Jordan Cooper ran a competition on his (hilarious) Not A Pro Blog blog, the competition was “Regift & Win $500“, where to win you had to come up with the best joke relating to technology. Mine was simple, really unfunny, yet I won.

The prize – 2 Months Paid Subscription to Problogger.com forums. A prize that was won by Jordan on a competition on Erica Mueller’s blog. As well as an hour’s comedy coaching with Jordan. However, if I was to regift it, I could win $500.

So here we are, a Gospel According To Rhys Competition!

Rules

The rules are simple – simply write a comment below to enter. You get 5 further entries if you are a registered member the Gospel According To Rhys Newsletter. However, the comment must be an answer to this question:-

“What has been the worst gift you’ve ever given or received?”

The winners will be announced on my Birthday post (March 4th) in a contest organised by random.org.

The Prizes

The prizes for this contest are long & numerous:-

• 2 Free Months on the Problogger.com Forums (from Erica Mueller)
• 1 Hours Private Comedy Coaching for Bloggers (from Jordan Cooper)
• 3 Months Advertising on The Gospel According To Rhys (from me)

The Regift Element

With a massive disregard of duplicate content rules, I’ve copied this verbatim from Not a Pro Blog’s original post:-

Now, this is where the fun stuff starts happening. The contest isn’t over yet. The person that wins the above joke contest has a choice of two options:

1. Accept the prize of two months paid membership at the ProBlogger forums.
2. Regift the prize in their own blog contest and get entered into a drawing for $500 cash.

What’s the catch, you might ask? Well, here are the ground rules if you choose #2.

• You must regift the prize on your own blog within two weeks of winning.
• The winner of your contest must be given the same choice: Accept or Regift.
• That blogger must continue under these same guidelines as laid out here.

Every regifted prize winner will get one entry into a random drawing for $500 cash.
If the “chain” is broken and anyone accepts the prize outright without regifting it…
The contest is over and no one wins anything!

I will be keeping track of the prize transfers from blog to blog on the bottom of this page.
Everyone can then “play along from home” and see what happens in the course of this year.

This process of regifting will continue until December 17, 2010 (which just happens to be National Regifting Day) where all the bloggers who have participated in the regifting will have their names put into a bucket. The $500 winner will be chosen at random live on UStream that day by yours truly.

Suggested protocols for regifting participants:

On your blog contest, please include a link to this post so others entering will know the rules.

Also, please include a link of the blog you received the prize to regift. (if possible, all of them!)

Support all blogs this prize appears on. Remember, if they don’t regift it, you lose out!

Finally

Both my prize & Jordan’s Prize can be accepted or regifted if you want, it’s only the membership prize that you must regift to keep the $500 prize going.

Good luck! Any questions please leave a comment below.

Using Social Media Can Help Your Writing

Aside from connecting with others and “building your brand,” social media offers an interesting side benefit: It can improve your writing.

Writing, like many other skills, is something you can get better at with practice. When you use social media to interact with people, you are practicing (and likely improving over time) your ability to write in a conversational way.

Social media gives you an easy and informal test ground to hone your communication skills.

Winston Churchill is said to have practiced the best bits for his speeches multiple times on family members and guests. He’d try out various lines and anecdotes and practice delivery.

You can do the same thing!

Next time you’re sending a Tweet or doing a Facebook post, see if you can tweak the idea in your head a bit before you are posting it. Think about what you wanted to write, then see if you can alter it slightly to make it even better.

Watch. Your “real world” writing will start to improve as you work on these “mini-writing” pieces.

I have now given you the power to feel virtuous about spending time on social media. You’re welcome.

“But Rebecca,” you ask. “Do you have any pointers about HOW I might tweak my social media quips to make them more interesting?”

Why yes. Yes I do. This brings us to . . .

One Copywriting Principle Can Help You Be More Interesting On Social Media Sites

Let me tell you about writing headlines.

Have you ever seen those Twitter accounts that seem to post nothing BUT headlines? The ones I’ve seen seem to fall into two categories: (a) Spam or (b) News services.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you keep a social media account that is at least somewhat personalized (or that you are a spammer who wants to make his social media accounts more conversational).

So you probably post updates about your life, your plans, etc. and seldom make use of the “headline” tone of voice or sales blurb-style of socializing online.

But there is something we can learn from the headline-only accounts. The sole goal of those accounts is . . . to get you to click through. They want to grab your interest.

And isn’t your goal in social media to attract interest and build up your personal brand?

To that end, let me introduce you to “The Four U’s” of headline writing. These serve to draw the reader in and make him want to read more. Incorporate one or more of these into your social media activities, and see how it affects your posts.

1. URGENCY. In copywriting, this means we try to get people to take action. In social media, you might substitute “urgency” for “immediacy.”Write vividly of your present moment. How to do this? Use details that add color and draw our attention to you. Help us focus on you, now. Remember that guy that tweeted his wedding vows? He is an example of this.
2. UNIQUENESS. Uniqueness is a great one-word synopsis of the already brief mantra “be yourself.” How can you play up your uniqueness?Talk about the things that make you YOU—hobbies, interests, things you mull over in your brain. The guy that tweets stuff his 70+ year-old dad says is pretty unique.(Side Note From Rhys: This is key if you’re retweeting articles! By offering your own spin on what you Retweet (such as making the headline funnier, or more urgency, or a quick opinion, you’re being unique!)
3. ULTRA-SPECIFICITY. Want an easy way to create subtle humor? Be very specific. “Saw 4 geckos on the train today” is more interesting than “Noticed wildlife during commute.”
4. USEFULNESS. Tell the reader useful things you’ve learned. Share links to things you find interesting or helpful, or give a synopsis if you can write it briefly enough.Share how to solve a problem. Whether a new movie is enjoyable with a date. Or even how to write great quips for social media sites using copywriting principles.

Rebecca Kellogg is a copywriter based out of Southern California. She writes copy for businesses and also writes magazine articles. Visit her blog at www.rebeccakellogg.com.

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One such area of plugins is ad management, with thousands of ad manager plugins available. Whilst I had one installed for the age longest time (Ad Rotator), it wasn’t perfect, requiring constant setup & maintenance. With the relaunch of this site in July, I wanted something that offered me plenty of functionality, but little or no maintenance.

Asking around, I was recommended OIO Publisher, a premium wordpress plugin.

OIO Publisher is a wordpress plugin that allows you to set up zones of advertising on your blog. These areas can then be sold independently of each other or in groups. Adverts can be targeted also on a per page or by a per IP address basis (which is stupidly complicated, something which I’ve not yet needed, but it’s there).

One thing that annoyed me with Ad Rotator was just the lack of automation, it annoyed both myself & one of my advertisers when I was away for an extended period & the advertiser couldn’t get the advertising live on the site. Not such a problem with this, from an advertisers perspective they click on the “Advertise Now” link, fill in details, upload a banner, pay with paypal and that’s it. The blog owner approves it from the wordpress dashboard, the advert then goes live for the length of time specified by the advertiser.

The advertiser can also set up a subscription, so that they’ll get the advert automatically renewed at the current rate – this is something which is great, as very few “free” add ons out there that manage this. If they’re not subscribed, then they  get a warning email that there advert is expiring – in fact emails are sent out quite a lot for this, making sure you don’t miss anything. If they choose not to subscribe then the advert is removed.

Being the site owner, you can also add your own adverts for a period of time (good for contests or banner exchange), as well as set up default advertisers should nothing be sold. Furthermore, the amount of different types of ad creatives you can have is huge – you can even manage paid posts & text links through this, and because you are separate from any advert network, you keep 100% of the income.

Purchasing the plugin also gives you access to the OIO Publisher marketplace, allowing you to list your blog as accepting advertising. This again is a nice feature, allowing you to sell advertising to companies that wouldn’t have seen your blog otherwise. The plugin author has stated he’s building up a network of advertisers for this marketplace, and there’s not much activity. Nevertheless, from that site alone, I’ve paid for the plugin a few times over.

It’s not perfect, one problem I have found is that have problems setting up advertisers for times not specified by the site owner (I’ve 1 & 4 week plans, I wanted to give a contest winner a prize of 8 weeks, and I’ve been unable to), and the default banner for “Advertise Here” is ugly, very ugly (it’s a text link), but other than that it’s a great plugin, as well as an ad server – you can use the plugin from within wordpress on Non Wordpress sites, and affiliate manager (you could earn money selling my ad space, but I’ve not set that up yet!).

OIO Publisher is available for $47, however if you use the coupon code given to you on any of the links on this post, you can get a discount of between $5-$15. I would thoroughly recommend it to manage your site’s advertising revenue. To purchase, please click the banner below.

(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links)

Spam is bad, but automated twitter accounts aren’t necessarily. A number of great twitter accounts (such as the National Rail Enquries Twitter Account) are automated, as there isn’t a need for it to be anything but – why create work for yourself? I propose that you create a twitter account purely for your blog posts. Why? Well, a number of reasons.

• It secures your brand - If your blog takes off, people will snap up Twitter usernames associated with it. Capture them first before they do.
• It allows you to promote your post twice without pissing people off - Your main twitter account (the one you network with) can retweet your automated twitter account, rather than you retweeting yourself. It does look a little better, plus you promote both your post and your twitter account.
• It disassociates you from your blog (in a good way) - Whilst you will be the person behind the blog, it’ll help build the brand around your blog. If you ever sell your blog or move on, you can give a twitter account away, so the blog will continue to be successful even without you.

So, how do you create a useful twitter account for automated posting of your blog? Here’s what you need to do:-

1. Sign Up For a Twitter Account

First off, get a twitter account. You can sign up here. Note down the username & password – you’ll need it for the next step.

2. Download Twitter Tools Plugin for Wordpress

We will use a plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King for this tutorial. Download & Install it using your chosen method of installing wordpress plugins.

3. Set Up Twitter Tools

To set up Twitter Tools, click on Twitter Tools under the settings menu in the wp-admin. A screen like this should appear:-

Insert your Twitter Username & Password into the boxes & test the login. Make sure you switch the “Create a Tweet When You Post” & Default to Yes, and the Tweet prefix to what you want. Make sure other options are switched off – you don’t want the creation of blog post of your tweets. Save, post & check your twitter accounts.

4. Integrate your Favourite URL shortener to Twitter Tools (Optional)

A number of popular URL shorteners can be integrated with twitter tools. I can’t go through the setting up of these – most use an API key which can be gained from your account on your URL shortener. Here’s some of them at least.

• bit.ly for Twitter Tools
• su.pr for Twitter Tools
• tr.im for Twitter Tools

Try it yourself! Set up a Twitter account purely for your blog. Here’s mine you can follow for my blog – @gospelrhys. What’s yours?

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

I read a blog post over the weekend on Men With Pens. In it the author argued that Blogging is Turning Into a Sweatshop, with people working their butts off for little or no money. I’ve been doing this blogging thing now for over 7 years, and really I’d be lucky to make a year’s wages in my 7 years if I was to quit now. I’m not really too bothered, as I do get a lot of pleasure from blogging. Also, I am a firm believer in alternate forms of building income, and surely the fact that running a fairly successful blog for 7 years shows for something to potential future employers, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I understand that not everybody feels the same, and a few bloggers are questioning the fact that they are giving away all this free content, with very little return. Personally, I think the fact they’re questioning it shouldn’t be an issue. Nobody is asking them to be a blogger, so if they don’t like it, leave, or if it’s worth it, continue with guest writers, paid guest writers.

However, if you work for free on your blog, you shouldn’t work for free on other people’s blogs. Freetards have annoyed me recently, and here’s why.

I’ve done a website for somebody as a freebie, a friend (at the time) who I built a pretty good Wordpress blog, with 3 hours of training on how to use it. It lay dormant for a year, during which the friendship between myself & the person in question broke down. The first I’ve heard from him in a year was a text earlier today asking how to access the website, as they’ve “forgot”. I’m apprehensive in doing so, so much so that a “google it” email will be sent if he pushes.

I’ve also been marking a few comments as spam for people who have been giving personal attacks because my wordpress plugins won’t work on their setup, despite emails trying to sort it. At the end of the day, I’m only one person working on the plugin. I can try to help,  but I will only do so much for free, please understand that.

I’m a firm believer in what Aaron Wall has said on his website – that he cares more for money than links, so much so that there’ll be a bunch of things I’ll be working on with my plugins in the next few months, to hopefully streamline or eliminate a lot of the technical support requests, I’m actually genuinely excited for these, so I’ll be happy to support a lot more after this.

Will they be paid for support? Maybe. After what Gaping Void said not so eloquently in a tweet: I’m not paid to write software, but I should be paid for answering your problems.

photo credit: danhodgett

One story doing the rounds on Twitter & various other social networks is the story of Paul Chambers, 26, who a couple of weeks ago during the big freeze tweeted the following:-

“Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Innocent enough, but it ended up with him being arrested on terrorist charges by the East Midlands Police. Whilst the press took the normal ground they normally take of “how much health & safety and anti-terrorist BS can you get? He wasn’t going to blow up any plane!”, Twitter took a more neutral stance – that he should’ve expected it.

My thoughts are leaning towards the latter – after all I’ve had trouble at airports before now. Returning from Japan I was stopped going through security at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport. My crime? Having in my carry on bag two key rings that were shaped like samurai swords. Admittedly they looked sharp, but couldn’t cut butter. The punishment? A few questions & an emptied bag. The fact that rest of my bag contained a bunch of Nintendo cuddly toys saved me from a full cavity search. I’ve never been so thankful of Yoshi in my life.

Forgive my xenophobia, but one advantage I had over the Doncaster Twerrorist (not a typo, deliberate) is that I don’t really look like a terrorist. Twitter is a different story. Anybody can upload whatever they want as their avatar. Anybody could hide behind a picture – after all – do you really think that half of twitter are willing to take photos of themselves performing fellatio on other people? It’s quite plausible that the twitter avatar would look different from the person in question. Of course, would a terrorist thread be broadcast over Twitter? Probably not, but you don’t fuck about with airports.

So from me, the chap learnt an important lesson most people know about the interenet – everything is public. Yes it’s probably a little extreme, but after the Christmas Bomb Threat in the United States, I can imagine the world police are a little more alert on certain channels. That would naturally include Twitter.

What are your thoughts? Over reaction for the police? Or did the Doncaster Bomber have what’s coming to him? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

I am not a lawyer, but the second you create content & unless you state otherwise, it is under copyright, so it’s a good idea to have something that states that the copyright is yours. Keeping the date upto date is one of those jobs that is easily forgotten, so to automate it you need to put the following line in your footer.php file in your template:-

&copy; <?php bloginfo('name'); echo date('Y'); ?>

Nice and simple. A quick explanation for each of the elements in the code:-

• © - The HTML code for the copyright symbol: ©
• bloginfo(‘name’) - The wordpress template tag for displaying the name of the blog.
• date(‘Y’) - The current year

That’s it! You don’t have to update your footer copyright ever again.

If you want to include your year of formation in the copyright notice, put this in your footer (assuming your blog was formed in 2004).

&copy; <?php bloginfo('name'); echo "2004-". date('Y'); ?>

Again, very simple.

This can be put in any of the template files in your blog, but traditionally it’s put in the footer. Any questions & I’ll do my best to answer them.

photo credit: QiFei

Over the past day or so, a blog post posted on Google’s blog rocked the internet & the world. In it, Google gave it’s position on China relating to a systematic attack on known Chinese human right’s activists:-

“we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.”

Whilst it doesn’t point the finger at shady authorities directly, some of the language used (phrases such as “targetted attacked” thinly covered with “phishing scams & malware”) is contradictory enough to suggest Google knows damn well who caused the issue, and that group of  people are high in China’s government.

Google fought with it’s most powerful weapon – information – and simply stated that it was reviewing it’s feasability on how to conduct business in Google. A very diplomatic way to say that what has happened is bang out of order, and like any other business, if you treat any service, employee or user with abuse, the service is going to be withdrawn.

I’d love to believe that it was a moral move, but the cynic in me knows that with Google as the prime conduit for information exchange, it stands to profit greatly from as much information freely available as possible.

Nevertheless the news was met with trepidation in Wall St.: Google’s share price dropped around 1.1% with the news (source), which is odd, considering that when they announced that they were censoring the content in China in early 2006, nearly 15% was wiped off the company. From a financial standpoint, it appears that Google are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This leads me to believe that maybe this move was driven at the very least on protecting it’s property (Google doesn’t want to be seen to have leaky services),but more than likely on Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra. China went from just being naughty in Google’s eyes, to evil, and Google – who hoped that the human rights record in China was to improve – has given up helping.

Ironically Google’s withdrawl from China could be the one thing that brings about human right’s change, particularly if more western countries follow their lead. China is an expanding market, but Google are saying that it’s not worth exploiting at the expense of current markets, company morals & ethics.

The move could be a great move financially, as at the beginning of the recession, one phrase that was bounded around a lot was “Ethical Economies”, and how some respected financial analysts belived that a new form of capitalism where growth was achieved outside of exploitation would lift us out of recession. I’m not sure totally about that, but if Google are trying, then by god good on them.

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However, from there, I’ve grown into some mighty fine posts, networked with some mighty fine people, and also become more happier with the work I’ve put in. With that said, I’ve decided after reading Erica Mueller’s blog to do a bunch of goals for 2010, both in terms of this blog & my personal life. Here they are.

Blogging Goals for 2010

Release A Product

My programming’s getting better, and whilst I don’t think I can justify releasing an ebook (my writing skills aren’t that great, and I feel I’d just be repeating myself), I do want to have a go at releasing a paid Wordpress plugin. It’s already in the works, and about 30-40% complete. When it’s done, you’ll be the first to know.

The goal is to get it finished & out the door this year. Sounds like an easy job but trust me, I’m a procrastinator so I’m not sure if it’s possible. I’ll try though!

Go To A Blogging Conference

I’ve only in 8 years been to one sort of “conference” (it was a trip down the pub), a North West Bloggers Meet in Chester. It was good fun, but I don’t think any of the bloggers there are actually still blogging. Apart from this, I’ve only ever met two bloggers, one of which has stopped blogging (though we’ve kept in touch), the other is blogging very erratically (yes Han, I’m looking at you).

I’d love to meet some more bloggers, people who don’t sneer when I talk about RSS feeds, and generally the best place to meet them is at conferences. Wordcamp seems quite good fun, so I may go there. Or I may organise an informal official “The Gospel According To Rhys Alcohol Fuelled Shindig” somewhere. By organise, I mean I’ll be in the pub somewhere, find me.

Either way, I’d love to meet more of you, my one hundred million readers.

Guest Post More

I’ve done one guest post over at Twitip entitled “8 Characters To Make Your Tweets Sparkle“, and it did lead to a few enquiries for more guest posts. One of which I’ve acted on. This is something I’ll like to do more, particularly with promoting a product.

Likewise I’d like to get some guest posters in for this site. I know my name’s in the title, but I’d like people to guest post now & again. If my readers are dead against it though then I wouldn’t allow guest posters. What do you guys think?

Personal Goals for 2010

Travel More

Travel dropped off a little bit over the course of the year, with good reason. Thailand, Japan & South Korea was an expensive jaunt, and by the time I paid it all off, I had to start thinking about Christmas. The distinct lack of traveling wasn’t fun, so I’m looking to go away more. Ireland is closer to me than London, so that may happen. China looks like it’s cheap but getting more expensive. Eastern Europe could be fun. Ryanair have started flights to Morocco. Or I could try and get away further, who knows? All I know is I want to get away more than the 10 days I did this year (I managed 16 in 2008).

Move Out

Bit of a secret here. You see, like a third of British men under the age of 30, I still live with my parents. This has all sorts of ramifications, some good, some bad. Either way, as much as I love them, I need my own space. When things have settled down after the new year, I’ll be looking for rental accommodation, and finally get a bit of responsibility. That’s the hope at least. It depends how much Personal Goal #1 takes off before I look at Personal Goal #2.

Anyway those are my goals, what are yours? Share them in the comments!

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It’s got so bad that grit is largely all gone, people have been working from home, and schools have shut for a few days.

The BBC in the UK does have a list of schools that are shut – split into areas, for example this is the list of schools that were shut on Wednesday. I didn’t know about until Becky Williams tweeted it. I then immediately retweeted it, as even though I didn’t have kids, one of my followers (a lot of whom are from North Wales) could have & have found it useful, so I did feel it was the right thing to do, even if I wasn’t directly involved.

This got me thinking – by and large as social networkers/marketers/users/whatever (Becky incidentally isn’t really a “social marketer”, just a local user of Twitter), do we have influence? If so, do we have any responsibility in tweeting local events & news, knowing full well interested parties could read them?

A lot has been made on the power of social networking sites such as Twitter (for example the Iranian Elections) & Facebook (for example Rage Against The Machine being Christmas #1), but often these are large movements. Stepping away from The Wisdom of Crowdsmentality for a bit, do so called “power users” have a responsibility to tweet or share vital information that could help people in their community?

Maybe not, but maybe most people have a conscience in helping, in whatever way they can. It’s the same reason some people jump out of planes, or bathe in baked beans do so because they feel like helping somebody. I feel that social media gurus (both proper & fake ones) should do whatever they feel is right, whether that’s being like Lyndon Antcliff and offering Free Social Media Advice for Cornwall Politicians, tweeting about shut schools or warning your mates about the latest scam on Facebook.

Of course, everybody’s answer to “what’s right” varies from person to person, but in my eyes, the possibility of not putting the family through a unnesseccary struggle to get to school is worth 140 characters.