Tag: platform

Are You Building Your Platform Toolkit?

If you’re serious about building your platform, then building your toolkit as you go is almost as important as your content. Trial and error or ad-hoc tools will only take you so far.

You could refer to the resources pages / suggestions that experts in the Online publishing world give such as Michael Hyatt, Pat Flynn. As far as I am concerned, I have found the following tools extremely helpful in building my platform. Best part is that most of these resources are free to use or at least try.

  • Freemake Video Downloader – Easy way to download your favorite Youtube clips as an audio or video.
  • Free Sound Recorder – Excellent quality voice recording of any length in MP3 format.
  • Debut Video Capture Software – Another one of my favorites to capture the computer screen, make home videos and convert recordings into other formats.
  • Facebook Cache Refresh: Shrug off that sticky cache from Facebook before you share your blog-post on Facebook.
  • ZAMZAR: Convert documents and PDFs into music files (MP3 and other formats) without the need to download software
  • NOZBE: Best way to keep track of your To Dos.
  • FEEDBURNER from GOOGLE: RSS Feeds and Email Subscription Management.
  • Audio Joiner: Lets you cut and join MP3 audio files.
  • Analyse your Blog’s Headline: Check your headline before posting your blog. Get a score and recommendations!
  • 750Words: I started blogging using this site. I recommend it for those who are getting started to take up the trial version.
  • Wordle: Create your own word cloud!
  • Trello: Agile Scrum based Project Management tool. Let’s you manage multiple projects and product backlogs!
  • YOUTUBE to MP3 converter: Works specially well for long (I was successful in converting a 6 hour video) Youtube video to audio conversions.

Question: What other tools are you using to build your Platform? Please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

How to Create Two Blogs on Your Site?

For a very long time, I thought there is no way I could create two proper BLOGs on my wordpress site.

What I wanted was simple (at least I thought so):

  1. Blogs related with parenting and relationships appearing as one category.
  2. Blogs related with Platform Building (such as this one) as a separate category.

At best, I could create Menu’s leading to pages (instead of posts). But Pages are Pages are Pages! They are not anywhere close to blog-posts. There is a lot of wasted effort in turning them into something that looks close to blogs.

Steve Jobs once said: [bctt tweet=”If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”]

Being a hardcore fan, I didn’t settle easily and kept looking. Simply put, here are the steps to create (or give an illusion of) two or more blogs on the same site:

  • Create two (or more) categories: Go to Posts -> Categories and create two (or more) categories corresponding to the Blogs you would want to create. In my case, I created BLOGS and PLATFORM BUILDING as two categories.
  • Add newly created categories into the Menu: Go to Appearance -> Menus and click on the arrow to show the Categories. Select the newly created Categories by checking the box against it. Press the “Add to Menu” button to move these new categories into the Menu. (In case you want to change the text on the site for the categories, you can change the categories details on the Menu widget.)
  • Select the category for each blog-post: Open the Posts page, Edit (or Quick Edit) has the select the category. In my case, I selected BLOGS for my parenting and relationships related posts and PLATFORM BUILDING for posts such as this one.

That’s it! You’re all set. Open your site and you’d see two (or more) menu items – “Blogs” & “Platform Building” in my case.

Resources That Helped Me:

  • Video on the BobWP site. Follow the link.

Hello World!

The phrase “Hello World” holds a special meaning for people born in my generation who happened to be students of computers. This was the name of the first computer program we wrote when ever we learnt a new computer programming language. It used to give me and all of my friends a sense of joy and accomplishment to see these words showing on the blue computer screen on ‘executing’ our programs.

I still get the same sense of joy on having my site up and running today, and more glad to see the same text on my site as it launches – H E L L O  W O R L D.

Today, world has changed and my 4 year old son, Tanav, is sitting next to me, assisting me with the teething problems using this site while in parallel playing on the i-Phone which he knows like the back of his hand. I doubt if “HELLO WORLD” will ever hold any relevance for his generation or generations to come.

As for me, it has taken my Rocket a lot of energy to attain this Escape Velocity, and it will need your love and support to keep spinning in an i-orbit around the planet where it can be used for some blessed purpose. Amen!