The post WordPress Instatutorial Dashboard Settings appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Read Blogposts Everyday

Use Google Reader to subscribe to a variety of blogs and visit your Google Reader page to catch up on your daily reading. Reading new blogposts keeps you up to date in your niche and keeps you in your favorite bloggers. Reading daily also helps you stay sharp and very often helps you inspire and polish your upcoming blogposts.

Write Everyday

Even if your blogging schedule and editorial calendar don't call for daily writing, you should write every day. When you write, you practice. Writing develops the creative part of writing as well as other important skills, like using your blog, typing faster, searching better in Google and more.

(notice the previous two items both say: EVERYDAY, not whenever you're up for it)

Observe Things With a New Lens

As you go about your day, when you become a blogger you will notice new things. You'll notice something about your granddaughter that you never noticed before; maybe you'll pay more attention to the different restaurants in your city because you want to blog about food. Take time to notice these subtle differences about your daily life, your hobbies, your family, your friends, your work. As you blog more, you'll observe more, develop an insightful eye. Everything is bloggable (yes, I think I just made that word up).

Talk to People About Your Ideas or Discoveries

When you write a blogpost, or you have an idea or discovery, share it with friends or family. Try to find friends and family that you trust with this information AND that will be supportive of you and your efforts to develop your blogging voice. Tell them how you're coming up to your current train of thought and see if you make any new discoveries. Sometimes it isn't the feedback that they'll give you that will be important here, instead the clarification of your own thoughts as you try to put them into words will be refreshing.

Find Other People That Like Your Topic

Once you have a few blogposts published under your belt, you need to find other bloggers that write about similar topics and that may be interested in what you have to say. Go out and search for them, sometimes you'll need to go beyond the traditional search engines. Look in forums, social networks and even amongst your friends, family or even co-workers. I've discovered that people I've known for months or even years have a blog and they just don't talk about it much, but once I bring up the topic, they open up. Instant blogging friend!

 
(all images by shutterstock)

Go on, you know you wanna read part two: Blogging Tips Part II

The post Blogging Tips – Day 11 #30DBC appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Living in Irvine gives me an insight into the culture that we have, and I know most people have smart phones so this is a great move. You can use the phone to find and connect you different places. You can email or call the police officers in charge of the different high schools around town. If you're social and want to go out and mingle with other city dwellers you'll find a cool section that shows you events coming up so you can join.

One thing that I thought was really interesting is the crime tip tool. You can actually report a non-emergency crime directly from your phone. That's pretty neat, you can just send and alert to IPD if you see a crime taking place and you don't even have to dial the police department or 911. Though you're still reminded to call 911 if there is an emergency. Something that was a bit unexpected for me,  is the "Teen Events" and "Youth Action Team" social media icons, in fact there's a whole section related to Teens and I just found that odd. Why isn't there a "seniors" section, or "entrepreneurs"? Perhaps Teens is the demographic that the Irvine Company determined is using mobile devices with these kinds of apps.

I got the app as soon as I heard about it and I like it. It's a bit rough around the edges when it comes to design. The functionality of the app although  limited, is well done. The icons and menus make sense and you are able to do what you are being offered. The app hasn't crashed on me or given me any problems. If you want to try it yourself, just head to your respective markets and Download for Android, or Download for iOS.

At last, a few screenshots of the app to give you a better idea of what it looks like. So far it's been great and you should get it if you live in the area. I'm guessing that cities like Costa Mesa, or Tustin, Newport or even south of Irvine will start their own apps soon, especially if enough people download and use the Access Irvine app.

The post Access Irvine, The City of Irvine’s First Mobile App appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you have seen my video rant about Klout then you is might see where I'm coming from. Today, I have a much more practical approach to my thoughts. The gaps that the services have are tremendous, for example they don't measure Yelp yet. They can't measure your activity in a forum, and with the exception of Empire Avenue most of them ignore your own blogs. Blogs are arguably the center of a lot of social media interaction.

As cliché as it might sound, Content is king. So blogs and websites, especially individual's websites are the place where people find content to share across their networks. We need the measuring systems to quickly build a more flexible framework to which we can plug in all the smaller websites that we participate in. Whether it is our personal blog, GetGlue, GoodReads, Daily Mile, Daily Booth, and even StumbleUpon. If we are going to truly measure influence, or social activity then we must include all the avenues in which this interactions take place, not just the big ones or the ones that are convenient or most lucrative. Until then Klout, Peer Index, Empire Avenue and even Kred are nothing more than a sociology experiment; albeit, one of the funnest experiments I've participated in.

The post The Failures of Measuring Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

William Pitcher even asked me if I thought the potential for EA was really there, I told him, yes. Bigger than FB and Twitter? he asked. I told him... "maybe."

I don't think it will ever be as big as FB or Twitter, or even Linked in. These three are the Three Kings of Social Networks, as I call them, and the reason Empire Avenue will never be as big as any of them, is because EAv actually depends on those sites for its services.

You see, EmpireAvenue is one of many attempts --albeit, one of the successful ones-- at measuring influence online. How much is your content worth? I think that is the real question that gets answered by the site.

The site works in two ways, depending on your opinion of it. One popular view is that it's just a game; the other view, MY preffered view is that it is a super powerful networking and filtering tool. I take it a little more seriously than most, but then again I take a lot of the things I do online more seriously than most people do. After all, I've been making my living with online resources, since 1999.

EA gives you a handle, or rather you pick it, and this becomes your "Stock Ticker" akin to a corporation's stock ticker in the NYSE. After you join, they'll give you a number of Eaves to start with (their own fictitious currency). Mine is (e)OG. You can change it anytime you want... for a price.

Once you start and join, the rest is up to you, you can buy into other people you find interesting, amusing, or simply when you want to show support for their cause. Other people engage in what they call "reciprocity" and I call bullshit. Pardon my french but I stand by my post in reciprocity.

Reciprocity is good only if its genuine, otherwise its just a cheap way to game the system, whatever system that is.

With that mini rant/intro I'll try to get back to the original title of the post. Have we reached a tipping point for EmpireAvenue to become mainstream? And I mean mainstream, only in the circle of social media enthusiasts. For if you really think about it and look up some numbers, Twitter is not really "mainstream" yet, most people (despite what you believe) are NOT on twitter.

Don't believe me? Ask 3 of your neighbors what their twitter handle is? Ask your Tax person who they "follow" on Twitter? Ask your doctor where you can follow his updates... I'd venture to guess that 8 out of 10 people will simply give you a googley-eyed look and wonder WTF are you talking about.

Certainly EA has gone through a tremendous explosion over the past few months. Some big names in the tech world, social networking arena and other fields have joined. And I wonder, why haven't others? Is it really a waste of time like many people say? I don't think so (more on that later).

You can now find people like Chris Pirillo, Darren Rowse, even big name brands like Ford and ATT. But aside from those two brands, do you even know who the other people are? I happen to know of Chris from years back because he's *been* there from the get go, in the tech industry. As I was learning systems administration and computer support for Windows in the early days of my career, his posts would often come up with solutions to various problems.  As for Darren, he is one of, if not *the* most popular blogger in the planet when it comes to monetizing the whole blogging thing. He makes millions blogging.

I would be curious if all the people I invited in the early days are still hesitant to join, do they still think this is a time waster? Do you think that way? I can tell you that I've enjoyed the site quite a bit. People wonder what "business" value I've gotten from it, and I can't pinpoint it, but I've gotten some true value. I'll give you a couple examples, I met Adriel Hampton on there, and eventually he reached out for some website help. He's a happy camper now and I thank him for approaching me for help, and I thank EA for creating this space where I met him. I also humbly help moderate the WordPress group *in* Empire Avenue, where people ask random wordpress related questions. This group gave me a connection to other wordpress professionals that I probably would never have met.

I love EmpireAvenue. Truly, I do.

I've met a few other people on the site and now follow them and interact with them on Twitter. I have found some amazing blogs to read that would probably never have come up in my normal circles of friends or searches.

But EA isn't mainstream, nor do I think it will ever be. I think by the time social networks are really mainstream, it will be something new, something different.

Thanks for reading this rant. And if you end up joining EmpireAvenue, let me know if I can help. After all, helping is what I do.

The post Tipping point for Empire Avenue, incoherent thoughts and ramblings. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Screenshot Pimp has a few more features than the previous two Firefox addons I reviewed. Just like other addons, this is installed through the Firefox addon facility and after a quick restart it will be available to use. While previous utilities I've reviewed have an icon to activate them, this one actually uses a full bar. The bar sits below your address bar and it provides with quick access to the utility's functions.

Screenshot Pimp Preferences Screenshot Pimp Saves video Screenshot Pimp Toolbar

To the addon's fault, there are lots of options. Most of the options are unnecessary I think and some of the features provided by the addon are really not supposed to be there if you ask me, for example, the addon brought with it a search box and I really wasn't looking for another search box in my browser bar. With that said, there is one cool feature that might attract you to this addon. One of the options the addon provides is the ability to capture a video from a video website like Youtube, or Viddler, now that's Pimp!

Besides the feature to capture a video, this addon provides the necessary tools to capture part of a website, the whole viewable area or the entire page, even if you can't fit it all on your screen. Very handy, very useful with a few extra added features that help Screenshot Pimp might be the right app for you.

The post Screenshot Pimp by Konverts, screenshot addon for Firefox appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So... Last year I I conducted a contest for a client, the contest was a design contest. The purpose was to come up with a logo. After sometime, we came up with the guidelines and requirements for the company logo. Shortly thereafter we started up the contest using a website called LogoMyWay. The service is pretty straight forward. You pick an amount as the prize, the website takes a percentage and you select the parameters of the contest. As the contest runs, designers all over the world are able to read your requirements, see any collateral you chose to share with them, and even ask questions. A designer can participate on any contest he or she wants and there are usually anywhere from 90 to 150 design contests going on at one time. To me it sounded like a great idea, and it turned out that I was right. My client received over 1000 logo submissions. From those I would say about 500 were really original, while the rest split somewhat unevenly between bad, copycats, or revisions based on feedback.

We ran that contest for 14 days and that was an excellent amount of time. It allowed us to give the designers constant feedback and it provided us with 1117 total submissions and a good 15 - 20 great logos, . After the contest was over, we received the vector files from the designer. We thanked all the participants and ranked all the remaining logos into the top 10 spots. We were able to get a lot of different options, all of them based on our requirements. The requirements can really be anything you want to portray on your logo. You could include keywords, objects, symbolism, special fonts, desired style. Express your business values, your target audience, your ideology or anything you would like to convey in your logo. Make the contest private if you would prefer.

Based on the success of that contest, I decided to run my own contest when it came time to get a new logo. As you might know, I have had a job for the past 10 years, and I've been an IT Consultant, and Systems Administrator for hire for about half that time. Recently, after quitting everything I had that was great I decided to pursue The dream, my own business, so I decided to officially launch my consulting services business. The name is pretty straight forward, Oscarstech. The logo had to contain that in the design and also have a symbol or bug as some call it that is unique and can symbolize the different aspects of my business. Or it an just be unique and eye catching.

After you're finished reading this post, feel free to rank the existing logos for my contest

Turns out that the contest has been a success so far, I ran a 5 day contest this time. In fact it ended today (Wednesday). One small problem is that a bunch of people submitted last minute designs, making it difficult to pick a winner. I asked the guys at LogoMyWay if they could extend the contest. They have obliged and I have until Monday to receive submissions and to give some feedback to the existing designers so they can make adjustments if they like. Something that is actually new this time around with the second contest I run is that they have a feature where you can share the contest out to friends and family or whoever you want so they can rate the submissions.

So far I like a lot of the logos I've seen but I'm glad I have some more time to make a decision.

My contest is going now until Monday. Then I have 14 days to pick a winner, but I think I'll pick the winner within a few days. If you want to see it, go visit and rate the contest here.

The post Logo my Logo appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The purpose of Tarpipe is similar to Yahoo Pipes. It takes a source of data and posts it to a location. The sources available right now are of two types, email or a REST API. If you don't know what a REST API is, don't worry its not very important yet. But it means that it could read information from other websites. The destinations in the other hand are greater in numbers and some of them include WordPress, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Evernote and many others.

Essentially, Tarpipe allows you to send an email to a special email address, and this action of sending an email can trigger a whole process which ends up posting the body of your email to your Blog, and then announce it on Twitter while saving it to Delicious at the same time... for example. Anyway, check out the video and let me know if you have any questions. I also have a second video ready which improves on this one and should be made available later on this weekend.

The follow up video is now published, you can watch it here.

The post Tarpipe, Learning by Example appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.