Image credit: Giulio Bernardi

Life has its ways of playing tricks on you.
At one point you feel everything is slotting into place, things start working right for you.

You are loved.

Not only are you loved but your other half is the girl of your dreams. The one you’ve been fancying for the last couple of years.
Messages of love and affection are exchanged between you online.

So what if she lives overseas? Who cares?
Love knows no boundaries, right?

This is not just another relationship.
You know too well that you’re one of those guys who are, well, different. Unique, if you may say so.
So once you’ve found such a much which works on all levels – physically, mentally and, most importantly, spiritually – you’re grabbing it with both hands, not letting it slip.

When you were about four years old your parents gave you a helium balloon, dolphin-shaped, or something like that. They told you to tie it to your hand but you wouldn’t listen. When you lost grip of it, for one split second, it was too late…
Everything had been well planned. Your future had been almost crystal clear. At least to you. You would move together. Heck, you’d even named your future daughter.

And just as you’d completely succumbed to love and let yourself flow with it, almost helplessly…
In one instant, everything is shuttered. All Hell breaks loose and you’re left alone, trying to mend the pieces together. Feelings of self-pity give way to more practical thoughts of “What do I do next?”

One thing is certain – this can’t go on like that. No more.

In times like that I’m reminded of Robert Lee Frost’s insightful poem The Road Not Taken. I learnt it at High School and it’s still just as relevant now, almost 20 years later:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

How about you?

What is your way?
What do you choose in times of trouble, fear, chaos?
Please share your thoughts in the comments…

Was it The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber?

Or maybe it was the good old classic Influence by Robert B. Cialdini?

How about Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson? I mean, everyone’s talking about this book, isn’t it time you put your hands on it?

Well, if you’re reading this, chances are you are an aspiring entrepreneur and you know the old saying that one of the best way to succeed is to learn from others who are already successful.

Guess what, amigos?

Today is your lucky day, because for the good guys @ AppSumo Christmas is not over yet and they’re giving away what they call “The Ultimate Entrepreneur Book Collection.” Basically it’s a bundle of 40, yes forty books for entrepreneurs. Titles include the best of the best in business, copywriting, entrepreneurship, mindset, entrepreneurship etc. A few gems:

• The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
• The Personal MBA – Josh Kaufman
• The Toyota Way – Jeffrey K. Liker
• The Ultimate Sales Machine – Chet Holmes, Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael Gerber
• Tribes – Seth Godin (signed)
• Guerrilla Marketing – Jay Conrad Levinson
• How To Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
• Inbound Marketing – Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah and David Meerman Scott
• Influence – Robert B. Cialdini
• Crush It! – Gary Vaynerchuk
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Peter F. Drucker
• Losing My Virginity – Richard Branson
• Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
• The 4-Hour Workweek – Timothy Ferriss

And the list goes on…

Heck, some of these books are even signed by their authors!

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Where’s the catch?”

Well, actually there is none. All you have to do is to follow this link:

Win the Ultimate Entrepreneurs  Book Collection!

and then answer a really silly question, give your email and once you’ve approved your email address – you’re in!

I’ll be totally transparent here: this link is kind of an affiliate link. For every time you use it I get more entries to the contest. I don’t get paid though. But hey, you can do the same! Once you’ve entered the contest you’ll get a similar link which you can use in your blogs, social media etc. and get more entries to the sweepstakes!

In fact, while you’re there, take note of the way AppSumo are using social media tools so cleverly to spread the word about the contest. You can do the same as well!
Now head over to AppSumo and claim your entry as well so by this time next year you’ll be a super savvy entrepreneur (and add your own book to the list…)

Contest Ends on February 3rd, 11:59AM CST.

Hey guys.

This is a quick one.

What if you could give a little girl with Stage 4 Bone Cancer just the tiniest sliver of hope that she may survive into one more year, would you?

A group of top Internet marketers have teamed up and are holding a live fund-raising event. Some of the names include:

Ryan Lee, Russel Brunson, Willie Crawford and many more.

Now, what they did is they’ve bundled up an amazing package of products on Internet marketing that top marketers have donated. For a really tiny amount you really get so much value!

In fact, we’re talking $5,000 value. And the coolest thing is:

100% of the proceeds generated from this event will go to Sophie & her family.

Help Sophie Now!

Here are some of the products you get in the package:

Business Boosters Webinar Series by Andrew Baird

Boost Your Business in Just 5 Weeks This adds leverage, gets you better marketing, shows you how to source and deal with better partners, how to have more free time…

ContestBurner Viral Contest Marketing System Facebook App by Bill McIntosh

Run Incredibly Powerful Viral Contests Right Inside Your Facebook Fan Page

One Ticket To “The Leverage Summit” by the Crusher Crew – Matt Gill, Bill McIntosh & Eric Louviere

Discover The One Secret That Will Propel You To Incredible Success Without Spending A Ton Of Money NOTHING Will Ever Be As Powerful… Lucrative… Or Explosive As What You’re Going…

Custom Written Presale Promotional Videos by Dr. Mike

Custom Written Presale Promotional Videos for Popular and Overlooked Clickbank Products! Please login or register for Huge Charity Marketing Bundle to view this content

Top Traffic Tips by Willie Crawford and Doug Champigny

Big Dog Secrets To Driving Massive Traffic To Your Web Sites, Squeeze Pages, Blogs & Affiliate Links! Please login or register for Huge Charity Marketing Bundle to view this content

Continuity Summit III Event Videos by Ryan Lee

Our latest Continuity Summit was the best one yet. Lots of heavy focus on membership sites and cutting-edge continuity programs… Please login or register for Huge Charity Marketing Bundle to…

Facebook List Machine by Ran Aroussi

The “next-generation” of list building. It lets you build bigger email lists faster by allowing people to join your list simply by clicking a “Connect to Facebook” button on your…

And lots more.

We’re talking value here, baby, no c***!

Help Sophie Now!

Just so you know that I’m not pitching here, there are 2 things I have to say:

1.I’m not affiliated with the product owners

2.I’ve bought the product bundle myself. And I don’t easily get my wallet out of my pocket. It’s that good, and the cause is so worth it.

There’s also lots of awesome training and prizes.

Please check out this fund-raising event before it ends, and spread the word…

Thanks.

Help Sophie Now!

Image credit: Kaylan02

“…To be free. To travel. To have a healthy, supporting, loving family. To continuously learn and develop. To be happy and enjoy new experiences. To have fun. To create, educate, inspire, excite, transform lives, make a difference…”

This quote is taken from my “why” statement. It is much longer so I’ve just chosen a few of the most powerful lines
I read my “why” statement every morning, before I kick start my day.
I wrote my why statement about 2 weeks ago.
Since then, wonderful things have started coming into my life. No, writing the why statement is not the only thing I did. But once I had it written down, I felt much much better. Much more relaxed.
Why?
Because when your “why” is clear, everything suddenly makes sense.
Everything you do gets a new meaning.
Suddenly, it makes perfect sense to do things like:

• Pouring coffee at Starbucks, getting orders from ego-driven supervisors, carrying heavy, smelly, dripping rubbish bags(not fun.)
• Chopping bananas and carrying 20kg carrot bags at the juice factory (not fun at all.)
• Writing articles for $5 per 500 words (flipping burgers could me more fun…)
• Spending over an hour writing replying a single email at times.

Everything makes sense because you know that you’ve got a reason to get up in the morning and you’re no longer a victim reacting to circumstances like most people believe they are. You’re in control, you’re the captain of the ship which is your life and everything you do, yes everything, takes you a few miles further to your destination. And you’re enjoying every minute, well, almost every minute, because you know you’re in the flow and be being present you’re putting all your energy into anything you do.
You’re not yet another call center worker, but rather you’re giving the best customer service you can possibly give.
You’re making the perfect cappuccino to the hard working London folk, so they start their day on the right foot.
You’re producing the perfect fruit juices so that people can enjoy their lunch breaks and be more productive at work, thus providing more value to their clients and companies.
Everything matters. Every single moment and action bears a meaning. Everything and everyone are connected. Every fragment is part of a bigger picture, another piece assembling your life’s jigsaw.
And no, while goals are important as well, they are entirely different.
Example:
“To have fun” – the why; “To visit Disneyland” – the goal
“To create, educate, inspire…” – the why;  “To become a world renowned public speaker” – the goal

The “why “is a general statement about your destiny, about the reason you’re actually going through all of this journey. Your personal raison d’être, if you like. It has to be something really big, really meaningful, something that will make you thrilled and excited each time you read it. Something that keeps you up at night and a worthy reason to get up in the morning. Some call it a “vision statement” but it’s basically the same thing.
The goals are the fragments, when you break down the why jigsaw. They are much more detailed, much more specific, and some people like to give them dates.

What next?

• I highly encourage you to read follow Jaime Tardy’s tips on how to set your goals and write down your “why.” She explains it very clearly and I’ve followed her guidance when writing down my why statement. She’s a very nice lady and I’m sure she’d love to hear from you and answer your questions.
• Edel O’Mahony is my spiritual inspiration and she can really teach you how to set goals and write down your gratitude statements. I like her approach because she teaches methods that actually work. I know because they’ve worked for me, time and time again. I’d urge you to follow her on Facebook, Twitter and to join her on her path of the peaceful warrior.

Now let’s talk about you for a second…

Have you written a why statement? Goals?
Can you share some of them here, so that we all get excited?

If that article has helped you, please share the love so that others can enjoy as well… Thanks

Image credit: Michael Lorenzo

No more
pursuing other people’s dreams,
following other people’s passions,
taking advice from those who ‘know better’
but actually know much less than I do.

No more
succumbing to the fear hypnosis of corrupt governments
echoed by disempowering chants of the cheerleading media,
following the blind herd of narrow-minded intellectual skeptics
into a ‘bright’ future of doom, gloom, poverty and spiritual death.

No more
ignoring those voices of Truth within me,
my heart, my intuition, my energy,
suppressing my passions,
falling victim to the illusive world of physical appearances.

That’s it
let my spirit be my sword of light
against the dream-stealing forces of darkness,
I’m off to the battlefield,
I’m grabbing life by the horns,
failure for me is not an option.

Dear Steve,
Thank you for inspiring a whole generation,
Thank you for innovating and never compromising on quality, simplicity, innovation and a lot more,
Thank you for capturing our imagination with your vision,
Thank you for turning your vision into a reality we can’t get enough of,
Thank you for revolutionizing the computer industry, the music industry, the mobile industry, to name just a few,
Thank you for sailing Apple (and us) into your dream destination through an ocean infested with sharks and hopeless skeptics,
Thank you for being a shining light amidst the darkness,
Thank you for daring to think different.
You have made a difference.

May God bless your soul. Rest in peace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Image credit: Christina Rutz

So you want to be a blogger… Or, maybe you are a blogger already? Whichever is the case, you probably know that once you get into the swing of business blogging, there are generally 2 avenues to take: You can either create quality, genuine, helpful posts or write short posts of pointless waffle or flat out promote your business in every single article. Oh, yes, you can also use ezine articles or just post YouTube videos with 50 words on top of them. So, that’s 4 routes right there, I guess… Now which road will you take? Here are 7 reasons why I would go for quality:

1.More traffic and leads

When creating a blog with top-notch content, you’re pulling traffic to your site rather than pushing the message out to your readers with methods like PPC advertising, press releases and the like. Moreover, people are more likely to share quality content via social media networks and social bookmarking sites like Digg and reddit. More traffic = more leads and a greater ROI (return on investment).

2.Gain expert status

One of the fastest avenues to gaining an expert status in your industry is to create a blog where you share thoughts, tips, resources and more. When you write quality, original content you become recognized with quality. This, in turn, will help build your expert status faster.

3.Attract guest bloggers

Quality attracts quality. When other bloggers recognize the quality of your articles, they will contact you, asking to write for you. They would want to be identified with a quality blog and they can see your blog growing, gaining large readership and getting a high PR in the future. That would make the link back to their website much more valuable.

4.Make a difference

When you put your heart and soul into the writing process, and write about meaningful things, you can make a difference. You can change lives. Words have power and if you use them with care your words can empower others. Don’t write anything just to check it off your to do list. This is pointless.  Your readers will spot it in seconds and you will harm your reputation.

5.Entice comments

Quality, thoughtful articles spark discussions and ongoing comments from your readers. You’ll get comments thanking you for your article and other comments telling you how someone is going to take action on your idea. Now besides being fun and encouraging to you, thoughtful comments will result in more comments and active comment threads will attract more readers to your blog, which could turn into long term subscribers and leads.

6.Build trust

Quality invokes trust. Just recall your recent buying experience. Have you ever come across a product sales page which is clumsily written? I have. Would you buy from such a website? I thought so… You see, when you want to establish trust with your audience, you’ve got to provide them value first. And the best way to do that, in my view, is to write quality content that solves their problems and shows them that you actually care about them and about the subject matter.

7.Attract writing offers

Just as bloggers will want to write for you, your quality posts will have webmasters and blog owners asking you to write for them. Although it does mean more time and effort on your part, writing for others could prove rewarding over time. Some benefits could be: High PR backlinks to your site, more visitors, speaking gigs and personal branding.

The mic goes to you!

What are your reasons to creating quality content?

What are your favorite content creation techniques?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

It can be that annual tax report you’re too scared to even start thinking about… Or proofreading the ebook you’ve just written… Or maybe updating your website so you can proudly show it to colleagues or potential JV partners…

Image Credit: Nintendo

You know what I’m talking about, right? Or is it only me? I don’t mean just any old burden but the tasks that may seem tiny and mundane but without them you can’t move to the next level in your career or life in general. You know those video games where you have to obliterate a monster or some other enemy just to get to the next stage? No matter how many points, golden coins, swords or mushrooms you’ve picked up along the way – without killing that one enemy, you’re stuck in stage 1. Now think about where you are today, and what the annoying thing is that’s standing between you and your own stage 2…

I’ve been stuck in stage 1 more times than I care to count. And yet still – just like playing stage 1 of Super Mario over and over just because you can’t beat that Pakkun Flower – I kept on putting off the thing I needed to do. For instance I used to shy away from phone calls. There would always be that one important call I would avoid making, sometimes even for weeks! I would get on the phone and as soon as I’d hear a dialing tone I’d hang up. Whether it was calling a company about a vacancy, apologizing to my professor for a late assignment or even ringing an old friend after a few months of no contact – I just simply would not do it. I couldn’t face that feeling of embarrassment, rejection or negativity from other people, and so I chose to play it safe. Then suddenly cleaning the fridge of my apartment became very urgent, anything else but the pressing task at hand.

And guess what?
The longer I left the task undone, the harder it became to actually do it. I’d feel more and more guilty, and hence too weighed down to focus on it.

There was this really big project I had to carry out that should have normally taken me 3 days. It actually ended up taking me more than 2 months. In other words, about 2 months of consistently saying: I’m just about to do it and then spend 3 days getting it done.  In retrospect I know that it was actually a mental block that has been keeping me from getting the job done.

How did I manage to finally get it done?
Well, here’s what I’d realized:
For every single thing holding you back, there’s another thing you’re really passionate about, or even addicted to. I believe this is common knowledge. Well, in my case I’m addicted to Twitter. I can’t end the day without checking my Twitter stats and replying to all (or most of) my mentions. No email? I can manage. No Facebook? No problemo. But once you’ve unplugged me from Twitter, I go nuts!!!

So here’s what I did:
For 2 days I deprived myself of Twitter. And boy did that hurt. I had a few sleepless nights of working like crazy and all the while had my Twitter followers in mind. But I knew I had to do it. I had to blast through it because the mental block had been delaying my progress. Twitter therefore became my reward for getting the task done!

And guess what?! It worked!

Sometimes you need to strike where it really hurts the most. Sometimes it’s the only way forward…

What about you?

What is your sticking point?

What are the techniques you use to blast through it?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

In the first version of my blog I had about 27 plug-ins, and boy, did they slow everything down…

When I redesigned my blog I had a goal in mind: No more than 5 plug-ins. Only the absolute musts! And here I am today, with 16 plug-ins and counting. Seriously, I’ve tried… But sometimes you just can’t resist the ease, the functionality, the simplicity So here’s my rule of thumb for you, my friends, the next time you’re considering a new shiny plug-in. Ask yourselves: “Do I REALLY need this functionality?” If the answer is yes, take it for a spin. If it messes up your blog’s layout, slows down your site or interferes with other plug-ins – give it the boot. If it delivers on its promise, keep it but try not to have more than, say, 20 plug-ins or your site will slow to a crawl. Not fun

I hereby present you with the list of the 17 plug-ins I’m using right now. Kudos to my man Garin Kilpatrick whose plug-ins list formed the ground base upon which I’ve developed my own plug-in ‘portfolio’.

Oh, by the way, all of the plug-ins below are free, except for Akismet. Some plug-ins, like WPtouch, have pro versions which are paid.

Absolute must have plug-ins

1. Google XML Sitemaps
This plug-in, alongside All-in-one SEO Plug-in has gained foothold as one of the essential plug-ins for WordPress. The reason is that it solves a critical SEO issue – Creating a sitemap for your blog. This free tool not only creates a sitemap for your site, but it also keeps it up to date and notifies the major search engines of any changes. There’s also an option to download the .xml sitemap file, in case you need to manually upload it to Google Webmasters or to other search engines. Plug-in site.

2.SEO Ultimate
The good old All-in-one SEO pack is great and over 7M downloads would testify for this. However, since that plug-in was introduced things have moved on and there are tools with far more advanced SEO features. SEO Ultimate is one such tool. This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over title tags, noindex/nofollow, meta tags, rich snippets, slugs, canonical tags, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets, and more. There are 24 modules which you can easily enable or disable to fit your needs. SEO for your blog has never been easier. Plug-in site.

3. Google Analyticator
Whether you’re building your blog to flip or using it to grow your own business, adding Google Analytics to is a must. The GA plug-in makes this task a walk in the park, and also gives you lots of neat features. You can avoid tracking certain user roles, such as Admin or Author, so you get more accurate results. You can also track your Google Adsense information, but the coolest feature is the blog Analytics preview you’ll get in your dashboard whenever you log-in to your site. Plug-in site.

4. WordPress Database Backup
This plug-ins makes it super-easy to maintain a regular back-up schedule of your WordPress tables. The core tables – including wp_comments, wp_links and wp-posts and more – will always be backed up. You can choose additional tables to back-up, how frequently and where to send the files to (your email, server etc.). Luckily I haven’t had a data loss disaster yet, so I’m not sure how helpful this backup is. But right now, it’s the best remedy I’ve found except for keeping the actual article Word files backed up. Any suggestions? Plug-in site.

5.Akismet
It’s probably a no-brainer and WordPress comes pre-installed with Akismet (and owned by the same company, surprisingly enough…), but I’ll mention it anyway. Up until recently I’d been putting off activating this anti-spam plug-in, but yesterday I went on and did it. And I’m glad I did. I don’t have time to moderate comments and I hate censorship anyway, so $5 a month for not having to worry about Viagra and gambling comment bots sounds fair to me Plug-in site.

6.Bad Behavior
This neat little fella denies automated spam bots access to your PHP-based website. In other words, it prevents the bad guys from even getting to your blog. It’s no Akismet replacement but can be used as an extra layer of protection. I’ve just checked my statistics only to find that BB has blocked 62 access attempts in the last 7 days! Sounds good to me… Plug-in site.

7.WPtouch
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that mobile is huge. In fact, mobile Internet is predicted to take over desktop Internet usage by 2014. If you’re not setting your website for mobile devices, you’re setting online business for failure. That’s why I’ve included WPtouch in the Must Have list. This nifty little plug-in will allow you to create a mobile version of your site in a few clicks. There are CSS customization options as well as a choice of icons to use, information about mobile plug-in support, to name just a few features. There’s also a pro version with advanced features such as iPad support and child themes. If you want to see the plug-in in action, try to access my blog from your mobile phone. Go to ProBlogger to see  the pro version in play. Plug-in site.

Social Plugins

8.Facebook Social Plugins
These days having a Facebook Like box and buttons on your blog is pretty standard. This handy plug-in allows you to easily integrate Facebook’s social features on your blog and it saves you the headache of messing around with Facebook’s clunky developers’ section. Facebook blog integration has never been easier. Plug-in site.

9.WP Socializer
This plug-in makes it a breeze to add social icons to your blog. You can add Facebook, Twitter and DIGG icons with counters as well as icons of dozens of other social bookmarking services and social networks. WP Socializer gives you full control on where you place those icons, ie on top of your content, below your content, in pages, archives and so on. You can also customize the CSS to control the placement and appearance of the icons. The new beta version looks promising and supports Google+. Plug-in site.

Comments plug-ins

10.CommentLuv
Much, much has been written about this little gem by Andy Bailey. This plug-in visits the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieves a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. CommentLuv has been proven to increase comments and the community spirits of the thousands of bloggers who have installed it. With this plug-in installed you will appear in the blog search engine on the ComLuv Network and you get the option to guest post and display your own posts on this high-traffic blog portal. In short, if you want more comment love, get CL… Plug-in site.

11.Thank Me Later
Comments are cool, we’ve already agreed on that one, right? Well, Thank Me Later takes commenting up a notch, by sending a quick thank you email to the commentator, encouraging them to come back soon. You can edit the default message and control the number and frequency of the messages. Plug-in site.

12.Do Follow
The idea behind Do Follow is simple – Remove the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. Why would you want to do that? To encourage comments. Some commentators use tools such as SEO for Firefox to spot unfollow attributes and give your site a rain check if you’re not using DF. Besides, there are many other reasons to vote against nofollow attributes. Could using DF result in more spam? Maybe. But you’ll get spam anyway once you get a substantial amount of traffic to your blog. So… back to #5☺ Plug-in site.

13. IntenseDebate
The ability to comment and to respond to readers’ comments is one of the key features that set blogs apart from regular sites. The comments help keep the flow of the conversation which is now so natural with the growing use of social media and forums. They help you communicate with your readers and grow your own little community around your blog. But here’s the thing – WordPress’ native comments are pretty, well, basic… And that’s where other commenting systems come into play. While there are a few viable options around it seems like Disqus is the most popular. Which is why I’m going for Intense Debate☺ What I love about ID is, except for the super-cool name, the ability to integrate other plug-ins, such as CommentLuv, into it. Moreover, ID duplicates all your WordPress comments, so in case you switch to other systems or stop using their service, you still own all your comments. Finally, as their name implies, using the system does convey a feeling of a heated debate going on, which can spice up your blog and encourage more comments. Plug-in site.

SEO Plug-ins

14.Efficient Related Posts
You may be familiar with Related Posts plug-in. The benefits of RP are huge. Not only does it improve your site’s SEO by building internal links, but it also improves the reader’s experience by keeping him in the loop and helping him find more relevant content after reading your post. This, in turn, means your visitor is likely to spend more time on your site. Bliss! Well, not quite… It turns out, that there’s an issue with good old RP. Aaron D. Campbell, the creator of Efficient Related Posts goes to great detail about it. I’ll spare you the long read though. In short, RP can potentially slow down your site to a crawl, because of its architecture, while ERP is super snappy. You be the judge… Plug-in site.

Audio & video plug-ins

15.Blubrry PowerPress
If you’re like me, you like to include interviews or other audio files on your blog. Well, with PowerPress doing that is a breeze. You can choose between over 5 different players, some of which are also compatible with video. Other options include iTunes integration, feed enhancement and control over the player’s appearance. Blubrry even gives you the (paid) option to store your media on their servers. This is a professional plug-in, made by podcasters for podcasters. Plug-in site.

16.Video QuickTags
We all know how important video is these days. Now although you can now integrate videos in WordPress easily by pasting the embed code in your post, Video QuickTags gives you so many more options. You can add videos from over 10 of the most popular video services, to include YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and more. Heck, you can even upload your own video files. Changing the player dimensions and color are a snap. (Thanks Justice for the recommendation) No more excuses for video skeptics   Plug-in site.

Performance plug-ins

17. W3 Total Cache
This performance plug-in is described by its developers as the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. The plug-in is trusted by many popular blogs like Mashable.com, Freelanceswitch.com & Yoast.com.
In my test W3TC made my site load x3-x4 faster. The only rant I have is that while fiddling with my theme’s CSS file I had to deactivate W3TC. Having the plug-in on meant I couldn’t see the styling changes when refreshing my blog pages. But considering the importance of site speed for better user experience & SEO, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it? Plug-in site.

How about you?

What are your favorite WordPress plug-ins?

Are you using any paid plug-ins in your blog?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below. Let’s compile the ultimate marketer’s plug-ins list together!

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

This post is the 2nd (and final) part of the blog series: 7 Simple Methods to Blog Like a Pro Even if you’re Not an Expert.

Here’s the link to part 1, in case you’ve missed it

5.Review products

One of the most profitable things you can do to monetize your blog is to write product review posts. When done right they also make for interesting content and can generate trust and position you as an expert. The beauty about reviews is that you don’t need to be an expert in order to craft them. You just need to make them thorough and ideally to have used the product yourself. Ana from Traffic Generation Café recommends Yaro’s Entrepreneur’s Journey as an example for writing reviews that convert.

Action steps:

1. Find 5 products (physical or digital) in your niche market, which you have been happy with. If you don’t have any products at hand, contact the product owner and ask to review their product. If you do this respectfully and show that you are serious they might give you free access to the product (this will mostly work for digital products only). Don’t abuse this technique though. Don’t ask for free product access if you’re not going to write a review. Personally I prefer to buy products so I can write a completely honest review about them.
2. Following one of Yaro’s reviews as a guideline, write a thorough review about each product, including an overview of the product, its upsides as well as downsides. Don’t simply copy the reviews provided by the product owner as you won’t gain any trust or sales this way.
3. Bonus points if you include a video with a walkthrough of the product or with yourself talking about the product and showing it in action.
4. You can offer bonuses to people who buy through your links, but if your blog provides really good content then you might not need these bonuses at all.
5. Try to link back to these review pages from your blog posts, in a natural manner. When mailing to your list, refer them to your reviews rather then straight to the product sales page.

6.Do a product/service faceoff

Do you know a few products or services that essentially do the same thing? Let’s take iPhone apps for example. There are a few apps, which let you manipulate photos, Instagram being one of the popular ones. Why not take 2 or 3 apps and compare them side-by-side? At the end you can choose your winner and ask your readers to nominate theirs. These posts generate interest because they give a lot of useful data and are easy to skim.

Action steps:

1. Choose 2 or 3 products or services that do the same thing. Example: HootSuite and Seesmic are both social platforms that basically give their users the same functionality.
2. Find about 5 points of comparison. For example: Speed, costumer service, robustness, efficiency, etc. For each point, write a paragraph comparing the 2 or 3 products. Use bullet points and even give grades for each service. People love numbers! Here’s how LifeHacker do it.
3. At the end of the article, select a winner. Encourage comments by employing a bit of conspiracy and leaving room for a debate.

7.Blog as you learn

Another approach you can take is that of your blog being a journey towards a destination. Let’s say you are into photography. You could say in your About Page or even on the header, something like: Jo’s journey to become a world-renowned photographer. A bit pretentious, I hear you, but you get the point. Here are the advantages of this method: Your readers can really relate to you because you come across as one of them. Your blog becomes a live learning process, which makes for interesting content, because you’re going to test lots of methods and products and share your hands-on experience. As you become a true expert, you will already have a loyal following of readers who have grown just as you have.

Action steps:

1. Decide what your ultimate goal is. Let’s stick to the example of a world-renowned photographer.
2. Choose a fitting slogan and header to go along with your image as an expert-in-the-making. Jo’s journey to become a world-renowned photographer could do the trick.
3. Tailor your About page as well as your bio on social media sites to your image. You could title your bio: Jo Smith, a world-renowned photographer in-the-making. In your About page present your blog as a learning experience for you and for your readers.
4. Your blog content could include reports of your success in your area (for example, showcasing g your photo experiments), interviews with experts, links to other useful blogs and resources and a lot more. You can encourage your readers to ask questions and give suggestions, thus taking an active part in the learning process and growing with you.

What about you?

Have you ever tried any of these methods?

What methods are you using to allow your expertise to shine?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it +1-ing it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

If you have any ideas for new blog series you’d like me to create, please let me know in the comments…

Well, I’m here to tell you to shake those doubts away and listen for a second. There are actually many things you can do to get started with blogging about your passion and not come across as unintelligent, even when you’re not an expert in that area. Some of these ideas I’m using myself and some will be brought into action in future posts. Hope you find these tips helpful…

Method #1: Interview experts

Doing interviews is one of the ultimate ways of generating fresh, quality content. You leverage the knowledge and experience of experts in your niche so your own expertise becomes irrelevant. Moreover, interviews are great way to create products (if you’re not using them for posts, that is) and to form fruitful relationships with experts. But the icing on the cake is that you come across as an expert by association. As you share the interviews with your audience, you are associated with the interviewees and, over time, gain expert status yourself.

Action steps:
Find experts in your industry in one of these 3 ways:

1. Google ‘[niche market] + blog’ (if it’s a popular blog, its owner is likely an expert in the relevant niche) or ‘[niche market] + expert’
2. Use any of these Twitter related resources to find influencers and then approach them on Twitter: Listorious.com, Wefollow.com, Twellow.com.
3. Look for Amazon best-sellers in your niche market. Authors of best-sellers are probably experts as well. Try to Google them and if they have a website, contact them there. Alternatively, Search for them on Search.twitter.com [LINK] or on other social sites like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Method #2: Create resource posts and pages

Are you using WordPress? Well, in that case there’s probably a boatload of plug-ins you’ve tested. Why not post about 20 of them? People love to read and share this kind of articles.  Another common (and profitable) way is to put together a Resource Page. Here you can review a few of the tools and services you’re actually using in your blog, with affiliate links to the product sites, just like Ana from the Traffic Generation Cafe did so beautifully. As your blog community grows, your resource posts and pages will attract more eyeballs and become a major source of revenue for you.

Action steps:

1. Go to your WordPress admin panel, and make a list of the 10 or 20 plug-ins you’re using and you’re happy with. Write a few lines about why you’d recommend it, with a link to the download page. Here’s a good example from Michael’s Income Diary.
2. Alternatively, make a list of the 30 most successful marketers today, the 20 most converting email headlines or anything else relevant to your nic.

Method #3: Display infographics

Unless you’ve been living under a virtual rock, you’re well aware of how infographics have been taking the Internet by storm over the last few years. Basically, they are a visual way of conveying data. Here’s a good example. Call me medieval, but I find it odd that with the rising popularity of video and dynamic websites, people marvel at a static image with fancy numbers, vector shapes and designer fonts, but that’s me. Fact is, peeps love data and numbers with a bit of eye-candy, and so everyday a gazillion of infographics spring up like mushrooms after rain. Heck, there’s even a startup company all about meeting the massive demand for these little fellas. So why not jump on that bandwagon?

Action steps:

1. Use Visual.ly to find great infographics to share with your audience. (since the copyright issue is often vague, either ask the infographic creator for permission to republish it or just show a screenshot of part of it and link to it from your blog).
2. You can also create your own infographic. Use Wikipedia and Google to find other reputable data sources. Visual.ly will soon have their in-house infographic creation tool. Alternatively, you can design your own infographic or outsource it to a designer, and upload it to Flickr and to Visual.ly for more exposure. These posts give great tips on growing your traffic with infographics and pitching them to other blogger.

Method #4: Analyze relevant blogs

If you are passionate about a certain topic, you probably read blogs about it on a regular basis. Why not take, say, 5 or 10 of your favorite blogs, or search for the top 10 blogs on that subject matter, and analyze them? This could make for an insightful article. You can search for similarities between them, e.g. layout , design, monetization methods and posting frequency. You can craft a whole article or even shoot a video going through what makes these blogs so popular. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

Action steps:

1. Use Google, Technorati, AllTop, 9rules or even Alexa to find popular blogs in your niche market. Make a list of the 10 highest ranked blogs.
2. Look for common traits among these blogs. For example: How often do they post? What are their monetization techniques? Does the blog owner reply to comments? Are there similarities in the layout of the sites?
3. When putting together the article, include a list with the blog names and relevant links. Then you can go through 5-10 questions and answer them. Try to include a takeaway at the end of each paragraph, to make it relevant to your readers. A summery with your key conclusions would be an excellent way to wrap up the article.

Part 2 of the article will be published on Thursday. Watch this space…

What about you?

How long have you been blogging for?

What methods are you using to show your experise?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it +1-ing it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

This dialogue is taken from the movie Hanna, directed by Joe Wright which was out last April.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Isaacs is a mercenary hired by Marissa wiegler, a corrupt CIA agent, to capture Hannah.

But what is it all about? Who is Marissa? And why would she want to capture Hanna?

I hear you!
OK, here’s the story behind the movie Hannah in a nutshell:

Hanna is a teenage girl. Uniquely, she has the strength, the stamina, and the smarts of a soldier; these come from being raised by her father, an ex-CIA man, in the wilds of Finland. Living a life unlike any other teenager, her upbringing and training have been one and the same, all geared to making her the perfect assassin. The turning point in her adolescence is a sharp one; sent into the world by her father on a mission, Hanna journeys stealthily across Europe while eluding agents dispatched after her by a ruthless intelligence operative with secrets of her own. As she nears her ultimate target, Hanna faces startling revelations about her existence and unexpected questions about her humanity.
(source: IMDB).

You can think about Hanna as the teenage female version of Leon (the professional) or as Run Lola Run meets Kill Bill. I watched it not long ago and although it hasn’t been praised by the media, it’s the kind of movie which will keep you on the edge of your seat, if you like action thrillers and don’t mind a bit of violence and blood stains on the screen (I do actually but I had fun all the same.) The movie has got great music as well, by The Chemical Brothers, which fits the fast-paced action perfectly.

Why am I telling you about Hanna?

Well, as I’ve already mentioned, Hanna is a teenage girl who didn’t have a normal upbringing. She didn’t go out with friends to the movies on Fridays. Nor did she spend her afternoons window shopping at the mall or chatting with her friends on Facebook. She didn’t have a telly so she couldn’t watch American Idol or Lost or The Bachelor or any other TV feel-good series. In fact, when you think of it, she must have had a pretty lonely childhood.

I mean, think about it: Growing up in the freezing wilds of Finland where your best friend is your father, and the only guys you can hang out with are probably reindeer, until you hunt them…  But here’s the thing: Hanna had had a goal. All her life she’d been trained by her father to become the perfect assassin. She practiced fighting, shooting, she perfected her German as well as many other skills. She read encyclopedias and accumulated a great amount of knowledge that would serve her later on in her mission.

And when the time came for her to act, she knew exactly what to do. She was the perfect assassin.

There’s a lesson for all of us here.
No, you don’t need to live in the middle of the Arctic. You don’t need to live with your Dad either. And please don’t become assassins. Of course not. Be good human beings! Hanna is just a fairy-tale movie, after all…

But here is what Hanna can teach us all:
When we have a goal and we really want to accomplish it, we need to focus most of our energies towards that goal. I don’t care what that goal is. It takes a lot of commitment and sacrifice to achieve the success we’re after. But if we stick to our guns we will ultimately get there.

I’m going to talk about my experience for a second. My current goal is to make this blog a success. Why? Because I love writing. I love blogging. I love reading comments and replying to them. And I’ve realized that my blog is to turn into my main lead generation source.

And here’s the thing: My success is going to be in direct proportion to the amount of effort I put into . Last month I’ve been doing many other things and have been blogging once or twice a week on average. Guess what? I’ve hardly had any new leads and my traffic has taken a nosedive. But now I’m about to change it, to spend much more on the blog and to optimize it for success. Ultimately I’ll be posting 4 and 5 times a week. I will also spend much more time on driving traffic to my blog by commenting on other blogs, guest posting and more. Will I get more traffic and leads? You bet!

You can do the same, whatever your passion is. Learn from Hanna and stay committed to your goals until you succeed.

What about you?

Have you seen Hanna?

What are the movies that have influenced you?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

Image credit: Cea.

VeteranBlogger.com is a site dedicated to help bloggers succeed online. A visit to the site reveals a wide variety of helpful articles on topics such as content creation, SEO, WordPress, affiliate marketing and more.
I got to know Bapun, the owner of Vetran Blogger via Twitter. I’ve asked him a few questions…

Bapun, as you describe on your blog, VeteranBlogger.com, you are an engineer and a longtime blogger from India.
I was really moved by your bio, where you say that you dedicate this blog to bloggers, who left blogging just for the lack of proper guidance. It really felt this way as I was reading through your blog. Your site is all about helping bloggers and guiding them on WordPress, making money online and more with simple and useful tips.
So, Bapun, having read a few of your posts I have the impression that you’ve been around the blogging scene for a while.

How did you grow this blog (VeteranBlogger.com)?

Having recently started this blog, I wanted it to be a catch all for the beginning blogger. What I realized via email questions is that many people want to diversify their WordPress [blog] without changing their whole theme. So as of late, a lot of my posts have been about different WordPress plugins and codes to add functionality. This has helped to grow the blog and obtain new readers via Twitter and word of mouth.

I think word of mouth is huge and goes hand in hand with [Google] +1. I try to utilize more social media than traditional link building to spread the word.

What bloggers have inspired you?

Some of the bloggers that inspired me: Ana Hoffman of Traffic Generation café, Lisa Drubec of The Friendly Blogger, Blogging with Beth, Devesh of Tech N Share, Gail Gardner from GrowMap, Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks and Ingrid Abboud from nittyGriddy blog.

It’s nice to shout out bloggers that I personally feel are in the same league as Darren Rowse and even Seth Godin. They don’t get enough recognition for what they do.

What are you doing to monetize your blog?

Right now, I am taking monetization slow. However, I do dabble in some affiliate marketing for products which I know and trust. I will never recommend something I think is a bad product. My readers are too important to me.

I also plan on developing a forum as an extension to Veteran Blogger that will utilize heavy hitters consulting services.

As you mention in your blog, one of the most common questions bloggers have is about how often to post. Yet you come up with 1-2 posts every day! What do you do to get fresh ideas? How do you get over writers block?

I have started posting twice a day. Whew! Writer’s block hits me when I least expect it; however, I know that people have asked me questions and I can post about that. I can also turn one post into a 2 part series.

I try to have a theme for the day and write 2 posts on that. For example if I discuss brand building, then both posts for the day will tackle that topic. I read A LOT of blogs. I learn from them and then try to come up with my own angle on what they taught me.

What other niches do you blog about?

LOL….many actually! I blog about movie releases/reviews, business blogging, people searches and becoming a DJ.

What does it take, in your mind, to become a successful blogger?

Dedication and true devotion to your blog. Patience is key here….if you throw in the towel too soon, you will not see the fruits of your labor.

What do you use Twitter for?

I use Twitter to build relationships and see what’s HOT right now.

What impact did Triberr have on your blog and on your social media presence?

Triberr has been a blessing. It allowed me to reach more people by utilizing relationships I have already built. It helped me to get new readers and learn about people I may never have heard about before.

There seems to be a heated debate over Triberr and some marketers see it as a way to game the system in order to gain more Twitter followers by automating
tweets. What’s your take on that?

I 100% DISAGREE. There is no one in my tribe that I do not know and vouch for. Therefore, they have built their brand with me and I know they are quality people. They do not game the system, use black hat techniques or spam their followers.

In my opinion, Triberr is not about gaining more followers, it is about reaching more people with your content. After all, that is everyone’s goal. It is a tool I use, along with many others to build my brand.

Now that you can review all posts before you tweet them, there is no reason people should say that it’s just blind tweeting.

Dino and Dan should be quite proud of their accomplishments. It’s like some people using Fiverr. They pay $5 to have their post or ad blasted to someone’s Facebook wall or Twitter followers. The people providing the service usually do not care what your ad or content is about…they want the money.

The benefit of Triberr is real people decide if you are trusted and reputable enough to belong to a tribe and provide value to their followers.

How about you?

What is your favorite blogging strategy?

What are your favorite blogs?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it or sharing it on Facebook? Thanks…

If you’re a blogger and would like to be featured, please contact me!

Image Credit: Artotem

Everyone wants to rank high on Google. It’s every person’s dream to master the keyword or phrase that he’s been working on since he’s realized the power of SEO. But, as we all know there are websites and blogs going up everyday and to get your site to the top page of Google is not as easy as it was before. Over the course of a year I have been studying video courses and YouTube to figure out how I can use both content and videos to rank up on the first page of Google faster.

Content will always be king but if you want people to stay on your website or blog more and you want to build a stronger community you need to add video within your site. A lot of people are too shy to get in front of the camera as I was about a year ago, but the best thing about online video is that you don’t need to create it yourself. There are companies or individuals that have already created the videos that you need in order to rank on the first page of Google!

Tip #1: Use videos that are relevant to your posts

Google owns YouTube, in case you didn’t know, so that means they are always working hand in hand with each other along with WordPress. So, when you’re writing great content you want to make sure that you are including videos within your posts. Make sure that the videos that you place on your site contain the keywords that you are trying to focus on primarily. You don’t want to include a video talking about dog accessories if your post is talking about dog parks. Stay within your same keyword so when Google crawls your site it’s easier for them to rank that post. Now, this is going to take some work but make sure that you do this and you do it consistently.

Tip #2: Add video to your guest posts

If you’re not guest blogging then make sure that you put that in your blog business plan and guest post twice per week. But, when you guest post, focus on doing “How To” posts and tutorials on different products to use. The reason you should focus on that is because there are always videos out there that cater to the subject matter you are writing about.  So, when you are guest posting you then insert your videos within your content so that your readers could get a better understanding of your content. When Google sees that you are inserting their videos from YouTube on your blog posts, you are going to rank higher and quicker than someone who is using Vimeo or other video sharing services. Guest blogging alone helps you rank higher for specific keywords but when you start using videos alongside your guest posts, you are now opening up more opportunities to master that keyword or phrase you are going after.

Tip #3: Find videos with relevant title keywords and tags

An example of a video that could easily compliment a post titled "How to get a six pack"

However, you don’t just want to insert any kind of video from YouTube. That is one of the biggest mistakes that people do with video. If you haven’t created the video yourself or outsourced it to a video guy then you want to make sure you are choosing the correct videos for your posts. Now, this is going to take some time but it’s going to be well worth it. Go look on YouTube and type in a keyword or a phrase you have wanted to rank for. Look for the views on that video and see if they are high and also check the tags of that video. If the tags compliment the keyword or phrase you are trying to rank for then use that video. Don’t just grab the first video that pops up. You want to grab the video that is using both the title keyword and tags in that video that match what you are trying to rank for.

Post Recap:
Make sure that you include video in your blog posts or website at least twice to three times per week when you’re writing content. When you’re searching for videos, make sure that the keywords in both the title and the tags in the video are matching. When guest blogging make sure that you get permission of the webmaster before you insert a video and if it’s okay with them then find the correct video to go along with that blog post.

If you are using WordPress, download a plug-in called Vipers Video Quicktags and it will be easier for you to insert video into your blog posts.

I was going to write this Paper.li tutorial for quite a while. A few weeks ago I was asked by one of my followers how to get Paper.li to work. As often happens, I’ve had many other things on my plate. Funnily enough, my tutorial couldn’t be more timely, it seems. As this post from the Paper.li blog announces, the Swiss content curation service has reached a major milestone a few short days ago: 1 billion published articles!

So what is Paper.li all about?

Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers to fresh news, daily.

The Paper.li team believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. They also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in. (source: Paper.li).

In simple words – Paper.li is a cool service which enables you to publish your own newspaper in less than 5 minutes. Now why should you even care?

Well, here’s why I’m using this service:

Paper.li enables me to curate content from my own Twitter stream and from the people I follow on Twitter. It does it automagically. Once a day my Paper.li

is updated and a tweet goes out, mentioning the 5 top contributors. I can’t tell you how many thank you messages I got from Twitter friends for mentioning them in my paper. This is a great starting point for a conversation and for a new relationship. Now these people will often retweet these messages and the paper edition, so that your paper quickly spreads around the social web. So, in other words, I’m using Paper.li as a relationship building tool. 

There are other reasons to use the customized paper: I’m sure it has SEO value, especially if you choose a targeted keyword as your newspaper’s name. The paper can be updated daily or even twice a day, which is likely to attract search engine spiders over time. So if the content there links back to your website(s) this can add you some link juice.

A newspaper format is also an easier way to consume large amounts of information, so instead of going through hundreds of Twitter streams which are updated every 2 seconds, you can the actual news sources in one nicely arranged paper edition. So that’s pretty nifty.

If there are other reasons you can think of, comment away! I’d love to hear!

OK, I hear you. Let’s cut the waffle. After all, you’re eager to get your paper printed, aren’t you?

1.Log-in and start a paper

Log-in to Paper.li, or Start a paper right away…

2.Grab a coffee/herbal tea…

Seriously, it takes a time to create a newspaper! You need to read through all the news, get all the reporters together, do the graphics, roll out the printers… So 5 minutes is even too little I’d say! Now go make yourself a drink…

3.Customize your paper

Choose a name for your new publication. If you really love yourself, choose your real name. If not, choose a relevant name. for example: The Typography Lover Daily. If you know of an SEO keyword you like then that could work as well. Or simply choose a sexy, memorable name, e.g The Honest IM Daily Now choose your language, and choose the content streams which would shape your paper. You can mix & match up to 5 streams, from Twitter, Facebook and your RSS feed. The simplest and probably safest option is the first one: Me & the people I follow.

4.Admire your new baby

Now look at that! Isn’t it beautiful? And your coffee is still hot!

After you’ve scrolled through your newly-born baby paper, admiring every pixel, you can do some editing. And if you see a really awesome article, why not reply the contributor with a thank you message? That’s how relationships are born!

5.Tweak your paper

Now just so you know: You can always tweak your paper, add a background image, change the update frequency and time and more. Choose an update time which suites your audience. Try to hit the traffic peaks, depending on where most of your followers are (everywhere?). I set it for around midnight GMT but you can test what works best for you.

And now the mic goes to you!

Are you using Paper.li?

What kind of papers have you created?

If not, why not?

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook and Delicious, digging it or stumbling it? Thanks…

If you have a social media solution you’d like me to review, please contact me!

Podcast/Audio version:

Transcript:

How I started using Twitter

Adam: Alright. So, I’ll just present you. Here we’ve got Frank Emanuele who I got to know through Twitter actually. I think if I’m not mistaken, I posed a question about Twitter addiction and I think you replied to that question and we started talking about Twitter chats and I realized that you’re quite an interesting personality so I wanted to interview you. Is that right? Is it alright if I just read the bio that you’ve got on Twitter because it’s quite …

Frank: Sure.

Adam: … interesting. You said you are …

Frank: Sure. Go ahead.

Adam: You’re a proud Catholic, social media nerd, podcaster, musician, blogger, New Yorker and the community manager at Likeable Media. I’m all about Superman, Star Wars and the Beatles. So it sounds that you’ve got quite a wide range of interests and hobbies. So I was wondering what brought you into social media in particular because I’ve been looking through your blog in Tumblr and you’re really into quite a few different subjects, in comics and tech.

Frank: Right. Yes. I do have quite a wide range of interests. What got me into social media, I guess it really started with MySpace, which I guess did for a lot of us, but yes, going over back to MySpace. My friends were all getting on it and I wanted to see what it was about so I checked it out and then from there, I went to Facebook and I was never as interested in Facebook as I was in MySpace. I don’t know why but MySpace was definitely dead so I wasn’t going to stick around there anymore. So I was on Facebook and then in 2008, someone told me about Twitter and that’s when things really started to take off for me. Twitter is my favorite, absolute favorite social network.

At the time, I was getting into podcasts. I’ve been into podcasting for a couple of years and I was getting to know other people who were into listening to the same podcasts that I was into and listening to some of my podcasts. I got to know them through forums, message boards and on these podcasts that I was listening to, people were talking about Twitter. These were not tech-related podcasts or social. They were about TV shows but we were all watching the same shows and going on forums to talk about them and then listening to the same podcasts together. So people started talking about hey, I’m using Twitter. Let’s talk over there.

So I joined Twitter just so I could follow the people who I was already talking to on those message boards and that’s kind of where it all started. That’s where it really started to kick off. I got really, really into Twitter after a while. It took me some time but I really got into it and almost three years later, I’ve tweeted over 70,000 times.

Adam: Wow.

Frank: And I follow about 600 people. I’ve got about 1200 followers. Not huge but it’s people who I’m interested in talking with and engaging with and it’s growing all the time. So yes, that’s how you could say I got into social media. It all started with MySpace and then kind of grew from there.

Adam: The good old days of MySpace before …

Frank: Yes, yes.

Adam: … Facebook took over.

Frank: Right.

Adam: Yes. I’ve actually had a look at your Twitter account and quite interestingly, even though you don’t have that many followers, you’re really engaged and you actually talk to people all the time. That’s how it seems at least.

Frank: I do.

Adam: That’s right.

Frank: I do. Yes. I mean that’s why I started using it in the first place was to talk with people who I was already friendly with and I can’t even tell you how many friends, good friends I’ve made through Twitter. People who I didn’t know at all, never heard of and then we started talking on Twitter and then we met in real life and now we’re good friends. We talk on the phone. We text. Like we’re close. I’m close friends with a number of people and it’s all thanks to Twitter. If it wasn’t for that, I never would have known these people and a big part of my life would be missing honestly.

Adam: Yes. I couldn’t identify more with you actually on that. I’ve made many friends on Twitter as well.

Frank: Yes.

Adam: And do you find that Twitter is like the hub where everything comes together, where you combine all of your different social endeavors? Is that your main hangout place on the Web and that’s …

Frank: Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. I’ve just joined Google Plus and that’s pretty interesting but not enough people are on there yet. Everybody is on Facebook but it’s almost like there’s too many people on Facebook, people who I don’t want to really talk to necessarily. I feel like I’m obligated to be friends with a lot of people on Facebook. Twitter is all about who I’m interested in, who I want to talk to. It’s a list of people that I’ve cultivated over three years and I’ve said these are the people I want to hear from. These are the people I don’t want to hear from and yes, it’s the hub. It’s the central nexus of all social media for me. It’s where I get my news. It’s where I keep up with my friends. It’s where I make new friends so yes.

Adam: Is that the same account you’re using for everything? Because I see sometimes that the company you work, you mention them on your Twitter stream as well. So I wonder how you find the balance between personal life and professional life or maybe you have separate accounts for that.

Frank: Actually, that is my main account. I have other accounts for silly things. My main account is Frank Ramblings. I’ve got another account called Beatle Ramblings. I tweet a lot about the Beatles because they are my favorite band of all time. I tweet a lot about them and sometimes, some of my friends would be like, “Alright. Listen, I like you but I don’t want to hear you talk about the Beatles all the time.”

So when I get into those fits of tweeting about the Beatles, I just go over to Beatle Ramblings and I tweet from there. Just the people who want it, who want to see it will see it and people who don’t want to see it don’t have to put up with it. But other than that, I’ve got different Twitter accounts for my different podcasts so you can keep up with those. But aside from that, my main account is just Frank Ramblings and I tweet both personal and professional stuff from there because the way I see it, some people say, “Don’t you want to make a separate account so that your coworkers don’t see your personal stuff?” I’m friends with my coworkers and I’m friends with my boss and I feel like I have nothing to hide.

So anything I can say on my personal account, I can have my coworkers, I can have my professional contacts see. So, I have nothing to hide.

How I became a Community Manager at Likeable Media

Adam: We’ve touched about the professional aspect. Your job is being a community manager for Likeable Media and …

Frank: Yes.

Adam: … before we elaborate more about Likeable Media, I was wondering if you could tell a little bit about what it actually means to be a community manager and how you got into this role.

Frank: Sure. I guess I’ll start with how I got there and then we’ll talk about what it really means. So I started out as an intern at Likeable Media late 2010 and I found out about it through an internship fair. I was still attending school at the time and I went there. I met with someone from Likeable and I applied. I went for an interview and that went very well so they offered me an internship which I accepted and I had done other internships but this was the biggest learning experience that I’ve had.

In just a few short months, I really learned a lot. I was doing a lot of hands-on work. This wasn’t the kind of internship where I was getting coffee for some executive or filing papers or something. I was actually doing hands-on work engaging with people, working with these clients through my managers, my community manager and others and getting some real field experience. So my internship was up. I had kind of talked with the management and they offered me a position there. So I very happily accepted it and that’s how I’m now a community manager.

I guess I should explain. We’re a social media marketing agency so we handle the social media presences for our clients. So this is clients as small as like little mom-and-pop stores or even charities all the way up to big, recognizable brands like Neutrogena. We work with them to make them more likeable. That’s our motto. All brands should be likeable so my role as community manager is to see to it kind of on a direct level that everything that gets posted on their Facebook and everything that gets posted on Twitter helps them achieve their goals and helps us to make them more likeable.

So that means coming up with the content that’s going to go up on their Facebook pages and Twitter pages. I sit with my own interns now to support me and I work with a social media strategy director. I work with her on creating the strategies and then my responsibility is to put them into practice, execute them. So that’s kind of the general gist.

How you can become a community manager yourself!

Adam: Alright. Sounds very interesting. If one of our listeners wanted to become a community manager, where would you say is the best place to start for him or her?

Frank: Best place to start is right on Twitter, right on Facebook. You’re starting right there. Build a presence for yourself. Make connections. Build a community around yourself and get engaged with them and learn as much as you can on your own before you do anything else. That’s number one. That’s what I did. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing but it’s essentially what I did. I was preparing myself for this role getting to know Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn and Foursquare and all the different social media platforms that are in use today and staying on top of the news, reading Mashable, reading TechCrunch, reading all those sites, knowing your stuff, reading blogs.

Once you do that and you still know this is definitely what you want to do, this is where you want to be, this is the space you want to be in, next is find the company that will help you do that. Find the people, like-minded people and see if you can get an internship there or just any kind of social media experience whether that’s on the brand side or on the agency side. But try and get as much practical experience as you can and then once you’ve got the experience, you should make yourself stand out. As you’re getting the experience, I guess, make yourself stand out and show that you have the passion, you have the drive and you have the knowledge to do this. Once you have done that, if you’ve done it correctly, if you’ve really pushed yourself as hard as you can, you will get noticed and things will start to work out for you.

Adam: It sounds like a very stimulating job. I imagine that for many of our listeners, that’s what they do anyway. So it’s just taking it to the next level, isn’t it?

Frank: Yes, yes. It’s pushing yourself as hard as you possibly can. I mean when I was an intern, I had my hours, were like 9:00 to 5:00 but I was staying late at the office. I was bringing work home with me to get it finished. I was doing whatever was necessary just to get the work done at the highest quality possible and to keep the clients happy, make the clients happy and that’s when I was an intern.

Once I actually took on a fulltime position, I really had to bring it to the next level and now I really work extra hard and I’m always looking for new ways to be as efficient as I can and get as much work done as I can and  keep the clients happy. I mean my clients are great. They never pressure. They never push. They’re really, really fantastic and that drives me even harder to want to make them happy and do what I can for them to help them achieve their goals. So, yes, it’s a lot of hard work and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. You have to really be excited about social media and about the brands that you’re working with and you really have to always be willing to go an extra step.

The Thank You Economy and why transparency is key

Adam: Actually, you’ve been talking about hard work and that just reminds me of a post I’ve read of yours about Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest book, The Thank You Economy …

Frank: Yes.

Adam: … which I’ve actually started reading and I mean if I could sum it up in a few sentences, I can say that Gary speaks about the importance of being transparent and about really paying it forward and recognizing when you’ve made a mistake and also thanking your customer and it seems like this is also in line with the Likeable Media’s mission statement.

Frank: Absolutely.

Adam: Would you elaborate a little bit about this?

Frank: Absolutely. Absolutely. Our core values are drive, passion, transparency, likeability. These are all things that are essential to marketing in general but especially the social media marketing.

Transparency is one of the hugest, most important things that there is. If a brand can’t be honest with its fans, then there’s a real disconnect there. People have a good sense of when they’re being told the truth and when they’re being lied to and you really can’t play with that. They’re just going to know so what you need to do is you have to care and care passionately and show how much you care and mean it. You can’t fake it. It has got to be genuine. If it’s not genuine, the whole thing is going to fall apart.

You can’t try and push a terrible product on people and play it off as being great. That’s not going to work. If you’ve got a terrible product, they’re going to find out and it’s going to backfire on you because when they post on your Facebook wall, they’re going to tell the whole world how terrible your product is. Just because you have a Facebook page doesn’t mean that you’re going to do great. You have to be transparent and that has to drive you to improve your product, improve your services, to want to please those customers and the more you do that, the more there’s going to be sort of a feedback loop.

You do good things for the people, they’re going to come back and repay you with good feedback and that should inspire you to want to do even more good things, provide them with more good products and services and it should just be a loop that continues round and round from there.

I mean my CEO, Dave Kerpen, very wisely says in his own book, the four most important words in social media are “thank you” and “I’m sorry”.

Adam: Yes. I’ve seen the video. There’s a video about it on your Facebook page.

Frank: Right.

Adam: … I’ve seen that where he says that.

Frank: And it’s very true. If you aren’t saying thank you, then you’re not going to keep people and if you can’t say I’m sorry, you’re going to be turning them off. So, yes, we’re all about transparency at Likeable.

Costumer engagement strategies used by Likeable Media right now

Adam: And as far as you can share obviously, what key strategies are you using to engage your audience in social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? What are the main strategies you’re using?

Frank: It’s actually really pretty simple when you get right down to it. It gets down to trying to get people to talk, right? The way Facebook works, you post the status and it shows up in people’s newsfeeds, right? Most of the time, people don’t actually go to a Facebook page of a brand that they like. They don’t go there every single day. They see the updates in their newsfeed when they check Facebook and the way things get sorted in Facebook is by like popularity. It’s called edge rank. That’s the term that Facebook has come up with and basically, the way it works is the more likes and comments that a status gets, the longer it stays in your newsfeed and the closer to the top of your newsfeed it will be.

So we try to come up with content that we think is going to get lots of likes and comments and we push the envelope as many ways as we can. We try different things. It can be as simple as asking people to like a status. Just putting “like this status if you agree” or something like that or a really great way is to put a question, a simple question that people will want to answer. I mean it’s not really rocket science. It’s the simple tools of communication that we already have in everyday life. If you want someone to talk to you, you’re going to start the conversation somehow and that we’re just applying it to the internet. But it’s finding the ways that people engage more and engage less and trying out new and innovative ideas all the time. That’s what keeps us on our toes.

How to get started with Twitter Chats

Adam: Alright. As for Twitter, I know that you’ve been using Twitter chats, right? Do you …

Frank: Yes.

Adam: … do it for your brand as well, for Likeable?

Frank: Yes. Every Sunday night at 10:00 PM Eastern, we have Likeable chat. It’s a great, great experience. I’ve met so many people as a result of Likeable chat in just a few weeks that we’ve been doing it. It has been over a month and I’ve met hundreds of people already who I think are really smart, great thought leaders in the social media space and yes, Twitter chats, I’m a huge fan of them. I had never really done very many until last month and now, I’m all about Twitter chats.

Adam: So what does someone need to do just to get started? Just to search for the hashtag, for the relevant hashtag?

Frank: Yes. Every Twitter chat has a hashtag already associated with it. All you need to do is be running a search for the hashtag and be updating it and you’ll be seeing the people who are talking about it at that time. A really easy way to do this is you go to TweetChat.com. They have a tool where you just type in the hashtag and it automatically refreshes every minute or so or every 30 seconds. I’m not sure what the interval is.

It automatically refreshes and it automatically sets it up so that you can talk to the people who are using that hashtag and you don’t even have to remember to include the hashtag. It will put it at the end of your tweet for you. Really, really easy and convenient. I use it every Sunday night for #LikeableChat. It’s really, really awesome. It’s a great way to engage with people who have the same interests as you do.

If you’re looking for a Twitter chat to participate in, a simple Google search for the topic that you like and Twitter chat at the end will yield a lot I’m sure. If you’re looking for social media Twitter chats, right on the Likeable.com blog, we have a list. Just like last week, one of my colleagues posted a list of some great Twitter chats about social media that you could really check out other than Likeable chat. There are some really great ones. So, I highly recommend checking those out but like I said, even a simple Google search will yield whatever you like.

Adam: Wonderful. So, just to sum this up, if people want to find you, to get a hold of you or to chat with you, where would they go?

Frank: The easiest place to find me and chat with me, you’ll always get an answer, is Twitter.com/FrankRamblings. I’m at Frank Ramblings. I answer everybody. No reply goes unanswered so yes, definitely check me out there. I’ve also got a website, FrankRamblings.com. Those are my primary channels but come engage. We’ll talk about anything and I look forward to hearing from anybody.

Adam: That’s great. That’s great. So, is there anything you wanted to say to add?

Frank: I just want to thank you for having me. It has been really great to chat with you. It has been great chatting with you both on Twitter and off and I look forward to seeing how this series of yours works out.

Adam: Alright. Thank you very much. It has been a real pleasure.

Frank: Thanks. You too, Adam.

Adam: See you soon.

Frank: Bye.

Adam: Bye.

What about you?

What strategies are you using to engage customers?

Would you like to become a Community Manager as well?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook and Delicious, digging it or stumbling it? Thanks…

If you deal with social media and would like to be interviewed, please contact me!

Image Credit: Hector Landaeta

Another chaotic day in your workplace has come to an end. Frustrated as you’ve been there over the last few months, you murmur as you walk past the door: “this cannot go on. I’m starting my own business!”

Is that you?

OK. I’m guessing that if you’re reading this article you can probably relate to this story. You are fed up with mediocre life, you hate your boss and you want to start your own thing online. Since you’re in this very blog, I will further assume that Network Marketing is what floats your boat. That’s cool.

But let me ask you this:
Are you serious about your business?

About 95% of online marketers fail. In fact, it’s true for the general population as well. There are many reasons for these sad statistics. Napoleon Hill – in his timeless classic Think and grow rich – details as many as thirty major causes for failure.

I want to talk about four key causes though:
• Lack of self-discipline (aka Lack of self control)
• Procrastination (aka Waiting for the right time)
• Lack of persistence (aka Giving up too soon)
• Lack of concentration of effort (aka Lack of focus)

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing Network Marketing for some time, I’d recommend you be honest with yourself and go through the above list. If you feel that you’re spinning your wheels or not seeing your desired progress in the business, you’re probably suffering from at least one of these symptoms.

What sets successful entrepreneurs apart from most of those who fail? First and foremost – as Earl Nightingale put it in his famous recording The strangest secret in the world – successful people have goals. Hence they know where they’re going. As simple as that.
Have you set your own goals?

I’m talking about any goals you may want to attain – in life as well as in business. Once you get clear about your goals, all the rest will seem much easier!

Let’s take an example: Say your financial goal is to earn $5,000 per month in your business by the end of this year. Now, you put together a plan of action. You work out that you need to make about $166 per day to make that happen. In other words, you need to sell just over 8 products per day with $20 commission. One sale every 3 hours. Sounds attainable, right?

Obviously, making money shouldn’t be your only goal, as you’ll need to pursue your passion in order to succeed. If you’re in this business only for the money you are setting yourself for failure as you’ll get burnt out pretty soon…

Now you work out the marketing strategy. You build a schedule you can commit to. You start taking action. And here is where you join the %5 of successful marketers: You commit to your plan. You become disciplined. Facebook can wait and so can checking your email or watching Desperate House Wives. You don’t procrastinate because you know that the only time to act is now and that someday never comes. You don’t give up too soon because you understand that it takes time to build a successful business. And you maintain a concentrated, focused effort. There’s a squillion of ways to make money online. Don’t be a failure Jack-of-all-trades. Choose one way and follow it until you succeed.

There are other important causes for failure but overcoming the aforementioned four will put you on track to success. Remember – you are building a business here. The amount of effort you put into it dictates what you’ll receive in return. This is a Universal law that never fails.

“… Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7 KJV)

What about you?

How is your business doing?

Have you set yourself any goals?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook and Delicious, digging it or stumbling it? Thanks…

But here’s the good news! I’m going to share with you 7 powerful methods to keep track of your followers, to strengthen your ties with them and to dust off old relationships which otherwise would have been forgotten…

Image credit: Per Hardestam

#1: Harness the power of KLOUT

As you may know, Klout has become the Internet standard for influence (at least according to Klout…) The jury is still out on whether their measurement is accurate and whether it should really matters to anyone. However, here are 2 key ways for you to leverage the social influence site for strengthening the ties with your Twitter followers:

1. +K them. Klout enables you to vouch for your peers’ influence in topics. If you want to reward any of your followers you can simply look him/her up on Klout, choose a topic you think he/she provides value on, and choose +K. Eventually this can effect their Klout score and they will see you’ve rewarded them the next time they visit the site!
2. Talk to the tweeps you Influence. In your Klout dashboard you can see a list of  tweeps who are influenced by you. Now all you have to do is click on their thumbnail and look for their Twitter icon on the top-right of the page. If Klout believe you are an influencer of someone, it probably means he/she RTs your tweets and/or mentions you often. That person is likely to welcome any interaction from your part.

#2: Use the power of FREE

People love free stuff. Any newbie marketer knows that. I’ve recently tweeted a message about how to get Google+ invites and it got retweeted like wildfire. Whether it’s a free eBook, video, beta invites to a product, white papers and so on – it’s likely to attract a lot of RTs and get your followers attention. Don’t over do it though, otherwise your  freebie tweets will seem spammy  and will lose their appeal.

Takeaways
Once or twice a week do a few tweets, a few hours apart, about your free stuff. It can be something like How to: Get my latest SEO Domination report for FREE [Link to your freebie].  Note: It’s vital to include the word FREE and not to over-hype your tweets
 

#3: Get out of Twitter!

No, really, there are a few other social networks out there! No, they’re not as cool but on some of them you can actually use more than 140 characters each time (duh!) So although Twitter may be your main social hub, you can use it to drive followers to other networks where you can carry on the conversation with your followers and get to know them better.

Takeaways

• Include your Facebook/LinkedIn or your About.me page in your Twitter bio (but not instead of your main website!)
• About once a day tweet something like Are you on #Facebook? Why not join my Facebook party as well? [Link to your fan page]
• When you start interacting with tweeps DM them with your LinkedIn/Facebook personal profile link (we’re talking relationships here, so go personal) so you can contact beyond 140 characters. But for God sake, don’t use an automated DM. Capisce??
• Create lists on Facebook and tags on LinkedIn for your new Twitter friends, so they don’t get lost in the crowd.

#4: Have I got news for you…

When you update your blog, let your followers know. You’re probably saying: Duh! That’s what we’re using Twitter for anyway! I hear you… Here’s the thing though: The more you use Twitter, the more you’ll have friends you talk to a lot and tweeps who like you and the content you share and blog about…

Takeaways
What if you DMed a few of your Twitter friends to let them know personally that you’ve got a new exciting post about XYZ? This will make them feel special and more likely to keep watching you and engage with you. Again, use it sparingly, don’t become an annoying self-promoter. That’s just not cool.
 

#5: Ask a question

One of the best ways to engage and to get your followers attention is to ask questions. It doesn’t really matter what you ask, but try to keep the subject matter relevant to your audience. Open-ended questions are more likely to lead spark conversations, but yes/no questions also work well because Twitter is about short and quick massages. Don’t be afraid to appear as a dummy on a certain subject.

Takeaways
If you want to know something, just ask. Twitter is an unbelievable way of learning on people’s opinions (thanks @ChrisBrogan). When you get answers, thank the answerers. You can go the extra mile, and @reply the tweeps who’ve helped you with your conclusion. For example: Thanks @Jo @Jane @TwitKing @princess BTW 9 out of 10 tweeps prefer #FamilyGuy over #Friends
Questions I’ve asked lately:

• I asked for technical feedback on my site when I was redesigning it
• [QUESTION] Anyone using #Triberr here? How has your experience been? Would you recommend it? Pls RT Thanks:)
• [QUESTION] Are you addicted to Twitter?

#6: Shout!

The beauty of Twitter is that whenever you mention someone, that person will see it in their Mentions feed even if they’re not online when you are. Of course, some popular tweeps (@LadyGaga? *cough*) are boat-loaded with @mentions so they’re less likely to notice let alone react. But most of us mortals shall notice and even reply you!

Takeaways
Every now and then think of some followers you’d like to ‘bring back to life’ and give them a #shoutout. Here goes:
#ShoutOut @JohnDoe @JaneWhatever @George5th How is it going?
Keep this technique for special occasions and it will work like a charm. I’ve been able to ‘awaken’ tweeters after months of silence this way.
 

#7: Sharing is caring…

If you’re like me, and even if you’re not,  the lion’s share of your tweets are links to valuable online resources – blog posts, videos, music and so on. The thing with Twitter is that the shelf life of your tweets is pretty short, normally no longer than 24 hours. But here’s the good news: As the future of Delicious.com is unclear, a new link sharing service has sprung up. Trunk.ly will collects the links that you find interesting across the social web and will even make them easily searchable.

Takeaways
Register with Trunk.ly via Twitter and invite your followers to follow you there so they can see the all your links they’ve grown to know and love, and even share them with more people!
You can tweet something like: Find all the links I’ve ever shared with you [Link to your Trunk.ly profile]
Tweet this once a day and you’ll be rocking the house…

What about you?

What are your tips on staying in touch with your followers?

Are you willing to share them with the rest of us?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

If this post has been of value to you, why not share the love by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook and Delicious, digging it or stumbling it? Thanks…

She was so cute. Blond hair, probably about 12 years old. She stood there with her friend, a few meters from the entrance of the supermarket. I had just done my little shopping and persuaded my friend to join me for a glass of lemonade. I wasn’t particularly thirsty but loved the entrepreneurial spirit glowing on these 2 kids’ faces. Heck, I think it was Friday and they could have come home and play the Wii or watch TV just like their peers, yet they’d chosen to work hard, or hustle, for their money.

The blond girl slipped the coins into her piggy bank and poured us 2 glasses of lemonade with mint leaves. Although the drink wasn’t cold enough it was one of the tastiest lemon drinks I’d ever had…

Image credit: Amy Gizienski

Which reminds me of another person who put Dale Carnegie’s phrase If life gives you lemons, make lemonade into a practical test… Life may have not given him too many lemons in the negative sense of the word, but at the age of 8 Gary Vaynerchuk had 7 lemonade stands scattered around his New Jersey neighborhood, in full swing. Just imagine a little boy, his pockets jam-packed with coins and dollar notes, roaring around on his Big Wheel to collect his cash. Yes, Gary had become a young business owner before he had the guts to ride a bike…

Could this explain that contagious energy, that passion, that fire burning inside the wine-expert-turned-social-media-sensation?

Much, much has been written on Crush it!
Many reviews have been posted on blogs and sites across the web and over 500 reviews adorn Amazon.com alone.

Although Gary Vaynerchuk’s first book was written 2 years ago, I believe it still makes a useful read.

Update: Now you can win Crush it! and 39 other awesome books for entrepreneurs. more details here.

Here’s what this book is not:

• Finely written nonfiction. Gary is not a natural-born writer, nor does he claim to be. But he is a gifted speaker and presenter, which is the reason he chose video as his key blogging platform and used a tape-recorder to dictate Crush it!.
• An in-depth How to guide or a detailed step-by-step plan on how to build your personal brand on social media. To be fair, I was expecting Gary to elaborate more on the technical side of things. His action plan sounds good, but unless you’re a complete social media newbie, you’re in for major disappointment as the How to parts here are too simplified as well as out of date. OK, not completely irrelevant but so much has evolved in the social space over the last 2 years which would probably make any 2009 social media guide look dated. Therefore, seeking traffic and blogging advice in forums and active blogs would make much more sense.

Here’s what this book is:

• An insightful biography of a successful, self-made multi-millionaire. I was particularly impressed by his childhood details where you can really see how the entrepreneur inside him was forming. That’s where his beliefs in hard work, gratitude and customer care were taking shape as he saw his father succeeding in the family business.
• A no-excuses Take Action manifest of a person who’s truly passionate about his message. This book really seems like the essence of what Gary believes in, of how important it is to ‘follow your DNA’ and be true to your passion, to create a community around your personal brand, to work hard and care for your customers and a lot more. I’ve  been dying to do this book… Gary writes, …because it drives me crazy to know that there are still people out there who haven’t figured out that they don’t have to settle. Indeed, while reading the book it felt to me like Gary had had that fire burning inside him which he couldn’t contain anymore and had to get out to the masses.
  You’d be crazy to read it through without taking action.
• A book that is likely to break a few myths that might have held you back. Examples:
• There’s no point in starting an online business if my passion is not dating, weight loss or dog training
  
• Spending 8 hours a day answering emails is an utter waste of time
  
• Why would I give a s*** about one unsatisfied customer if all the rest are happy?
  
• Why work hard when you can run all your business on autopilot?
• A great motivational book from a person who has ‘been there’. Gary’s amazing energy is evident as you read the book. If you’ve ever heard Gary speak I’m sure you realize how passionate he is about what he talks. This book is no difference. In fact, that was the main reason I bought it. I wanted to soak more of his powerful energy.

Maybe a nice way to sum up this article would be to go back to Amazon.com.
Right now, a review by Julie S.C.Y tops the Costumer Review section. It was one of the few negative ones (most reviews were 4 & 5 stars) and although it was written back in 2009, Julie’s review has caused a tremendous stir in the comments section, so much so that comments on it are still trickling in today.

In short, Julie had looked forward to Crush it! but was let down.
She blames Gary for using the book as a PR tool and a personal sales pitch. Well, as I’ve explained before, there is a lot about Gary in this book. But I’ve found it to be a positive thing though. Having the chance to get an intimate encounter with Gary’s childhood, his insights, his vision and success fundamentals fascinated me. True, these are more or less the same things you would hear him speak about in his videos and keynotes, but here they are much more in-depth. Also, if you read between the lines you’d get a lot of business insight from Gary’s descriptions of his childhood baseball card ventures, his work at the wine shop as a teenager and a lot more.

Gary describes himself in Crush it! as a ‘walking contradiction’. He really believes in himself but then he’s humble and talks about how unimportant he really is. He couldn’t care less what other people think but he does respect people and pays attention to what they say.

And pay attention he does. One of the comments Gary wrote back to Julie goes:
…I really am sad that you think its a PR piece, that would be the last thing I would want to do, I just wanted to write what I knew, which is what I did! I hope we get to meet in person and please understand I respect your thoughts for sure! …

How about you?

Have you read Crush it!?

What do you think about Gary Vaynerchuk and his business philosophy?

Are you pursuing your passion online?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

If you liked this review, why not share the love by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook, digging it or stumbling it? Thanks…

Update: Now you can win Crush it! and 39 other awesome books for entrepreneurs. more details here.

Over the past few months I’ve been working heavily on my Twitter presence. Throughout this time I’ve learnt a lot about the best ways to create engagement, credibility and increase your following on Twitter. As you probably know, Twitter is growing in a staggering pace [DATA], and so are the third-party tools around it. Therefore the learning never stops and I’m learning new, exciting things everyday.

From now on, I’m going to dedicate Thursdays to posts about social media and Twitter in particular. I’m going to share a lot of my knowledge and experience, to review related products and more. I hope it helps you succeed. Your feedback and ideas are welcome of course…

How to Stop Twitter Addiction

I’ve been using Twitter since 2007, but only a few months ago did I start exploring its full potential. Although my hard work had paid off, spending countless hours engaging with other tweeps, reading tweets and retweeting them came with a price tag. I realized that, like many of you, I was a twitter-addict. There are many reasons why, just like Facebook (or even more) Twitter would keep us to the edge of our seat. That could easily require a separate post.

However, I’m going to assume you don’t care why you’re addicted. You just want to be rehabbed… So here are 7 ways to stop Twitter addiction:

#1.Limit your Twitter-time

Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s Law? It says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In other words, it means that if you had 12 hours free, you’d tweet 12 hours. If you had only, say, 15 minutes a day allocated for tweeting, the task would suddenly look simpler and take much less time. While it doesn’t always work ‘right out of the box’, it’s a good idea to limit yourself to a reasonable amount of time on Twitter, just like you would on any other social network. Once you @mention others they will get your tweet and reply you even if you’re away.

Takeaways
Set an egg timer. I suggest a session of 15 minutes a day or 2 sessions of 15 minutes each, to accommodate time-zone differences. This free online stopwatch will get you started (thanks, @rachelkarl).

#2.Schedule tweets

Here’s the thing: On one hand, you need a certain ‘tweet frequency’ to build your presence on the social network. That’s how it works, because unlike Facebook and other social networks where there’s an actual page of posts, Twitter is more like a river – a constant flow of information. If you don’t flow with it, you are soon forgotten behind. On the other hand, you can’t spend all day on Twitter right? We’re trying to rehab you here, remember? So what do you do?

Well, my advice is to schedule tweets. It’s ok; no one really expects you be chained to your laptop 24/7. There are also time-zone differences which mean you can’t be up when all your followers are. Just don’t forget to also engage with people. That’s where Twitter gets really fun as well as powerful.

Takeaways
Follow @awsamuel’s social media plan. It’s a good plan to get started with. @ChrisBrogan suggests that for every self-promotion, RT 12 links to other people’s posts. I tend to agree.

#3.When it’s time to say Goodbye…

I bet you’ve seen this kind of conversations:
Tweep A: RT (your link here) < Great post!
Tweep B: Thanks a lot for the RT!
Tweep A: You’re welcome
Tweep B: How is it going, by the way?
Tweep A: Going great, sunny day… How bout you?
Tweep B: Not too bad, thanks.

You see, it’s taken 6 tweets for a pretty boring, not too valuable conversation, let’s face it… I’m not saying you shouldn’t be polite, but Tweep B could have done without the How is it going… bit, and the world would have kept turning. There’s time to talk and time to say goodbye! Twitter is an open conversation platform, so every time you tweet it creates more noise on the public timeline of your followers.

Takeaways
Think before you tweet and keep conversations short and sweet… You’ll save a lot of time and your followers will love you more

#4.Clean your stream

One of the things that really get us hooked into Twitter is the constant flow of tweets in the public timeline (our followers’ feed). Sometimes the pace is so rapid that you can hardly click on a link before another 30 tweets turn up. Worse yet, probably most of these tweets are useless junk in the form of automated feeds/sales messages/hashtag spam etc. Useless waffle but eats up your valuable time all the same!

Takeaways
Every few weeks, spend about 20 minutes in front of Twitter and weed out the time-wasters as you please:

• The tweeters on steroids (tweet every 5 minutes or so. I’m not talking about conversations, but rather about automated tweets)
• The followers’ obsessed (FOLLOW ME, I’LL FOLLOW YOU BACK etc.). No offense if that’s you but these tweeps know nothing about value or engagement.
• The classic spam bots (a weird username, no profile photo, no followers but 1000s of updates us, tweets like: “Did you hear this, Douglas?” followed by your handle and an affiliate link to some crap.)
• The hashtag spammers (weather it’s #5thingsyoucantdo or #obama – as long as it’s trending, they’ll tweet about it, just to get a bit of attention.)
• The @reply spammers (they are real, annoying people who try to get your followers attention. They would simply @reply to you with an affiliate link.)

You can use Tweepi and ManageFlitter to speed up the process.

#5.Use lists

Even if your timeline is cluttered, there’s still hope… You can use lists, which are filtered by your followers’ location, bio, following/followers count and a lot more. This way your Twitter sessions become much more useful and relevant and it’s much easier to keep them short.

Takeaways

• @awsamuel has got an excellent post on using Twitter lists. Start there!
• Formulists allow you to generate lists automatically following certain criteria. There’s a free limited version and a premium version for very little.
• You can also find lists that interest you and follow them on Listorious.

What about you?

Are you addicted to Twitter?

What makes Twitter so addictive?

Any ideas on how to fight Twitter addiction?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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