…

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2013/12/10/5-unexpected-ways-to-build-your-personal-brand/?utm_campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

via Readability (This post was formatted automatically by IFTTT, so apologies if I haven't tidied it up yet. TK)

How to post an article from Twitter to your Blog in just two clicks.

If you’ve seen more activity than usual on MyKitchenSync this weekend, it’s because I have been playing around with some great apps designed to make sharing of stories simpler.

When I am scrolling through my Twitter feed, I tend to come across loads of links to articles that I just don’t have time to read at that moment, so to save them for later I got into the habit of emailing them to myself. As a resulted, I now have in a big fat inbox full of stuff that I find cumbersome to collate or share.

Luckily it turns out there’s an app for that and it’s 

called 

IFTTT

,

which 

stands for

 “

If This Then That

” 

(I SOO wanted to drop a comma in there!). D

esigned

for both Mac and iOS devices, it

 works on a very simple premise: you do one thing on a popular app and it triggers an action to happen in another one. These triggers are called ‘recipes' and yes, I’ve been busy cooking them up all weekend. (It just so happens I’ve had the sniffles, so this was a productive couple of days in bed with my Lemsip. Honest!)

One little recipe I put together is turning into a real life-hack as it is my answer to all that hassle of emailing myself those tweets. By clicking ‘Favourite’ on a tweet containing a link to an article,

IFTTT

automatically adds that linked article to my Reading list in an app called ‘

Readability

’. (I could also have used

Instapaper

, but I prefer the layout of this app.) Later, when I open

Readability

on any of my devices, my Twitter-discovered article is 

beautifully formatted and

 sitting in the queue waiting for my reading pleasure.

That got me thinking; what if I could share some of these stories to my blog so you could read them too?...

Yep, you guessed it,

IFTTT

had a recipe for that as well. A few minutes of tweaking and now I can 

automatically generate a blog post

 by simply clicking ‘Favourite’ on any story in my

Readability

list.

The post is published

 with the title of the article in the heading, together with an excerpt and the link in the body of the post.

It took a couple of attempts to correct the formatting and to add in some wording to let the reader know 

it is automatically generated

. 

By communicating that my post is formatted 

automatically

, I am giving myself a little room to manoeuvre if it doesn’t look right at first glance.

Of course, this does not replace the task of actually writing for a blog. And I certainly wouldn't advocate this as a TOTAL answer to blogging or building your community, but I do think that curating and sharing stories of interest more regularly will help to keep subscribers interested in my blog over the longer term.

Let me know what you think about this approach, and if you want more help in creating a similar workflow for your blog, just post a comment and I will put together a more technical post with all the steps required.

Please feel free to leave a comment. And if you enjoyed reading this you may like other related posts listed below. To receive future posts don't forget to subscribe via email (just enter your email above), or by RSS, or why not follow me on twitter

@mykitchensync

.

In search of the obvious answer [Shared article]

Here's an article I came across which I thought was worth sharing with you:

The obvious answer to your problem isn't obvious yet, but once someone finds it, it will be.That's the way obvious answers work. They're not obvious because they're easy to find, they're obvious…

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/12/in-search-of-the-obvious-answer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

via Readability (This post was formatted automatically by IFTTT, so apologies if I haven't tidied it up yet. TK)

Be Careful: Employers Eyes are on your Social Media [Shared article]

Here's an article I came across which I thought was worth sharing with you:

"Social Media can be an excellent way to keep up to date with your friends and meet new people, but don’t forget that many unexpected people could be searching your accounts to find out if you…"

http://www.learnist.org/be-careful-employers-eyes-are-on-your-social-media/

via Readability (This post was posted & formatted automatically by IFTTT, so apologies if I haven't tidied it up yet. TK)

When it Comes to Leadership Everything Communicates

Here is a great article I came across on Twitter which I thought I’d share with you…

"Communication is critical for effective leadership. Without communication leaders are unable to share their vision, convince people to follow and to inspire the action that…"

http://www.georgeambler.com/when-it-comes-to-leadership-everything-communicates/

via Readability