Celebs are tweeting, marketers are twittering, normal people are turning into Tweeps and it’s all going off big time. It’s great, but what is it? Well it’s something called micro blogging. It’s a short sharp blurt out no longer than 140 characters. It was original supposed to answer the question:

What are you doing right now?

It’s odd that it has taken off really because a lot of the time all you see is one half of the conversation, if you follow someone then you see the messages they put out when they tweet in general, but look at their profile and you see all their tweets even the ones they sent to someone else, however you don’t get to see the other half of the conversation. And then of course someone will ReTweet (RT) someone else’s tweet and you get another snapshot of something they were twittering about. It can be confusing at times, it’s like walking around with one eye closed, it’s odd – but you can get used to it.

With a good twitter app like TweetDeck or Twirl you can do a lot of clever things, Reply, ReTweet, Direct Message or make someone a favourite. You can group your message list, look people up and filter them out. It’s all very clever and can be addictive…. but… it’s no good without an audience.

Your audience are the people who follow you, you are part of the audience of the people you are following. And just to make it very confusing the people you follow can also follow you. Only your followers get to see your tweets but you can reply to anyone the only restriction is you can only direct message those who are following you.

Building your audience is key to your twitter success and there are many reported methods of doing it. If you google it you will find that there are a few ‘autopilot’ schemes that proclaim to get you lots of followers. Over time most of these have been exposed as using spam techniques and if they do actually attract followers they tend to be bots and of no use to you as an audience.

The safest method to use but by far the longest way of doing it is to follow other people. Decide what you want to twitter about, then start to search for topics on your chosen subject at twitter.com Then, when you have found some people you like the sound of, click the start following button. Start tweeting yourself putting out good quality info about your subject and interject it with your own thoughts and of course what you are doing about it. A good proportion of the people you follow will follow you back if they like what they see. This is called the organic method, it’s growing an audience without the aid of (or interference from) other methods. The organic method is slow, not all the people you follow will reciprocate so you have to follow a lot before your audience grows. By way of natural selection you will be followed by others just because you are tweeting good stuff so keep your quality of info up and be a regular twitterer.

On the subject of growing an audience I have taken part in a scheme based on the pyramid model over at John Cow. There is no selling involved and it’s free so don’t worry. Basically you agree to follow five people me and John Cow being two of them and then you promote the link that the system gives you. The idea is you promote and get five followers, then those five get five and so on. It sounds good – but to tell you the truth it’s not working too well for me, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t really asked anybody to follow the link yet. Give it ago – in theory the result should be good for all concerned and it doesn’t cost anything and you aren’t contributing to twitter spam.

I’m aso about to trial TwitterRocket from upstart blogger. I’ll let you know how that goes in another post.

First of all lets deal with how we forward our email:

Hands up anyone who has received an email that has been forwarded and forwarded so the email is 100′s of lines long and contains all the names and email addresses of every recipient so far?

Yes, I thought so. There are lots of us. It seems a popular thing to do, however it’s actually the lazy persons way of replying to email. It also uses more bandwidth and processor time to do it. An email that starts out at 1k, can soon turn into 10 or 20k once it has been backwards and forwards a few times, especially if the senders have graphics in their email signature. And if it’s an email conversation between two people remember the email goes into their sent email folder as well as being an email in their inbox – now suddenly there are multiple incarnations of the same message and its size is growing all the time.

There are a number of things wrong with this way of emailing, here are just 3:

1. Security

Email signatures normally contain peoples name, title/position, telephone and sometimes mobile phone number. If you blindly forward an email on, that information is sent to who you forward to. A simple email I send to someone I know can easily be forwarded by them to multiple people I don’t know and suddenly they have my email address, my name, my company, my position in the company, my telephone number and what my email signature looks like. What’s to stop them sending an email purporting to come from me?

Another security issue is people forward to multiple others, and they do it by just adding more email addresses in the ‘To’ field. It works, but what happens is the email software makes a list of the recipients and dumps it in the header of the message. Now an unintended recipient has some email signatures and a long list of valid email addresses. And don’t forget the sender is in their too, that could be you.

2. Confusion

The email you send to some one has a subject and a body, the subject is a brief line about what the body content is, and the body is the message. When you reply the subject gets ‘Re:’ added before it and the original message is included with your reply. Some email programs have your message above your reply, some have it below. Almost all email programs have the ability to add ‘quoting’ to the original message and display it as a hierarchy in different colours, but most people have this facility turned of. So imagine an email that has been replied to a number of times, by people with email signatures, one of these people replies above, one of them replies below and both have their hierarchy quoting turned off – what a mess.

3. Size and Time

There are millions of emails sent every day, thousands every minute. The 20k (and growing) email sent in the example above is one of millions of others fighting their way through the internet to get to their intended target. Ever wondered why your email has gone astray? Or why its taken a while to reach the person? The web is choking on oversized content and even a small email like this is making matters worse.

What’s worse is the email software that the email is sent/replied from is having to keep track of the send, the reply, the send again etc there is more work for bigger files. The bigger the file the more the recipient has to wade through to find the bit they are interested in, this takes time to do and can result in confused replies.

Email is brilliant and I love it which is why I have invested time in making email work for me and to be as slick as possible. I have found out that if I want to reply to an email, if I highlight the bit I am replying to, only that chunk of text is included in the reply as the original message. I have found out that when I have my quoting turned on, the bit of text I am replying to gets ‘>’ added before it and the software changes its colour.

I also take time to split my replies and insert what I am saying into the original text, so it’s easy for my recipient (the original sender) to re-read what they wrote and then read my answer.

Here is an example:

Example email I might receive from a client:

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Thanks for you good work

A Client
Managing Director
Business Inc
Tel: 01234 567890

Here is how I would reply to this email

1. First I highlight the paragraph beginning ‘Thanks…’ and ending ‘…footer?’ and hit the reply button. This generates a reply email, it adds a time stamp at the top, includes the highlighted bit of text as a quoted (>) paragraph and my signature at the end. Notice I didn’t highlight the senders ‘Hi’ or their signature. My reply email looks like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions
> though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

2. I then start to make my replies inside the quoted paragraph and it ends up looking like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design.

Great. No problems – l’m pleased  you like it so far

> I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

I’ll adjust the r/h column, it can go about 20px wider. For the footer I just need the company registration info and a copyright date.

Speak to you soon.

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

Now when my client gets my reply it’s obvious to them what they said and what I’ve replied to. My email software is set up to track the original message and all replies, I can even set up mail rules to shuffle them into folders and change their category, but this post is about Netiquette not about mail organisation so I will leave out the advice about email management.

I’m not saying my way is right (your way might be very different) or that you should adopt my way of doing things. What I am trying to get across is it’s most important that we all tidy up our communications. Email should work well for everyone and don’t assume that other people are as good as you may be at dealing with their emails, so it may be up to you to take the responsibility to learn some netiquette.

You read every day on the net about bloggers making six figures from their blogs and how their success can benefit you if you buy their proven system and blah, blah blah. We’ve all been suckered in at one level or another, and we are all still plodding on doing our day jobs non the richer.

Well here is a tip for you, it costs you nothing to implement and at some point down the road it ‘MIGHT’ earn you $6 too – it might earn you more than $6 but it’s not guaranteed.

Blogging Rocket is presented to you via a WooThemes WordPress template. Woo are excellent WordPress theme designers and that’s why I chose FreshNews as the Blogging Rocket skin. I noticed while I was looking around the Woo website that they had an Affiliate Program, I joined it (for free) and posted my affiliate link to Woo’s website in the footer of my blog.

Every so often a visitor to Blogging Rocket will click on my affiliate link and that click is registered at Woo against my account. Vary rarely the person that clicked will buy a Woo theme and once that happens I get paid a commission because I was the lead generator. Now that’s good – about $15+ in commission depending on what the person buys, but as I say that’s few and far between. The reason I made $6 was this, I introduced a friend of mine to the Woo Themes affiliate program and he joined up too. Woo registered the fact that my friend joined under me and I became the 2nd tier to any of his sales.

My friend’s blog generated a $30 commission this week and so I got $6 because of it.

Now of course these figures aren’t huge and you wouldn’t give up work to do it all day, but as I said at the beginning of this post, it’s money for nothing, so you have nothing to loose. It costs nothing to sign up, and after only a few minutes of your time you can post your affiliate link on your site and the jobs done.

The Woo designs are excellent, well thought out and what’s more they just work, so you can’t go wrong if you buy one. People realise this and so eventually I feel sure the link will work for you.

All you have to do now – is click here and sign up for yourself, then don’t forget to send you affiliate link to your friends and tell them to do the same that way you get to be their 2nd tier and hopefully you too can earn $6 for doing nothing!

1. Set the time to your local time zone

You do this by clicking on:

–> Settings

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/options-general.php

On the General Tab scroll down to the Time Zone section. Alter the pop up to correspond with how far out your time is with the server time

2. Alter your tagline to a good keyword rich slogan

While on the same page as above, in the Tagline section alter ‘Just another WordPress Blog’ to a meaningful keyword rich (but brief) slogan.

3. Alter your permalinks structure

You do this by clicking on:

–> Settings -> Permalinks

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

Click on the radio button next to ‘Custom Structure’ and type /%postname%/ into the field, this will set up good SEO links based on your blog title.

4. Update your Ping List

You do this by clicking on:

–> Settings -> Writing

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/options-writing.php

Your ping list is the list of services that your blog announces itself to when you make a new post, by default you have just one service specified (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) however I suggest adding these also:

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/

http://www.imblogs.net/ping/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

5. Set your comment options

You do this by clicking on:

–> Settings -> Discussion

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/options-discussion.php

Choose your options carefully because these choices configure how you want comments to appear on your blog. These options will also give you email notifications of when a new comment is made.

6. Alter your admin username

You do this by clicking on:

–> Users -> Admin (in the Username column of the Manage Users list)

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/users.php

The Admin username can not be altered, and if you blog under that login, your posts are credited as being authored by ‘Admin’. This isn’t ideal, so on this page you have the opportunity of entering your First Name, Last Name and Nick Name, then (once you have saved) you have the options in the pop up menu of being publicly displayed as a variation of your name or nickname. Alter this pop up menu depending on how you want to brand yourself.

7. Activate Akismet plugin

You do this by clicking on:

–> Pugins -> Akismet (click activate then follow the prompts)

http://www.<your-domain-here>/wp-admin/plugins.php

Akismet helps you fight comment spam, it is the default spam fighter plugin but a quick search will find others. Akismet requires an API key from WordPress.com the online version of WordPress. You will need to visit the link that activating Akismet prompts you to and sign up for a free account, make sure you opt for the username only option otherwise you will end up creating an online blog. You will be sent an email with your API key this is a string of numbers and letters approx 12 characters long. Copy and paste this into the Akismet configuration.

You have now completed all the initial steps to setting up a WordPress blog, no doubt you will need to adjust settings in the future but now you can get on and choose your theme and start blogging!

The problem doesn’t actually lie in the WordPress coding, it seems to lie within the settings of the webserver that is dishing out your files. Fortunately there is simple answer to this and it lies in doing a quick edit in your .htaccess file.

It seems that some hosting accounts have SecFilterScanPOST enabled and this is causing the problem.

Alter your .htaccess file by adding these two lines of code:

SecFilterEngine Off

SecFilterScanPOST Off

Now try to upload your picture again and you should find it working.

Please note: I’m not a webserver techie and I have to hold my hand up and honestly say that I’m not sure why turning off these two options makes the difference. I do know that they were on for a reason – that reason may be because it’s a default install and they can be either on or off without making any difference, or it could be that it’s a critical bit of set up that really shouldn’t be turned off.

So here is a shout out to anybody with webserver knowledge to join in the comments on this post and tell me what’s what with these settings. So please follow this post’s comments in either the comments RSS feed or subscribe to the comments below.

As with any of our advice the usual disclaimer applies: back up before you do any alterations and be aware that you do the mod at your own risk.

I would say, personally, I would put myself in the ‘ermmm… sort of’ bracket. I think some of my words are good, but in general I write too much, so I can definitely improve.

Fortunately I have found a way to improve, I have found a blog that positively oozes with liquid gold writing skills and I’m happy to share the booty with you.

Take a look… no bookmark… no sign up… no take a look, bookmark and sign up to this blogs newsletter there are untold nuggets of info here. Take note: gold is no good unless you spend it – whatever you learn from Brian Clark make sure you use it in your own work.

CopyBlogger.com Copywriting 101

1. Write at least two posts

Promoting your site is a given, no promotion, no traffic. But the traffic will only flow one way and never return if all your readers see is stale content. You need to write at least two articles a week, more if you can (if you can’t try and get guest articles from your peers) and post them a day or so apart. TIP: better traffic spikes will come from posts that appear at the beginning of the week – there is an assumption that news is ‘freshest’ at the start of the week. A great resource of tips and how to’s to help you improve your writing is www.copyblogger.com

2. Check for broken links

Links that end in a 404 page will lose you traffic so fix any incoming or internal links that are broken. A good plugin for checking your posts is Broken Link Checker. An awesome plugin for managing incoming broken links is Redirection it allows you to take an incoming URL and map it to a new post via 301 redirects. It’s the only way to preserve traffic to your posts when you change a site structure.

3. Check your Webstats

You know in the movies where you see the big macho hero choosing his weapons before he goes off and does something amazing, and he picks up a big gun, looks at it lovingly… then puts it back and picks up an enormous gun, snorts a laugh and nods his head in approval? Well your website statistics are that enormous gun. Your site stats are where you find out who is linking to you, how much traffic you are getting and what pages your visitors are looking at. The stats can tell you your most popular pages and therefore you will know what kind of content your audience is hungry for. There are many stats packages around, your hosting will come with some and there is of course Google Analytics. I’m currently using WordPress.com Stats which is a great plugin because it causes no extra load on your server and hey, who else but WP knows enough about WordPress to produce good accurate stats? A word of warning: only check your stats once a week, checking stats is like weighing yourself when you are on a diet, check to often and you don’t see any progression. Check once on a regular basis and you get to see the movement.

4. Plan future posts

Doing step three will make this step a breeze. While you are checking your stats, look out for your busiest pages or notice when your busiest times are (and note what you did to produce the extra traffic) and plan your next posts to extend your popular content. If you find your popular posts aren’t really where you thought your blog was going, don’t dismiss them and blindly push on, be sensible about it and let the market lead you, as they are the only experts in all this.

5. Don’t give up!

In every bloggers life there are moments of despair, moments where you think “Argh F**k It! This is going nowhere” if you are like this then you are probably checking your stats too often! Everyone is in the same boat here, don’t assume that others are getting more success than you, some might be, but others definitely won’t be. Just keep going and don’t give up. If you feel isolated then join a community, I’m in the Blog MasterMind coaching program and there are forums and communities to help keep me going – you can join too and I strongly recommend that you check it out.

6. Do Back up!

I will continue to harp on about this for probably the life of this blog, and even beyond, I might even have it etched on my Tomb Stone:

RIP
Ian Blackford
Blogging Rocket Webmaster
(*Snigger* I can RIP – I backed up!)

Get a back-up plugin, set it on a schedule to back up at least once a week and then forget it – job done. A great plugin for this is WordPress Database Backup

7. Take a break!

There is a lot to blogging, a lot more than people realise and if you do all the above every week along with your blog promotion and digesting information from others you are going to need a break. So don’t beat yourself up for a taking a little time off, switch off your computer turn on the TV – go on, I bet there is a good film on!

Here is how you test to see if you are affected:

Call up this URL, remember to change YOUR-DOMAIN to your domain name plus the .com or .co.uk etc:

http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN/wp-content/plugins/

By doing this you are directly asking the webserver to show you the plugins folder. If you are affected by the security issue you will see this:

The above screen shot is a file listing of your plugins folder.

This example is for a WordPress install but If you don’t have a WordPress blog – you may still be affected try and locate a folder on your server and all it directly like this:

http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN/your-folder-name/

You might think: “Well so what?” but the security implications are that any folder that is on your server can potentially be viewed like this because it means that your hosting account has not been fully configured. Imagine if you have an SQL back up of your blog sitting in an uprotected folder, anyone with a bit of trial and error can find it and download it.

I had this problem on this hosting account, it seems that some providers leave it up to you to figure out what the problem is and for you to sort it out. Fortunately for me I knew what the issue was and how to fix it, so now I’m going to tell you. It’s so simple I really don’t know why the ISP’s don’t just configure it like this to begin with.

Fixing the exposed file structure issue

All you need to do is add a simple line of code to your .htaccess file. This file (.htaccess – yes it does have a dot in front of its name) sits in the root of your hosting account and tells the webserver all the extra stuff you have configured. And in this case it tells it:

Options All -Indexes

That’s all you have to add to the .htaccess file to protect all you folders from being viewed in this hosting account.

Two ways to do it

The first way

Boot your FTP program and connect to your hosting account, then look in the root (the first level) of your hosting for the .htaccess file. Once you have located it, download it – a word of caution here on some computers (Apple Mac namely) when you put a ‘dot’ infront of a file name it makes it invisible, the file is still there – but you can’t see it. So it might be wise to change the name of it before you DL. *** Remember to change the name back in the account as soon as you download – just in case you don’t do the amend straight away. Your .htaccess file is important to your blog and you shouldn’t leave it in a renamed state. ***

Once downloaded you should open it in a text editing program (not Word, never open a server document in Word… ever) use something like notepad. Add the above bit of code on its own line at the end of all the code that’s already there.

Save and re-upload. TIP: Here is what I do, to make sure I don’t mess up my install, I rename the existing .htaccess to something like .htaccess_OLD, I then upload my new one called just .htaccess – then I test my site still serves. If it doesn’t I can always roll back to my original file while I sort out what I have done wrong. If it’s all OK I just delete the _OLD file.

The second way

If you are hosting with an ISP that provides you with a cPanel, then it’s even easier. Login to your cPanel and find the icon option called: IndexManager. Click it and choose the root options (if you get a pop up window). When you see the next screen that lists the files in the root of your account, click on the / public_html / (Current Folder) words. This takes you through to another screen that asks you to choose your indexing type, choose “No Indexing” and hit save. Go to your site and check that it’s still serving OK.

Now you need to call the previously exposed folder again and if all has gone to plan you should now see your blogs error page and not your file listing.

Please take care when you are editing any server files and don’t ever open them in Word!

This post is for information only and if you edit your files please note that you do so at your own risk, no responsibility is accepted by bloggingrocket.com or it’s author should anything go wrong with your hosting account / blog website. Also note that this code adjustment alone isn’t a guarantee against being hacked.

2. Regsiter a really good catchy domain name

3. Set up hosting with a reputable ISP

4. Get the Blogging Rocket ebook “All the Things You Should Now About Installing WordPress… …But Don’t”

5. Log all your usernames and passwords

6. Alter the AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY and LOGGED_IN_KEY in your wp-config.php file

7. Download a backup plugin like WordPress Database Backup and use it before you start playing with the settings

This is the partner post to registering your domain name and it explains all that you need to know about hosting so that you don’t fall into any traps by buying the wrong hosting package or by using an ISP that isn’t quite up to scratch.

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