Celebs are tweeting, marketers are twittering, normal people are turning into Tweeps and it’s all going off big time. It’s great, but what is it? Well it’s something called micro blogging. It’s a short sharp blurt out no longer than 140 characters. It was original supposed to answer the question:

What are you doing right now?

It’s odd that it has taken off really because a lot of the time all you see is one half of the conversation, if you follow someone then you see the messages they put out when they tweet in general, but look at their profile and you see all their tweets even the ones they sent to someone else, however you don’t get to see the other half of the conversation. And then of course someone will ReTweet (RT) someone else’s tweet and you get another snapshot of something they were twittering about. It can be confusing at times, it’s like walking around with one eye closed, it’s odd – but you can get used to it.

With a good twitter app like TweetDeck or Twirl you can do a lot of clever things, Reply, ReTweet, Direct Message or make someone a favourite. You can group your message list, look people up and filter them out. It’s all very clever and can be addictive…. but… it’s no good without an audience.

Your audience are the people who follow you, you are part of the audience of the people you are following. And just to make it very confusing the people you follow can also follow you. Only your followers get to see your tweets but you can reply to anyone the only restriction is you can only direct message those who are following you.

Building your audience is key to your twitter success and there are many reported methods of doing it. If you google it you will find that there are a few ‘autopilot’ schemes that proclaim to get you lots of followers. Over time most of these have been exposed as using spam techniques and if they do actually attract followers they tend to be bots and of no use to you as an audience.

The safest method to use but by far the longest way of doing it is to follow other people. Decide what you want to twitter about, then start to search for topics on your chosen subject at twitter.com Then, when you have found some people you like the sound of, click the start following button. Start tweeting yourself putting out good quality info about your subject and interject it with your own thoughts and of course what you are doing about it. A good proportion of the people you follow will follow you back if they like what they see. This is called the organic method, it’s growing an audience without the aid of (or interference from) other methods. The organic method is slow, not all the people you follow will reciprocate so you have to follow a lot before your audience grows. By way of natural selection you will be followed by others just because you are tweeting good stuff so keep your quality of info up and be a regular twitterer.

On the subject of growing an audience I have taken part in a scheme based on the pyramid model over at John Cow. There is no selling involved and it’s free so don’t worry. Basically you agree to follow five people me and John Cow being two of them and then you promote the link that the system gives you. The idea is you promote and get five followers, then those five get five and so on. It sounds good – but to tell you the truth it’s not working too well for me, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t really asked anybody to follow the link yet. Give it ago – in theory the result should be good for all concerned and it doesn’t cost anything and you aren’t contributing to twitter spam.

I’m aso about to trial TwitterRocket from upstart blogger. I’ll let you know how that goes in another post.

With the death of the ebook, it’s obvious that the mailing list model is going to go the same way. With everyone so keen to avoid spam building a mailing list was never going to an easy thing to do.

So – we have taken the bold steps of ‘donate if you want to’. It’s a simple no nonsense way of leaving it up to you to show your appreciation if you want to. We won’t ask you for your email address and you can donate whatever you want. All donations over £5 (approx $8 or €6) will get mentioned on this page.

These people have supported

Hifix – Hifi Excellence Coventy

The Stanage – Bed and Breakfast Guest House Telford

Overseas Property Sales Direct – Sell your property overseas

–>

Most of them are badly formed in my opinion, so with a little research, cribbing of other peoples ideas and trial and error I think I have found the best title tag arrangement. Open up your ‘header.php’ file from your current theme and replace everything between the opening and ending title tags. The opening tag is:

<title>

And the ending title tag is:

</title>

Once you have found that code (and only that code) replace the whole lot with:

<title>
<?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ -’; } ?>
<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>
- <?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>
</title>

I reckon if you craft your blog name and slogan / description carefully, you can get all your keywords into your title using this.

What are your thoughts?

First of all lets deal with how we forward our email:

Hands up anyone who has received an email that has been forwarded and forwarded so the email is 100’s of lines long and contains all the names and email addresses of every recipient so far?

Yes, I thought so. There are lots of us. It seems a popular thing to do, however it’s actually the lazy persons way of replying to email. It also uses more bandwidth and processor time to do it. An email that starts out at 1k, can soon turn into 10 or 20k once it has been backwards and forwards a few times, especially if the senders have graphics in their email signature. And if it’s an email conversation between two people remember the email goes into their sent email folder as well as being an email in their inbox – now suddenly there are multiple incarnations of the same message and its size is growing all the time.

There are a number of things wrong with this way of emailing, here are just 3:

1. Security

Email signatures normally contain peoples name, title/position, telephone and sometimes mobile phone number. If you blindly forward an email on, that information is sent to who you forward to. A simple email I send to someone I know can easily be forwarded by them to multiple people I don’t know and suddenly they have my email address, my name, my company, my position in the company, my telephone number and what my email signature looks like. What’s to stop them sending an email purporting to come from me?

Another security issue is people forward to multiple others, and they do it by just adding more email addresses in the ‘To’ field. It works, but what happens is the email software makes a list of the recipients and dumps it in the header of the message. Now an unintended recipient has some email signatures and a long list of valid email addresses. And don’t forget the sender is in their too, that could be you.

2. Confusion

The email you send to some one has a subject and a body, the subject is a brief line about what the body content is, and the body is the message. When you reply the subject gets ‘Re:’ added before it and the original message is included with your reply. Some email programs have your message above your reply, some have it below. Almost all email programs have the ability to add ‘quoting’ to the original message and display it as a hierarchy in different colours, but most people have this facility turned of. So imagine an email that has been replied to a number of times, by people with email signatures, one of these people replies above, one of them replies below and both have their hierarchy quoting turned off – what a mess.

3. Size and Time

There are millions of emails sent every day, thousands every minute. The 20k (and growing) email sent in the example above is one of millions of others fighting their way through the internet to get to their intended target. Ever wondered why your email has gone astray? Or why its taken a while to reach the person? The web is choking on oversized content and even a small email like this is making matters worse.

What’s worse is the email software that the email is sent/replied from is having to keep track of the send, the reply, the send again etc there is more work for bigger files. The bigger the file the more the recipient has to wade through to find the bit they are interested in, this takes time to do and can result in confused replies.

Email is brilliant and I love it which is why I have invested time in making email work for me and to be as slick as possible. I have found out that if I want to reply to an email, if I highlight the bit I am replying to, only that chunk of text is included in the reply as the original message. I have found out that when I have my quoting turned on, the bit of text I am replying to gets ‘>’ added before it and the software changes its colour.

I also take time to split my replies and insert what I am saying into the original text, so it’s easy for my recipient (the original sender) to re-read what they wrote and then read my answer.

Here is an example:

Example email I might receive from a client:

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Thanks for you good work

A Client
Managing Director
Business Inc
Tel: 01234 567890

Here is how I would reply to this email

1. First I highlight the paragraph beginning ‘Thanks…’ and ending ‘…footer?’ and hit the reply button. This generates a reply email, it adds a time stamp at the top, includes the highlighted bit of text as a quoted (>) paragraph and my signature at the end. Notice I didn’t highlight the senders ‘Hi’ or their signature. My reply email looks like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions
> though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

2. I then start to make my replies inside the quoted paragraph and it ends up looking like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design.

Great. No problems – l’m pleased  you like it so far

> I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

I’ll adjust the r/h column, it can go about 20px wider. For the footer I just need the company registration info and a copyright date.

Speak to you soon.

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

Now when my client gets my reply it’s obvious to them what they said and what I’ve replied to. My email software is set up to track the original message and all replies, I can even set up mail rules to shuffle them into folders and change their category, but this post is about Netiquette not about mail organisation so I will leave out the advice about email management.

I’m not saying my way is right (your way might be very different) or that you should adopt my way of doing things. What I am trying to get across is it’s most important that we all tidy up our communications. Email should work well for everyone and don’t assume that other people are as good as you may be at dealing with their emails, so it may be up to you to take the responsibility to learn some netiquette.

It’s a simple idea and could help you to make extra affiliate cash.

All you have to do is head over to APB: http://www.affiliatepinboard.co.uk/affiliates/ and tell them about your affiliate program.

They want to know about any and every you may run, or even just be are part of. APB will then follow your affiliate link and sign up to the program too and then make a post about it on the blog. This means that APB are then your 2nd tier affiliate (if that’s a feature of your program) and the post on the blog will help to promote your money making efforts.

It’s simple, it costs you nothing and it might make you some more cash, so follow the link and tell them about your programs.

You read every day on the net about bloggers making six figures from their blogs and how their success can benefit you if you buy their proven system and blah, blah blah. We’ve all been suckered in at one level or another, and we are all still plodding on doing our day jobs non the richer.

Well here is a tip for you, it costs you nothing to implement and at some point down the road it ‘MIGHT’ earn you $6 too – it might earn you more than $6 but it’s not guaranteed.

Blogging Rocket is presented to you via a WooThemes WordPress template. Woo are excellent WordPress theme designers and that’s why I chose FreshNews as the Blogging Rocket skin. I noticed while I was looking around the Woo website that they had an Affiliate Program, I joined it (for free) and posted my affiliate link to Woo’s website in the footer of my blog.

Every so often a visitor to Blogging Rocket will click on my affiliate link and that click is registered at Woo against my account. Vary rarely the person that clicked will buy a Woo theme and once that happens I get paid a commission because I was the lead generator. Now that’s good – about $15+ in commission depending on what the person buys, but as I say that’s few and far between. The reason I made $6 was this, I introduced a friend of mine to the Woo Themes affiliate program and he joined up too. Woo registered the fact that my friend joined under me and I became the 2nd tier to any of his sales.

My friend’s blog generated a $30 commission this week and so I got $6 because of it.

Now of course these figures aren’t huge and you wouldn’t give up work to do it all day, but as I said at the beginning of this post, it’s money for nothing, so you have nothing to loose. It costs nothing to sign up, and after only a few minutes of your time you can post your affiliate link on your site and the jobs done.

The Woo designs are excellent, well thought out and what’s more they just work, so you can’t go wrong if you buy one. People realise this and so eventually I feel sure the link will work for you.

All you have to do now – is click here and sign up for yourself, then don’t forget to send you affiliate link to your friends and tell them to do the same that way you get to be their 2nd tier and hopefully you too can earn $6 for doing nothing!

Well it looks like things are going to get a major shake up soon when version 2.7 launches, if these screen shots are anything to go by the admin interface is going to be radically altered – and we all hope for the better.

Proposed new dashboard in WordPress 2.7

The changes aren’t just confined to the dashboard it looks like the whole admin infrastructure is changing, for a complete list of what’s going on take a look at this blog post over at WordPress.org

The

So I decided it was time to take stock and compiling a list of:

You know you have been blogging too long when…

Someone tells you an interesting piece of news and you immediately wonder if you can submit it to stumble-upon.

You go to your child’s parents evening and you ask to see their stats instead of their books

Your partner asks you to do the washing up and you really wish there was a plugin to do it for you

You don’t even notice anymore when someone has a typo

You smile sideways…

OK I want lots more of these please, this blogging lark is very serious isn’t it? Lets liven it up a little and have some fun. So please get commenting below and give us all a sideways smile! (Don’t forget I stumble those who comment).

Just how effective are ebooks these days?

I ask because we all know that the: “Free ebook when you sign up to our mailing list” is just a ploy to get you to optin. Everything is free upfront but further down the line you will be mailed and asked to buy something else. Everyone does it and has done it for a many years now, but is it effective any more?

I’d like your take on this because if the ebook is dead (and RIP in my opinion) what is going to replace it? We still need folks to sign up to our newsletters – but how do we entice them now?

Come on – get commenting and lets see if we can decide on the next big thing and then jump aboard before the train leaves. Anyone who comments will get their latest blog post stumbled by me.