Lately I have been hearing about a lot of affiliates being burned by delayed or unpaid affiliate commissions not covering their adwords spend, and now I just heard a story from a friend that a well known affiliate management company has lost money due to paying affiliates but not being paid by merchants.

As our blogs grow to become businesses, and then become our main source of income, it is worth remembering that fortunes do not always go one way.

It is easy to get screwed through no fault of your own:

• Google Rankings tank
• Advertising prices you sell are cut
• Advertising prices you pay suddenly increase
• Bans, penalties, quality scores
• Crashes, data loss and hacks
• and so on

Darren Rowse once told me his problogger empire was nearly stalled before it started when he lost three quarters of his Google traffic overnight. I think he still doesn’t know why it happened, it just came back a couple of months later.

Can you imagine losing three quarters of your traffic and therefore three quarters of your income?

This is why you should not give up the day job until you have sufficient budget to ride out any problems that might crop up.

You must have a safety net in place. Plan for the worst and hope for the best!

1. Rants about who is and is not a social media expert - I agree that tooling around with Facebook or Twitter does not an expert make, but really, does it matter if someone says they are an expert but do not meet your strict definition? I have seen so many posts on this it is getting tiresome. They always seem to come to the conclusion that the only social media expert is the author of the post explaining why everyone else is not. Here is a clue, if you have bash everyone else to get ahead then you likely need to work on your own messaging.
2. Retweeting praise about yourself – You wouldn’t go into a room and say “hey folks, Jake just said this really nice compliment about me, listen up!” would you? So why would you retweet a compliment instead of just saying thanks? I am all about the self promotion but I think there is something a little over the top about retweeting praise. For other people, cool, for yourself .. not so much.
3. Direct message and @reply spam – I follow people who interact with me, but not if I go to your twitter stream and see you sent the exact same message to a million other people.
4. Viral games that spam you with @replies and direct messages - One of the reasons I do not like Facebook much is all the silly stuff and “invitations” to stuff I am not interested in, please do not soil Twitter with this too!
5. Hash tag hijacking – When I follow a hashtag about a conference, I am not too excited to see random unrelated stuff just because the Twitter user thinks they will get more exposure that way.

OK, I feel better for getting that out of my system!

Feel free to disagree or add your own in the comments …

Of course "Grunny" Grunberg never said this

The problem with retweets on Twitter is that it is simply a free-text copy and paste thing.

Even when you use a desktop tool such as TweetDeck, all it is doing is copying the original twitter users message and adding some stuff. Nothing is ever validated in the process, the tool will not check anything, and the twitter service itself does not perform any validation.

You would think there would be some back tracking done, as in the “in reply to”. Maybe this is something the Twitter folks can look into.

But until any changes are made in the way the service operates. people can use your name to spread whatever nefarious schemes they are hatching with wild abandon. This particular example I found out through TechCrunch, but I have seen lots of examples recently.

Obviously to see the exact message above I had to search twitter, even though I follow Greg Grunberg on Twitter (as a loyal Heroes fan), because he did not Tweet this and I am not following the scammer bot, I did not tweet it. That is not the problem. The problem is that retweets do spread, people are not always aware they are following spammers and bots (especially when those bots use sneaky tactics that I am not going to leak here), and you could unwittingly be clicking a link sent to you by someone you do trust.

So …

1. Be careful about links you click
2. Do not blind retweet, check out links before retweeting
3. Report spammers and scammers to twitter

I just posted an article over at another blog that I write for about a crazy experiment I am trying with one of my websites. Already a friend has told me I have made this site go from merely “unattractive” to “downright ugly” :) But I am sticking with the new feature for now because the numbers seem to be suggesting it is working.

Try crazy ideas

Now, I am not saying that you should plaster huge, ugly red arrows all over your blog!

But it does lead us to the first of the big influences on your success …

Your willingness to try and your ability fail and get back up. You have to try different things, test, tweak, and, yes, make yourself look silly once in a while.

Just do it.

The second is taking action, and keeping on taking action. Put in the hours. Stick with it.

In most any field, the people that you look up to as achieving what you want for yourself were just there before you, maybe only one step or two ahead. They have stuck with it for longer and tried more stuff.

What we do is pretty public, and the internet does have a long memory, but do not use that as an excuse to not do stuff. I have probably been blogging over ten years. “Probably” because it is difficult to know exactly what constitutes a blog before the term was invented. This means I made my biggest mistakes years ago, but I still make them, all the time.

So in conclusion …

Blogging recipe for success

1. Try things
2. Keep going

What do you think? What am I missing? Please share in the comments …

Bloggers are often obsessed about traffic, audience, subscribers, comments. Things change when you publish a personal blog. As well as hoping that others will read, perhaps far flung family members, or a potential book publisher, there is a different emphasis.

When you write a diary or personal blog, the main audience member is YOU.

We are not just talking about “Dear diary …” writing, but photography, video, podcasts and status updates. This is what is meant by a “life stream”. The stream is made up of many random bits and pieces but when you look back your memories jog and the fragments coalesce into an ordered history.

A year in photographs remembered from my personal Flickr archive

People worry about giving too many personal details away, but that worry does not necessarily need to stop you – this concern is hinged on assuming that you have to reveal everything, but in fact all you need to write, post or share is snippets. You can keep it safe while still gaining the benefits, because the intimate and personal stuff is filled in by your own memory once reminded.

What was once a difficult, fiddly or technical activity has now been made really easy by Posterous. All you need to be able to do is email, it does all the rest for you, even posting up video, audio and photographs. Check out my Posterous overview here.

This time it is British high street giant Primark who has taken a turn at the mud pit

Discount retailer Primark has launched a staff investigation after several employees posted malicious comments about customers on social networking site Facebook

Of course Primark are not the first and they will not be the last. Previous brand victims have been

• Ryan Air
• Starbucks
• Waitrose
• Tesco
• Virgin Atlantic
• 118 118
• And who can forget about Domino’s Pizza?

What is the answer? What can companies do to save their brands?

1. Have clear policies and training in place for staff before the bad stuff happens so they know the risks, the potential punishment, and you can avoid things getting out through ignorance
2. Realize these networks work for good and bad, which means even if you do not want to use Social Media for marketing, you need to have a presence if you are going to be able to mitigate inevitable issues
3. When the fires start, work hard to get your side across and do not put your head in the sand

Got any more tips for companies who want to protect their brands from the dangerous side of social media? Please share in the comments …

Yes, according to BBC NEWS a certain company has already started selling us by the 1,000

Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service.

Followers are available in blocks starting at $87 (£53) for 1,000. The biggest block uSocial is selling is 100,000 people.

Ok, perhaps I am exaggerating my claim just a little ;)

What the service offers to do is introduce Twitter users to the company. It is kind of like an individualized and paid for recommendation. Monetized Follow Friday?

Description on the company site

USocial estimated that each follower on Twitter was worth about 10 cents a month to a company that got them to sign up. The money would be made from adverts and sales on websites that followers click through to.

Obviously there are no guarantees that any of the folks who get sent recommendations will actually follow the person recommended so it can vary how long it takes to get to the 1,000 that you paid for. There are probably many bots getting these recommendations too. I wonder how many people block the account after getting one of these notifications?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments …

Changing the list appearance is performed through the button up in the top left of your Following list.

After you hit the expanded version you will now see more detail, including the person’s last tweet.

For each person there is a cog-icon button. This is a contextual menu that allows you to unfollow, block, direct message or @mention the person in your tweet.

One thing I think the Twitter folks have missed is a visual indication for if this person follows you back or not. You can look in the menu to see if you are allowed to direct message them, but it would be nice to be able to see this in the skimmable list.

Twitter is more than just status updates

It seems from talking to lots of people there is still some considerable confusion around how Twitter @replies work. The problem is that @replies are a vital part of Twitter, they make it more about discussion than “status updates”.

The Twitter folks have never had a comfortable relationship with using Twitter for discussion. In fact @Replies took a while to come to the service, they were a community invention, then third party tools included buttons and tools to make it easier, and finally Twitter gave in to pressure and added support.

As you can see at the Twitter Blog even back last year they were worried about replies appearing in public streams …

We’re trying to avoid the situation of you hearing someone answer a question when you didn’t hear the question (for instance). Also, you don’t have to hear answers to the question from people you don’t want to hear from. (If you’re not following them, you won’t see their answer.)

They made it so you had to opt-in to all replies. In the end, they took away this ability altogether.

Twitter’s logic is quite compelling, until you realize that some people, me included, like to see discussion with people I am not following! It was a key way that I found new people to follow. If someone I was watching sent an interesting response to someone I did not know, I would hit the “in reply to” link in TweetDeck to get context. This was a key way I found new people to follow, and I miss it.

There is a workaround, but not for followers, it has to be initiated by the Tweeter. Twitter shows any tweet that does not start with @ to all of your followers. So if you want your reply to be seen by the recipient and everyone else, start with a character other than @. For example:

Yes @chrisgarrett Twitter SHOULD fix their reply system

Do you agree that Twitter made a mistake with this change or do you prefer to only see replies to people you are already following? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Is WordPress.com bad for the WordPress brand?

Think I am being to strong? Check out this from Mark Jaquith

What about the following, which I’ve all heard?• “You can’t edit your CSS on WordPress unless you pay.”
• “You can only use the themes that come with WordPress.”
• “WordPress doesn’t allow Adsense.”
• “Embeds don’t work on WordPress.”

Those statements, which are absolutely true for WordPress.com, are false and damaging for WordPress

I see this confusion occasionally too in my forum and in conversations. Not a lot but enough that I know it is a problem, and I also know that the “WordPress is for non-commercial” meme has spread far and wide …

Now if you support the idea that WordPress.com is causing confusion for the WordPress brand, and I think many people will agree that it is, what to do about it?

Well, it is not like all those thousands of *.WordPress.com sites are going to be happily redirected to new domains. I can only think that rebranding the software would be the (inelegant, or even downright ugly) solution :(

What do you think? Am I blowing this up to be a bigger problem than it is? Is there a better solution? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

I would have linked to the original but it seems to have been taken down by their ISP.

The basic point, other than the great tips supplied for this specific case, is that rather than get caught up in Twitter memes we need to very carefully consider the impact of seemingly small and generous actions, and also be aware of the misinformation, both accidental and intentional that is going around right now.

Of course it is very often difficult to tell the difference, so I trust outlets like BoingBoing who have the network scale to sort the signal from the noise.

Facebook Countdown

Ever feel like you are being manipulated into herd behavior?

Facebook is getting a lot of publicity right now about their vanity name deal. I am sure you have seen this already, if not check out this great post by the Facebook Queen, Mari Smith.

And then there is the domain name grab of top level domain extension liberalization which essentially means soon you might be seeing .coke, .apple, .microsoft and .garrett … well, maybe not the last one.

How do you spot a real gold rush? Which should we get up at early hours for and which should we let slide?

The sad truth is it is very difficult to tell when something will be a big hit ahead of time. I am fortunate in that I am such an early adopter that I have time to get things wrong, correct my mistake, and STILL be ahead of the major curve. I did this with the internet itself in the very early 90′s, and most recently with Twitter a couple of years back. How do I do this?

Grow a good network.

It’s not about size, although scale does help, but about connecting with people who truly have their ears to the ground, fingers on the pulse, and any other “well connected” cliche you can think of.

You need that early warning system. If more than a couple of your trusted friends and contacts are buzzing about something then take notice, even if it still seems absolutely daft and meaningless. The more scarcity is built in, the more you need to take note.

Risk and reward are also important. How much will you risk for how much potential upside? It makes sense to grab your Facebook username, it makes sense to grab your .com and it is obvious now to most that you need your Twitter name. The risk is low (or zero) compared to the upside, which can be large.

With the tld domain liberalisation, I am on the fence right now. But I am listening to my trusted advisers.

What say you?

To prove my point, I wanted to expand on the idea here!

Rather than rewrite what I wrote, let me simply quote it here for you:

Writing a comment gets you writing – getting your wheels turning, and sometimes a long comment can be copied and pasted over to your own blog to become a great post.So just commenting is good, commenting early is good, and sometimes there are additional benefits.

I think all bloggers should comment. It’s just a good thing to do.

I do stand by that because when I am stuck for a blog article idea it is one of the strategies I use to get my mental gears greased or even write a whole article.

First I go to blogs in the niche or the top forums in the subject area (for bloggers I recommend the Authority Blogger Forum of course!), then I find content that gets me thinking, particularly questions where I can provide a good answer, or statements I disagree with, and then I write a comment.

Over on my blog I take the comment and flesh it out, provide background and context, and perhaps an anecdote or two.

The original question gets an answer, or the blogger gets a good comment, and I get relevant content for my blog that addresses a real issue – everyone wins.

Well you are in luck! I have written an information-packed 7 day blogging course for my friends at Simplweb, the Joomla turnkey site people, and best of all it is free.

Of course the site talks about “content sites” but we know blogs and content sites are the same thing, right? There are a couple more things you need to know

1. Even if you do not run a for-profit site, all the same ideas are relevant
2. The site is about Joomla rather than WordPress, but ALL the principles in this course apply to any blog
3. You will need to add your email address to get all the parts in the series

Get the first part and sign up for all the entries here.

I would love to hear what you think about it, I put a lot of hours in to make this really comprehensive and “flagship“.

Never Trust Stranger's Tool Suggestions

What can you do to prevent your account getting snatched?

First do not use a tool suggested by a stranger. Why should you trust a recommendation from a person who you don’t know and who has not proven their trustworthiness? Unfortunately so many people have been taken in this way. Just because they are tweeting to the same trending topic as you are following does not make them your friend.

Second, ask yourself WHY they need your login, even if you have been tipped off about a tool by a friend. This friend could have been taken in, or it might be autogenerated spam created by the tool that fooled them! In most cases tools do NOT need your login details. Unless we are talking about a fully fledged Twitter application like TweetDeck and such, there are only a few features that would require a login. Sending a Tweet or looking at your followers are not included in those.

Third, if it seems too good to be true it probably is. Greed is the main reason people get trapped by fake tools, with the promise of thousands of followers just by hitting a button. Do not be surprised if your account gets hijacked if you hand over control of who you follow and how to someone you do not know.

Last I should also mention the recent rash of “scripting attacks”. These are links that if clicked will do bad things, from sending fake tweets to taking over your Twitter account via the Twitter.com site. If you are using a desktop application and therefore not using the Twitter.com site to Tweet then log out. This will prevent the majority of the malicious “bad links” from doing their nasty deeds.

Any more Twitter safety tips to share? Please add yours to the comments …

Not everyone out there is a fan

I am a Starbucks fan, and I didn’t know any of the allegations being made … and ironically I think I would have never heard about this bad news stuff if it wasn’t for Starbucks social media campaign …

Starbucks idea was to allow the public to get involved in spreading the word via a Twitter hashtag. But, the public used the tools to spread a different word than the company was hoping for. Bloggasm tells it best

Those who posted the pictures to the microblogging site were to use predetermined hashtags that were listed in the contest rules.

Unfortunately for Starbucks, liberal activist and filmmaker Robert Greenwald, founder of Brave New Films, came across that Times article early Tuesday morning. Greenwald, who has directed films for major studios and launched Brave New Films a few years ago, had been working for months on shooting an anti-Starbucks video that debuted on YouTube that very day. The mini-documentary features interviews with several former and current Starbucks employees and makes the argument that the company — despite popular perception that it treats its employees well — has unfair labor practices and has aggressively fought off union organizing.

Any programmer will tell you to not entirely trust user generated input. Not everyone out there is your friend.

Perhaps this should be a warning that goes for Social Media also?

The fact is, if you have a personal site, doing casual development, or are testing the waters, most hosting providers are going to provide a pretty similar service.

For anyone who is serious about their blogging and hosting requirements, the crunch will come when

1. You really need technical support … and find that it just doesn’t exist (I live in the UK so even worse most hosting providers are asleep when I have problems)
2. It’s a big day for your business … and your site disappears

When either of those things happen then you immediately stop thinking about hosting as being a commodity and start investigating more seriously the options available to you.

While I was happy with DreamHost (most of the time) I knew the pressure of our Social Media Success Summit competition would be too much to handle for the service. Luckily via a couple of big-named bloggers I was introduced to the provider you see in my blog sidebar which is Westhost. This hosting company has handled everything admirably and provided excellent customer service so far.

If you ask on Twitter or any of the forums you will get many recommendations and they will all conflict. For each hosting provider that someone says they love,  you will have an equal and opposite reaction where someone hates that provider and gives you a long list of horror stories.

Some of the blogs I work on have super fast dedicated servers, the Promotions blog is blindingly fast, but the hassle of managing servers myself makes me frustrated just thinking about it.

This is why you need to work out the criteria that are important to you. For me being able to handle high traffic days (especially big launches like what I am doing now) and having someone available to scream at are now top priority. For you it might be day to day ease of use and the occasional down day might not be too much of a problem.

So over to you, how happy are you with your hosting and how important is hosting to your blogging?

Check it out right now or read on to find out more details …

Social Media Success Summit 2009 is the premier online event dedicated to helping businesses succeed with social media marketing. The presenters at this online event are some of the best known names in social media advice. They include bestselling authors and social media marketing experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Darren Rowse (Problogger), Mari Smith (Facebook guru), Jason Alba (wrote the book on LinkedIn), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), and Denise Wakeman (BlogSquad). There is someone called Chris Garrett in there too.

You can Tweet to enter to win a ticket for yourself, but the grand prize is worth more than $1690 and includes two tickets to the summit (one for you and one for a friend), a social media consultation, a blog review and two best selling books!

To enter for the grand prize simply write a post about Social Media Success Summit 2009 and let us know where it is, with trackback or a comment on the competition page.

Find out how easy it is to enter right now! – Good luck :)

Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?

What they have effectively done is removed the feature that allowed people to opt-in to all replies, regardless of if you are following all the parties in a conversation.

The problem is this is one of the ways I have found people to follow.

If you @reply someone I don’t know then I am going to check them out if your conversation looks interesting. I’m sure many folks do the same thing. It’s kind of like listening in to a conversation at a cocktail party, that is how you know when it is time to switch groups and follow the trail to where the good chats are taking place.

Now I am sure Twitter folks think they are doing the right thing, but it is strange they are removing features that harm nothing rather than improve the service?

You can look back over your blog posts and get an idea of where you were, what you were doing of course, but sometimes it is good to keep a diary, take screenshots, or even post milestones to friends.

What you are aiming for is a record and to track improvements and major events so you can look and learn.

Of course if you are going to track progress you need to work out what your goals are first, then measure against those goals

• Traffic
• Profit
• Subscribers
• Career
• Friends

Or perhaps you just want to have fun and relive some of the memories. Whichever your choice, it’s fun to look back.

What were you doing this time last year? The year before? Can you see this reflected in your blog?

This came to mind as I sorted through my flickr stream looking at photographs. Our combined social media output becomes a record of our life, but we can also do this intentionally in order to improve our professional efforts.

The simple truth is we can’t stop them, and I guess they are free to say and sell what they like providing they break no laws.

What we can do though is avoid those folks. We can block them. Like trolls, they only grow if we feed them.

After all, their very product involves taking advantage of other Twitter users weaknesses.

Their entire audience will be made up of either

1. People who autofollow
2. People who buy stuff like this

If we are careful to educate our own followers about the sleazy corners of Twitter, and at least unfollow people pushing stuff like this, then maybe the scamsters will wither and die on the vine.

Let me know of any more Twitter sleaze you see or hear about, @chrisgarrett

What do I mean by personalizing your content? I mean adding more of your self, some of your personality, into your writing and presentation.

This is because you are your main source of uniqueness. If everything on your blog can be found everywhere else in your niche, why should someone choose to read you?

• Use anecdotes and stories from your own experience.
• Draw cartoons, even if you are not a particularly good artist. Doodles are a fun way to draw your readers eye.
• Create video and audio so people can see and hear you.
• Have a great about page that shows the person behind the words.

“Does social media work?”

The problem with this question is you first have to decide what you want social media to work for. There are many things social media tools are great for …

• Fun
• Raise your personal profile
• Foster community
• Gain visibility for your business
• Attract an audience
• Customer service
• Market research
• etc

And some that I would not suggest social media be used for, such as making direct sales pitches.

When you play to social media strengths you do get results. I just read this in an email newsletter from Bob Bly about my friend Mike Stelzner’s social media survey report:

Surveyed 900 social media marketers

Three days later, more than 15,000 people read it and hundreds posted comments.

Within two weeks, nearly 30,000 people had read his report, more than 100 media outlets and bloggers wrote about it, and it was reposted on Twitter more than 1500 times!  He also was offered $30,000 to do some work directly resulting from the buzz around his report.

I know he got those results without spending a dollar on advertising or promotion, just time.

When you have something that you want to spread then social media is not just proven to be effective, I would say it is an essential part of your communication now.

If you would like to learn more, check out this free mp3 audio class where Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman, Mike Stelzner and I talk through the major things you need to know to be effective. It’s being offered as a thank you for signing up to hear more about the social media summit we are running, and you can opt-out any time.

There are a couple of reasons I did this. First if a URL is too long email programs break the links by wrapping. This means I get a lot of people saying the links don’t work. The second reason is in the past Aweber’s built-in click tracking shortened URLs have broken also when the URL contained non-standard stuff.

Of course the problem when people see a URL-shortened link is they don’t know if they can trust it. I have three solutions, and they are all easy to implement on WordPress.

1. Shrink your URLs down as far as they will go – Instead of www.somedomain.com/category/year/month/day/post use a URL scheme like mydomain.com/post
2. Use a redirect plugin such as gocodes to turn a long fancy URL into something like http://chrisg.com/recommends/hosting
3. WordPress already provide you with pre-shortened URLs, you just need to know where to find them! :)

Waaah?

Yes, indeed. You already have access to short URLs without changing or adding anything.

If you go into your control panel and look at editing your post, you will see an article ID. Simply use that instead of the prettier and friendlier URL. Eg. http://f1ftw.com/?p=28 goes to http://f1ftw.com/fantasy-f1/vettel-takes-china/ (of course it helps when your domain is 5 characters not including the TLD).

Copy the number that comes after Post= - that's your post ID

So to fix that, a friend and I just launched a purely fun blog, all about Formula 1. In doing so I learned a couple of lessons:

• When your interest becomes your job you need to work hard to keep your passion alive. My love of photography suffered from trying to commercialize my pictures to the point where I lost interest and sold my blog. Don’t let that happen to you.
• You can learn a lot from doing hobby projects, especially as you have true freedom to be creative.
• Finding the fun can be a great way to stay motivated.
• Blogs can help you enjoy a hobby – it happened with my photography and is happening again with F1
• Sometimes geeks just do what geeks do – it’s only natural that we blog stuff

If you want to join in the fun with a chance to win Formula1 prizes, head over to the blog and follow us on @fantasy_f1

Have you ever killed off an interest by getting too serious with it? How have you combined your work and play? Please share in the comments …