Blogging Tune

Want to become a freelancer within a week? Have time but don’t know what to do to start enjoying the life of a freelancer?

The joy of doing what you love and getting paid is second to none. Really. Think about it. Do you love to write about productivity? Have you been following a club from your early age and want to express your opinion? Love designing? Are you skilled in marketing and advertising? The best thing is that you can do these and get paid for it.

That is the job of a freelancer. You get paid to do what you love.

Image Source: i_do_graphics by Brent Nelson

Okay. You have decided to become a freelancer. So the next question that pops into our mind is “How do you get clients?”

I’m giving you three tips that you can act on right now and get a client within a week. That’s a guarantee if you really do what I say and do it well.

1. Guest Post

This is the best method. I don’t understand why people don’t rate guest blogging. It should be on top of their list if they need to get clients.

Of course, there are other uses to guest blogging.

How do you get clients by guest blogging?

Find a blog in your niche. When I say your niche, I mean the one that will suit you the best.

Are you a copywriter? You can write a guest post at Copyblogger.

At the end of the post, in the author byline, promote your service.

“XYZ is a blogger at ABC.Com and a freelance writer. You can see his sample works here. If you are hiring him, say “123 blog referred you” to get 20% off.”

Replace XYZ with your name, ABC.Com with your blog url and “123 blog” with the blog where you are guest posting.

By the way, this is how I got started.

2. Forums

Most people don’t visit forums when they need to find a job. The thing is there are quite a lot of job availabilities advertised in forums but very less takers.

Go to Warrior Forum and you will see thousands of marketers who are in need of a writer or designer. In warrior forum, you pay $20 to post about your service. But trust me, if you promote your service properly, you will get a lot of work. Lot more than you can handle.

The pay that you get for your work might be less but for starters it is a great place. Why not charge a couple of dollars when you are starting out instead of doing work for free to get testimonials?

If you are short of money, then you should read this lengthy post that I wrote about getting freelance work using forums at Freelance Folder. You can read it here.

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing. Or it already is. You have inspiration in the form of Gary Vaynerchuk for video marketing. When a person can build a huge business using video marketing, of course after a lot of hard work, you should be able to get a job using video marketing. Although I haven’t tried this, I know people who have done it successfully. I might give it a try in future.

Create a video explaining about yourself and your service. Post it on every video site. The only negative about this method is that you might get a lot of negative comments. If you are a person who doesn’t mind that (just like me), surely this method is for you.

Tip: Try to add humor. This video might help you with that. (:P)

Let me know what you think about these methods in the comments. Once you have done that, take action right now. Any one method will do. Sit down and think which method will suit you the best and go for it.

This blog post is inspired by the post over at Freelance Folder written by Laura Spencer on Five Ways to Start a Freelance Business Right Now. Make sure you read that too. The points in that post are completely different.

If a large portion of content is present within a domain or across domains, it is called duplicate content.

If you are blogger, I’m sure you would have come across the word “duplicate content”.

Image Source: Fight Club by Polina Sergeeva

You are either a blogger who is writing informational blog posts or one of the very few who scrapes content from other blogs. There are only those two categories. You can’t be in between.

As long as you belong to number one, you don’t have to worry about Google penalty. Of course, there is another problem for you. You have to worry at the nights about those who scrape your content and make money while you are writing quality original information and still waiting for the huge paychecks to arrive.

You have the choice. You can ignore them and let Google handle them or you can take a step forward and do what you can to get the site down. The choice is yours. There is no wrong in letting Google handle it but there is going to be more and more blogs stealing your content if you don’t take action.

Now let me take you to the world where bloggers steal content. I’m talking about bloggers who are doing it on purpose. I’m not targeting the bloggers who have writers that scrape content without their knowledge. Although I should warn you to do a test for most of your articles at Copyscape soon else you are risking your brand.

Side Note: If you are a Kumbaya blogger, you won’t steal content.

Mighty Google

First we’ll start with why you should not let the giants of the search, Google, handle content thieves.

Though Google say that they will penalize the sites or blogs that has duplicate content within or across domains, you can see many blogs doing it and escaping from the penalty.

There are about thousands of websites that has the same article going.

Ever heard about article directories? That is one of the biggest examples of duplicate content. I’m not blaming the article directory owners or the article marketers who do it the right way. But there are always people who try to game the system.

Pick up an article that is doing very well in a particular article directory and put it at copyscape. What do you find? Duplicate content. Or go to Problogger and copy a headline of one of the posts and search for it in Google. You’ll find all the blogs stealing every single post written at Problogger. Darren Rowse has written about duplicate content before. His blog is very popular and is naturally a target for blog scrapers. I have had my content copied before. Kevin of Blogging Tips has written about content theft a few times before like: Social Rank – The New Breed Of Blog Scraping and Don’t Get Stressed About Blog Scrapers Stealing Your Content.

The worst part is, these scrapers still get their blog posts indexed in search engines and receive traffic. The main reason is there are millions of sites that have duplicate content and Google cannot take action on everyone of them.

So I don’t think Google can do much about duplicate content, at least not till they come with a new idea to stop this.

For the bloggers who work their sweat off to write articles only to find it in some other blog word for word copied using RSS feed of your blog, here is a way to stop RSS feed scrapers from stealing your content. I don’t know of a way to stop copy-paste method using a plugin. Let me know if you have a solution for it. If you don’t like to take action, at least get something out of their work. Install RSS footer plugin and get a backlink from them. This will at least let Google know that your content is the original one (Thanks to Daniel for this tip).

I personally don’t like people who do it and normally advice everyone not to do it. But when Google cannot stop people, I don’t expect the world to change by listening to me.

Now comes the best part…

What YOU And I Can Do About It?

You have every right for your content and you cannot let others use it as their own.

Most people steal content to earn money from AdSense or sell affiliate products. Report to the owner of the product which these scrapers are promoting and get their affiliate link invalid. That way they won’t earn money. If they use AdSense, you can get their account banned by contacting Google. But still your content remains in their blog. Now what you can do is, report to the hosting provider where the blog is hosted. You can find where the blog is hosted using this site – WhoIsHostingThis.

Once you find the host, go and complain to the host. Show them the proof. Most likely they will bring the site down. You can also follow any of these 10 ways to fight back content thieves.

I can’t believe why people are not using social media sites like twitter for this. Seriously, all it takes is one tweet. Everyone is ready to help you if you need it. (Side Note: I like how Jonathan Fields starts his day in twitter every morning saying “Morning, great people. Who can I help today?”)

If you take a moment to get help from your followers to bring down the site, you can pull down the site faster. I’m sure Darren Rowse can get all the sites that steals his content in a single tweet. Think about it. Almost every hosting provider is there in twitter. If someone can tweet something like “@hostprovider This blog at Loser.com is scraping my blog’s content at Rockstar.Com” and many people retweet the message, you can instantly get in touch with the host provider. Sometimes you don’t even need your followers to retweet. Now all you need to do it prove them that you are the real owner of the content.

It only takes a minute to do this. Don’t let others to steal your content.

Have you had your blog content scraped? What did you do about it? Please share your views in the comments.

Thanks to pettre (no link) from Authority Blogger forum for the idea for this post.

If you found this post to be useful, please share it with your friends and tweet it to your followers.

Are you taking full advantage of forum marketing that gets you free targeted traffic? Are you doing it the right way or do you make these mistakes?

If you have no idea what forum marketing is, let me explain.

Forum marketing is a technique where you post in forums, help people, gain trust and convert those people who you helped into your blog readers.

How do you find forums that are related to your blog?

If you know how to do this, I suggest you to skip this paragraph and start reading the next. For others, go to Google and do a search for “your niche forum” without quotes. If you want clearer explanation, see this post I wrote sometime back on how to find forums in your niche.

Once you are done with finding forums, read this post for the common mistakes people make when posting on forums. To those people who are already using forums, you might be making these mistakes. It is never late to correct your mistakes.

Source: Authority Blogger Forum (one of my favorite forums) owned by Chris Garrett.

Okay. You are set now? Let’s see the mistakes bloggers commonly make.

7.Not Posting Regularly

Confession: I don’t post regularly in forums and I want to change myself when it comes to consistency.

People will forget you if you are not posting regularly. Many people (including me) post to forums like crazy for the first few days after joining. After a week, they completely forget about the forum. Bad marketing.

Building trust doesn’t happen in one day or one week. It takes more than that. I know people in some forums who are regular posters for 3-4 years. These people are trusted by everyone in the forum. If they have a product and they say one word about it, everyone will buy it. That is the power of building trust in forums. You can even sell your service easily once you build trust.

How to fix it: Make a commitment to posting certain number of replies in forums or have a fixed amount of time you want to spend in forums.

6. One Line Posts

One line posts are same as one line comments. You cannot build trust or convey what you want to say in one line. Unless you are thanking someone or congratulating someone for what they have done, you can’t help in one line.

If building trust in one line was possible, people would start using twitter more. If you are representing a company and you are answering a quick question, one line is fine. But most companies would send email detailing their one line answer.

How to fix it: When someone asks a question, elaborate on your answer. You don’t have to write it very big. Elaborate till you feel the other person will understand what you have written.

5. Copy and Paste

Some people create threads by copy and pasting the same message in different forums. Just like you, the people in your niche visit many forums and if they see you creating the same message over and over in all the forums, they’ll start ignoring you. I don’t see why you want to ask the same question in all the forums unless it is not answered.

How to fix it: Always create a thread in only one forum. If it is not answered, start a thread in another forum. Even if you are giving a valuable tip, please don’t copy paste. Make small changes to the post and the headline. Make it look like you have written again.

4. Irrelevant Posts

There is no better way to destroy your personal brand than by writing irrelevant posts. This is not very common but I know some people make this mistake. Why in the world do you talk about a method which pays you a huge one cent for every ad you click in a golfing forum? I understand it is a lot of money. If you are making one cent for every ad click, then you will be living an “internet guru” lifestyle. I can see that you want others also to be rich like you, but please, not in a golfing forum.

How to fix it: Stop posting irrelevant things and start contributing to the quality of the forum.

3. Affiliate Links

This is the most common mistake people make. When you go to forums and have affiliate links in your signature, it will mostly lead to your profile getting banned. Read the TOS of the forum before you start using it. Some forums allow you to use affiliate links in signature but when you have affiliate links in signature, you cannot build trust. If you link to your own product, it is different and there is no wrong in doing it. Only when it comes to affiliate links, the problem starts. See forums as twitter. In twitter, will you post affiliate links? If you do, how many people unfollow you?

You can also imagine a real life situation. You talk to a stranger. He asks you a question and you say buy this product under my referral and it will solve your problems. What are the chances that the stranger will buy the product? Zero possibility unless you are an extremely good sales person. But then if you are a good sales person, you would obviously not need these tips.

How to fix it: Instead of posting affiliate links, send the people to your blog. Give them loads of free information and then sell.

2. PM Spam

You already know what PM spam is and there is 99.98% chance that you are victim of PM spam if you are a member of the digital point forum.

What is PM spam? (for those who don’t know or not a member of DP forum)

PM is short for private messaging. When you register in a forum, you are given an inbox without email ID. Anyone can send you private message in a single click. This makes it easy for people to spam.

When you send me a PM selling your product, you are helping me by filtering yourself out of people who I trust.

How to fix it: If you have a product and you want to promote, contribute quality posts to the forum and have a link to your product (not affiliate) in your signature. This will help you sell your product. Don’t waste your time sending a PM to all the members. No one will buy it. Period.

1. Being Rude

I see arguments in forums very often. Arguments are fine as long as they are within certain limits. If you are rude, I’m not going to click on your signature link and come to your blog. You may think I’m the only one who is not going to visit your blog. But mind you, almost everyone who is reading it will lose the trust they have in you slowly.

Thanks to the forum scripts, most of them don’t allow swear words. If you use them, it won’t get published. But hey, we are people who have been using internet since it came into existence. We know how to bypass everything. So what we do is, we use asteriks. Simple. Let me tell you again, being rude is not good for your personal brand.

How to fix it: Simple. Care for everyone in the forum. When you care, you won’t be rude.

I suggest you to use forum marketing. It not only gets new readers to your blog but also helps you become a better blogger.

Do you make any of the above forum marketing mistakes? I feel guilty of not regularly posting in forums. I have been working on it though. Please share your views and also some other mistakes people make in forums.

Should you live tweet that conference/event?

First, what is live tweeting? (scroll to the next sub-heading if you know this)

It is tweeting something that is going on live. You normally have a #hashtag for every live event. For example, the Izea event which took place few days back used #Izeafest as hashtag. People use hashtag to make it easy for others to follow the tweets about a particular event.

I love Copyblogger and I’m a big fan of Brian Clark.

Benefits Of Live Tweeting

What? Can you get extra benefits by posting live tweet? Yes, you can.

1. New And Strong Twitter Relationships

Twitter is all about relationship, conversation and did I mention promotion? Now, the last one should be done carefully and within limits. Anyway, you’d be knowing that by now.

Normally you tweet about conferences live. When you do that you will be following other tweets about the conference using the hashtag assigned for that particular event. So you have a chance to find new people and form a good relationship with them.

If you are in the conference, you can talk to them directly. But if you are not in the conference and watching it in a live stream, you cannot do it. What you can do is, tweet those who are tweeting about the conference and talk to them about it first. Second , take the conversation to the next step. Don’t flood your twitter timeline with many @ messages. Send them in DM or chat in skype or whatever you like.

People who attend conferences are often those who are serious about business and willing to invest time and money to improve themselves and take their business to the next level. Forming relationship with these people is the best thing you can do in twitter.

Image Source: Trust by ?o??ƒx™

2. Learn

Every event has some of the industry’s experts in their list of speakers. These experts know what they do and clearly know what works. When they say it out for you in a conference, listen to them and learn. I hear you. You go to conference only to learn and form new relationship. But wait, according to a Edgar Dale:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss with others
80% of what we personally experience
95% or what we teach others

So why not hear it in conference, write it down as a tweet, favorite the ones that are really good and read it, discuss with others and teach them? It takes 21 days according to a research to save anything to your subconscious mind. Is it not easy to read the best tips that you have saved in your favorites everyday for 21 days till it gets installed in your subconscious mind?

Image Source: Learning to Walk by Tela Chhe

3. Help Your Followers

There will be many people in your followers list who want to take their blog/business to next level. How about helping your followers with what you learn from the conference?

People might have missed the conference due to some reason. Some would have missed it because they are in a different part of a world. Some of them cannot watch it in livestream because of slow internet connection/dialup. They all have one thing in common? The eagerness to learn.

By tweeting the important points of a event, you are helping your followers. Believe me on this. I have trusted few people in twitter who I follow because they teach me something new. It is a fact. You trust people who help you.

Let me remind you that you can even tweet about live games. I have live tweeted about football (Soccer if you are from USA). You don’t educate your followers in this case but you keep them up-to-date with live scores.

Note: It is better to keep your tweets within limits. Don’t tweet a lot about anything within a short period.

So when you live tweet, you not only learn and move your business forward, you also help your followers. Is there a much better way of using twitter? I’ll let you decide.

Please share your views on live tweeting, be it positive or negative. I’d like to hear your opinion on this. I’ll write a follow up post and include the best comments. You can add me on twitter here- @Ramkarthik.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent Van Gogh

Many bloggers miss out small touches to their blogs. This may cost a lot. In this post, I have summed up 5 small(and often overlooked) things that can improve your blog a lot:

Image Source: Bright Angel Point by Wolfgang Staudt

1. Adding Subscription Options

When readers comment, they expect a reply from you. Subscribe to Comments is a great WordPress plugin that can add this option below your blog’s comment form. This will increase reader participation. After all, getting a mail saying “A new reply” is much better than making someone check your blog again and again in hope of a reply! (But hey, isn’t it great way to increase Page Views? )

RSS subscription is another things bloggers tend to overlook often. Make sure that you add a RSS Subscription link/image at a visible spot. Some great areas are top of sidebar (like ProBlogger) or Top Right Corner of page (like Daily Blog Tips).

2. Participating In Community

No one likes to comment on a dead blog. If you do not reply to comments and participate in discussions, no one will bother to come and comment. You should try to reply to every comment on your blog. If you do not have time, make sure that you reply to at least all the questions asked in comments section.

Note that this applies specifically to small blogs. Many other factors(traffic, exposure and SEO) come in to play when people comment on bigger blogs like ProBlogger.

Image Source: Happy Our Birthday by Hamed Saber

3. Adding Social Bookmarking Icons

Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumble Upon and Digg are a great source of traffic. But hey, you will not get any traffic if you do not give readers the options/tools to share your posts.

You can use Share This Widget below your posts or add custom social bookmarking icons so that it becomes easy for readers to share your content. You should enable Feed Flare in your Feedburner feeds so that RSS readers can also share the posts.

Image Source: 50 Social Media Icons by Ivan Walsh

4. Proofreading Your Posts

No one likes half baked posts that many bloggers churn out! If you want readers to take notice, you should spend some time proofreading your posts. If you use WordPress, After the Deadline plugin is great for spotting spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Note: Remember that no plugin or dictionary can make up for human editing. Spell checker can not catch many small grammatical mistakes(e.g. their in place of there).

5. Including Calls To Action

So, you are doing everything right but not getting results! Not including “Calls To Action” may be the reason.

Even a small call can do wonders. Just try including “If you liked this post, please consider subscribing via RSS” or something similar after your post. You will yourself see results.

If you are using WordPress, here’s how to add a call to action to bottom of all your posts:

Go to Appearance -> Editor. Select “single.php” from the right menu. Look for the following line of code:
<?php the_content() ?>

Enter the desired message(using HTML) after this line. Note that the tag may not be same for every theme. If you can not find it in single.php and need help, just leave a comment here.

Referrer Detector plugin is another good option that you can use for you calls.

These were just 5 small things that can improve your blog a lot. I am sure there are many more. Please share your tips/suggestions in comments.

This is a guest post by Ishan from Blogging With Success. Liked this post? Check out his post How To Sell A Dead Horse For $500.

There are too many information available for you to read every day and the more you spend time reading, the less you will take time to act on what you have read. (If you want a free direct pdf version of this article, go to the end of this post).

Richard Saul Wurman said in his book, Information Anxiety, that:

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000″

This applies for the blogosphere too to certain extent. In the blogosphere, lots of information has been written today than a few years ago.

How will you manage online information overload?

Firstly, what is information overload?

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined to the term information overload, it refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Image Source: Information Overload by cambodia4kidsorg

How does this affect you in blogging?

Due to tons of information available online, which is increasing at a rapid rate every day, you have no time to process the information. As a result, you will neither learn a lot nor act on what you have already learned.

In whatever niche you are, there are already hundreds of good blogs if not thousands. To update yourself in your niche, you have to follow all these blogs. But following all the hundreds of blogs is merely impossible. Even if you subscribe to all the blogs, you are not going to read every post from every blog.

A year back, I subscribed to as many as 127 blogs. At times I used to go offline for a couple of days. Whenever I take short breaks and open my RSS reader after returning, I used to have at least 200+ unread items. I have heard people say they have 1000+ unread items. Is it possible to go through all of them and still have time to act on what you have learned? If you said ‘yes, it is possible for me’, consider yourself gifted. You won’t find much helpful information in this post. You can contact me and let me know how you do it if you wish. I’d be happy to learn from you.

But if you are like me, who cannot read hundreds of useful articles a day and act on whatever I have learned, this post is for you.

I’m going to share with you the exact techniques that have worked for me to avoid information overload. I have been using these methods for nearly 6 months and it has worked very well for me.

Image Source: New Controls in Google Reader
by Yandle

1. Subscribe to Less Blogs

If you want less information, subscribe to less blogs. Simple. If you are going to subscribe to 100+ blogs, you will come across the same thing I experienced (the above example). Be selective when subscribing to blogs. As I said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of good blogs in your niche.

Here are some tips for selecting the blogs to subscribe:

A. Authority

Subscribe to all the authority blogs in your niche. If you are into blogging, subscribe to Problogger. If you are into community and social media, don’t forget to subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog. These authority blogs will always deliver quality information. They are authority blogs for a reason. They know what they are saying.

B. Quality

This is the most important factor when you are looking for blogs to subscribe to. Read the recent posts in the blog, go through the archives and do all the research you want. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to do the research but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

C. Topic

Subscribe more to the blogs that belong to your niche. Subscribing to blogs that are not in your niche will not help you much. Of course you can subscribe to productivity blogs or technology blogs if you are interested. But I would recommend you to limit them.

Don’t subscribe to blogs just because your friends are subscribed to it. Think for a second or at least half a second if the blog will help you in achieving your goals. I used to do this. When my friends used to say that they have subscribed to blog A, I used to do follow them. Now I don’t do that though. Never subscribe to a blog that will not help you move forward in your life.

2. Learn to Speed Read

Take some time to learn how to skim. There are so many books out there that teach you exactly that. Grab a book and read it. Don’t mind about the time it takes you for learning how to skim. It will help you throughout your life. The best investment you can make is investment in yourself. If you spend a couple of dollars and a few hours, you can learn the art of skimming information.

Here are some articles that teach you how to speed read:

How to speed read – Boing Boing

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

3. Using Social Sites

Social sites like StumbleUpon will help you a lot in avoiding information overload if you know how to use it. There are many social sites out there. There are also niche based social sites like Sphinn. If you are a SEO blogger, you should check out Sphinn.

How to use social sites to manage information overload online?

Go to your favorite social site. My favorite is stumbleupon. So I’ll tell you how I use StumbleUpon to process information.

I search for stumbleupon users who continuously stumble articles related to my niche. You can get a RSS link of each user’s stumbles. I add this RSS to Google Reader.

Tip: Don’t subscribe to the ‘likes’ in stumbleupon. Subscribe to ‘reviews’. StumbleUpon users stumble many sites every day. You don’t want 1000+ items in your reader. SU users review only selected articles.

You can find me on StumbleUpon here. I review mostly posts related to blogging and social media.

Small Niche Based Social Sites

You can find a list of niche based social sites here.

My favorite is Sphinn. Though sphinn is a famous social site, the number of front page articles per day is low.

Create a list of social sites based on your niche and subscribe to the front page of these sites. This way, you will only read the best content in your niche.

4. Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are sites which gather the top news in all the niches or all the social sites. The popular ones are Popurls and Alltop.

Popurls

This site gathers news links from social sites and top blogs. You can customize the content which you see in the homepage by creating an account.

Alltop

Alltop gets links from top blogs and categorize it into different niches. There are plenty of niches. You can make your niche alltop as your homepage and glance through the new posts in all top blogs. You can also create your own alltop page with blogs of your choice.

5. Using Twitter

Twitter is useful in many ways. It is not just about updating what you are doing. Twitter can be used to find useful information online.

Follow people who share useful links to articles in your niche. If you are interested in social media and tech, you should follow mashable. Once you have created a list of users who share valuable content in their twitter stream, add them to a group and create a column for it. You can use a twitter client like tweetdeck to do it.

You can find me on twitter here – @Ramkarthik.

These are the techniques I use for managing online information overload. I suggest you to take this as a base and form your own techniques. What works for me might not work well for you. This is the concept. Understand it and develop your method till you find yourself managing information efficiently.

If you liked this post, please give it a stumble and/or bookmark it in del.icio.us. I appreciate it.

As I promised, here is the link to download the pdf version of managing online information overload (Right click -> ‘Save As’).

Twhirl is one of the many twitter clients. Unlike many other clients, twhirl is easy to use.

I assume you are on twitter (after all who is not in twitter these days?). Though many people prefer tweeting through the web, using a twitter client will increase your productivity.

Though there are many twitter clients, I have always preferred to use Tweetdeck. But for the last few days tweetdeck was not working for me and I had to switch to twhirl.

Twhirl is simple and makes tweeting fun. But if you are new to twhirl or thinking of giving twhirl a try, these are 5 basic settings that you should change in twhirl for better tweeting.

1. API limit

Go to settings and you will see an option called network. In this you can set the API limit. You cannot set twhirl (or any application for that matter) to update once every few seconds. If you do, you will reach the API limits and you won’t be able to tweet using the client for sometime. The API normally resets every one hour.

In this API, set how many requests you need per hour. I have set it to 30 requests per hour as you can see in the image. Once you do this, twhirl will automatically adjust the options that are following based on the requests you have set per hour.

I have disabled it for direct messages because I get DM notifications to my mail. I want to reply quickly to people who @ me and that is the reason why I have set my replies to update faster than tweets.

You can do this based on your requirements but don’t forget to set this.

2. Retweet Format

You can see the retweet format under ‘general’ in settings. The retweet format is by default like the below image.

You need to replace ‘retweeting’ with ‘RT’.

The reason why you should do this is because when you retweet by saying ”retweeting”, more characters are utilized. So change it to RT.

3. Notification with Sound

In twhirl, you have the option of getting notified of new tweets with sound. When you select this, you will be notified for all the tweets. But I feel that I get more distracted when I set this. At the same time, when I’m in some other room, I don’t want to miss my replies.

So what I do is I set sound for only the replies. Check the box which says ‘only play sound on replies/directs’.

4. Do Not Hide When Minimized

Twhirl gives you the option of automatically hiding the client when you minimize. I normally do not prefer this. I don’t want twhirl to hide whenever I minimize. I don’t have the habit of having too many applications running at the same time. So having twhirl running without hiding will not be a problem for me.

Go to settings and select general tab. Here you have to uncheck the box that says ‘hide when minimized’.

5. Lookup Profiles in Browser

Most of the twitter clients have this function where if you click on a user’s profile, it will be loaded in the client itself. I hate this since I cannot get a proper view of the user profile in the client. It shows in a small column. Even if it did show in a big space, I would never prefer to see the profiles in the client.

Go to the general tab under settings and click on the drop down list box which says ‘By default, lookup profiles’. Select ‘in browser’.

After you do all this, don’t forget to save. If you don’t save, the changes won’t have any effect.

Try twhirl for a change and see how it works for you. Let me know in the comments what other settings need to be changed in twhirl when someone has just installed twhirl or started using twhirl.

You can follow me on twitter here.

Challenges are fun isn’t it? In my case, it really was interesting. I took the 7 day pure self-discipline challenge last week (on 3rd June). The challenge ended yesterday and here is the result.

What did I challenge myself to do?

I followed this post written by Glen Allsop in his blog on pure self-discipline and challenged myself the following three things:

1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days

2. No twitter

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

The Results:

1. One blog post everyday for seven days

This one didn’t come out like I wished. I was supposed to write 7 posts (one everyday). But I ended up writing only 4 posts. But hey, 4 posts in 7 days is better than 1 post a week. It was quite hard to write one post a day since I’m not quite used to it.

This challenge helped me a lot and I’m sure my posting frequency will only get better. Also I’ll be concentrating on quality of blog posts.

2. No twitter

This one was a success. I didn’t post a single tweet for a full week. In fact I hadn’t posted for 2 days when I started the challenge. That makes 9 days of no tweeting. There were 3-4 tweets which were automated from Friendfeed. I disabled the automatic ‘friendfeed to twitter’ posting one day before the challenge ended.

This increased my productivity. I had time to accomplish a lot of things.

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

This went on well on all days except Saturday. On Saturday, I slept at 12PM and got up at only 8AM. That’s 8 hours. The rest of the days were pretty good. I didn’t sleep exactly at 11PM or get up exactly at 5AM but somewhat in that range.

This also helped me in becoming more productive. I had time to play football (or soccer if that’s how you call it) every morning with my friends and yet get my work done.

This challenge is surely a success. Now I can stay away from twitter whenever I wish and still be happy. I can get up early in the morning and be productive throughout the day.

Did you take up the challenge? Or will you be taking up the challenge? Please let me know your views in the comments. I’ll be glad to hear what you have got to share.

Image Source: My design for Twitter’s “over capacity” screen by Mykl Roventine

It has been quite long since I have done a links post in this blog. I’m starting it again and from this week, you will see “useful reads” post in this blog every Sunday.

I’ll be sharing some of the useful links I have stumbled upon. If you have any links that you feel to be good, let me know through the contact form and I’ll be glad to add it in the next week’s links post.

So here we go

1. Amazing Blogs: 1-2-3 Plan Every Blogger Should Know

Sonia Simone, in this blog post at Copyblogger, explains how you can stand out from the crowd. There are millions of blogs. Many topics are covered by bloggers everyday. What can you do to make people read your blog instead of million other blogs? This 1-2-3 plan shares some tips for doing it.

2. A Forgotten Key to Blogging Success

This is a post which is targeted to solve the same issue as the first link – building successful blog. Glen Allsop, in this post at Write to done, gives you examples of successful bloggers who have one thing in common for their blogging success – “Being personal”.

3. 5 WordPress.TV Videos worth a Watch

In this post, Janith shares 5 videos from WordPress.TV that bloggers should watch. They are about getting started with Google analytics, blogging in real time, the twitter friendly links plugin, speeding up WordPress with gears for firefox and intense debate plugins which help you to take comments even further.

4. How I Earned $1000+ in Blog Revenue Last Month

Marko Saric’s blog at ‘How to make my blog’ is one of the blogs I recently added to my Google reader. He has written some quality blog posts recently and this post I have shared with you is one of them. It shows you how he earned $1000+ in blog revenue last month. Read and figure out how you can implement it in your blog.

5. 101 Blogging Headlines

This post is from Lyndon Antcliff in his new site called Magnetic Headlines. In this post, he shares 101 killer headlines for blogging which you can modify and use it in your blog. He also shares headline ideas for many other topics in his blog.

Hope you found all the links useful. Let me know if you have written or read a quality article within next Saturday using my contact form so that I can add them on Sunday.

Negative things keep happening to everyone. Do you get frustrated or do you try to find the hiding positive in the negative?

It is so common for people to face negatives. By negatives, I mean those things that you don’t want to happen. Let us focus on the blogging part of our life alone now.

Image: Optimist, PlanTrees by Heart of Oak

Scenario 1 – Broken Blog Theme

You start a blog and in just few days your blog theme doesn’t function properly due to some change you did in the code while editing your blog sidebar. Would you sit down and get angry over your blog? I know people who quit blogging because things don’t go their way.

What should you do?

Instead of getting angry at yourself for editing the sidebar, sit straight for a moment. Clear the fear in your mind. Login to a social networking site (me in twitter) or instant messenger and ask for your friends for help. Do what your (trusted) friend says.

The hidden positive

You know how to solve the issue that you faced. So now you don’t need to be afraid again when editing your blog’s code. Also you will understand how helpful your friends are.

Image: Optimism by baejaar

Scenario 2 – Comment Spam

This happens for almost every blog. It is funny how the spammers get to know about your blog before the search engines even index it. If your blog doesn’t receive comment spam, you can consider yourself lucky or your blog is not worth being in the internet. Okay maybe that is too much. Anyway, don’t get angry with the spam comments.

What you should do?

Install Akismet plugin for WordPress. If you still get many spam comments, especially from a particular IP address, block that IP address.

The hidden positive

See the spam comments this way. The more spam comments you get, more popular your blog is. In mathematical terms:

Comment spam is directly proportional to your blogs popularity.

The next time you receive spam comments, be happy that your blog got one step more popular.

Image: Money by jenn_jenn

Scenario 3 – A Big $0 Income from Your Blog

Blogs will not earn you money (a living) unless you get huge traffic. It won’t earn you even a penny when you are starting unless you are really good at it. I never earned a penny on the first day. Sometimes you won’t earn money after 1, 2 or even 6 months.

What you should do?

This is the tough period in blogging. Once you cross this, you will start earning money (I cannot guarantee a living). Keep your focus on blogging and do it as a hobby. This way it will never bore you when you are waiting for the numbers to appear in your paypal or adsense account.

The hidden positive

You will learn how not to quit when you are facing hard challenges in your life. It will help you keep going even when the target you want to achieve is so far from you.

Almost every negative has a positive. You should only be happy when you are facing a negative.

A negative can teach you a lot more than what a positive can teach you.

So keep going in your life looking for the positives in every negative.

Please share your views in the comments.