I’ve been actively using Twitter for the best part of 6 months. I think, like most people, I didn’t really see the reason of it at first. What’s the point of sending “tweets” of up to 140 characters saying what you’re doing?

However I’ve become a total convert and now use it on a daily basis to keep in touch friends, find out what they’re doing, etc. I meet a fair people at conferences and I’m normally a nightmare at keeping in touch with people (do you email old friends, like err ever), especially when people are in different time zones.

This year I expect Twitter to go totally main stream, think how texting is the standard way for teenagers to keep intouch, Twitter is that and more. It’s already being mentioned in mainstream media and I expect will continue snowballing in popularity through the year.

One of the important elements with Twitter is connecting both with existing friends and like minded people, so I want to copy borrow an idea from Duct Tape Marketing.

Add your comment to this post and keeping in the spirit of twitter tell us about you or your business in 140 characters or so and give people a reason to also click on your twitter ID to follow you. (Make sure you add your twitter ID in the appropriate comment form box.

You can follow Scott at MrScottJones myself at AlCarlton. If you’re new to Twitter and follow us make sure you send us a message so that we can follow you back. Have fun!

I speak to a lot of Internet marketers and entrepreneurs and one thing that comes out time and time again is the number of failures. I’ll happily admitting having more failed businesses than I do successful ones. I own more websites that make less than $1 a day than sites that earn over $100. I have more failed relationships than happy ones. Most people do.

The GREAT thing about failed ventures is what you learn along the way and can take into your next more successful ventures. So if you’re struggling at the moment, appreciate the education.

I watched this video the other day and found it REALLY humbling, if you’re struggling to move on with something check it out.

As always your comments and thoughts are appreciated.

I got tagged on Facebook (befriend here) with 25 things, don’t normally do much on FB but thought this would be fun, so sharing here too as if it gets any SE traffic want it here and not there.

1. I used to run a market stall selling ethnic clothing, jewellery and dope paraphernalia

2. In my younger years I played drums and was into glam rock (even sometimes dressed the part)

3. I get secretly emotional when watching films, actually shed a tear when I watched Seven Pounds.

4. I was totally anti-mobile phone for years, I now carry two.

5. I got fired from my first two jobs and in all honesty should have been fired from my last (and final) job.

6. I used to have zero financial intelligence and racked up a serious amount of credit card debt. It got to the point where my parents were advised to disown me if they wanted to get a loan.

7. My daughter Alicia was born whilst I was at University and I spent my final year looking after her, studying from home and creating my first website (which is still live and earning $1 a day now).

8. I am a loyal friend and will do anything to help somebody but when crossed I hold a grudge for an unhealthily long time.

9. I never give vouchers or cash as gifts as think the thought is far more important.

10. My proudest moment of 2008 was inviting a homeless guy called Keith to eat with me and then buying him a room for the night.

11. I support Newcastle United which never fails to cause me pain

12. I want to learn to ski, had one lesson so far and it hurt

13. I read all 3 books of Lord of the Rings in two days.

14. I’ve electrocuted myself twice, both times I survived

15. I dislike sun, pool and beach holidays.

16. I quit smoking about 5 years ago, was on holiday at the time and was embarrassed by parents smoking over their kids, 20-a-day habit kicked.

17. I co-own the most popular budgerigar forum in the world; I know jack shit about budgies.

18. I’m a fan of spicy food though often regret that the next day

19. I own 2 cars and 2 watches, my watches are worth more than my cars

20. I used to play in both a pool and bowling league, my top bowling score is 242 and I’ve cleared from the break on 3 occasions (never in a match mind)

21. I once paid a prostitute to go away and leave me alone (in Ghana)

22. I’ve been arrested twice and cautioned once.

23. I was at the Brazilian Grand Prix, when Lewis Hamiliton lost, decided not to go the next year, duh!

24. I can be brutally honest and am not the most tactful of people.

25. If I am over changed in a shop I will always tell them.

If anybody moans that this post is not about making money then yeah it’s not but this blog is Self Made Minds, we’ve never pertained to be a “Make Money Online” site. If anybody else does one of these let us know and we’ll link up.

For most people that know me this post is going to come as something of a shock, for a few it won’t. In 2008 I lost my motivation, BIG time.

I’ve been pondering writing this post for about a week, in fact I’ve started it twice and deleted it (once on purpose, once accidently (fuckwit)). So what caused the loss, combination of things really. Moving away from friends, not needing to work and relationship issues which wouldn’t be fair of me to share on a public site. End of the day it was entirely my fault and I’ll take full responsibility for that.

As you’d expect losing motivation has consequences, businesses just ticked over rather than expanding (thank fuck I’m a TOTAL advocate of automation and outsourcing), I drank too much and piled on a shed load of weight, wasted £500 on gym fees and never went once, house is something of a shit hole with odd jobs being neglected for the past year or so and other issues which again wouldn’t be fair sharing publicly.

On the positive side I knew it was happening and knew I needed to do something about it. I attended Elite Retreat which helped and led to me attending Think Tank which helped more. Also did the a4u speaking gig and various other talks and meets. All really helped and I made some great friends in 2008 which I hope and expect will be friends for life.

The final piece in me re-finding my motivation was my recent trip to Vegas. I lost a fair bit in Vegas, cash, naivety, morals, brain and liver cells BUT more importantly I hooked up with some brilliant friends (you know who you are), saw some amazing sights and became really REALLY motivated again.

So what next? Starting to get fit again (lost about a stone since Christmas) business is expanding, just launched the UK version of Coolest Gadgets which is going to be big. Flying to New York at the end of the month to meet up with a fantastic friend and start another business in a totally TOTALLY different niche and have a list ideas that will be acted upon.

Need to thank Scott for being an amazing business partner, friend and posting here when I haven’t been. I’ll be back posting more frequently from now on (won’t post pad but trying a lot of new things here so will have more stuff to share).

Al’s back. Funny thing is last year was my most profitable to date, you’ve just got to love Internet marketing.

Created an account that I intend to use on Twitter for things in my head which probably do not warrant posts by themselves…finally.

At times we all get let down and or pissed off by people, whether their friends, work colleagues, family, employees, whoever. However how we handle the problem can make a massive difference to the outcome.

As an example I twice had a similar problem with writers. The first had been writing for me for over a year, she was great at her job until she disappeared on holiday for 2 weeks giving me 30 minutes notice to find cover. As you can imagine I was some what peeved and justifiably so in my opinion. However I handled the situation really badly. When her contract came up for renewal (or she got back from holiday), I simply terminated it and in the process lost both a good writer and friend.

In hindsight, we should have virtually sat down, discussed the problem and agreed what would happen in the future; instead I had a 10 minute hissy fit and that was that.

Next example was also with a writer, this one went off “sick” for 6 weeks, after 4 weeks I saw he was working on another site. I spoke to him on IM knowing he was working for this other site and likely wouldn’t be back, my initial thoughts were to tell him exactly what I thought of him (which would involved words like unprofessional, ungrateful, two faced tosser), however this time I bit my tongue (which did take a lot of doing).

He left my employment for pastures new but we kept on good terms (however if he ever asks for his job back that will be an interesting conversation) and when asked he helps out promoting posts (he’s a prolific twitterer with a following).

The lesson I learnt from this is that the 10 minutes of satisfaction you get from slamming somebody and telling them exactly what you think is nothing compared what you can gain in the future by being civil and biting the tongue. So even if you know you’re in the right and they are in the wrong, take 3 deep breaths and think of what’s best for the future.

Anybody else got good or bad examples when they should of kept their mouth shut?

A had a real defining moment during the Xmas break, my son got the board game Monopoly in amongst lots of stuff for Christmas and after wearing me down he got me to agree to play it during the holidays. I don’t think I have played Monopoly for about 10 years, one thing was very apparent within 30 minutes – what I do online is exactly the same as how I played that game.

She who must be obeyed preferred to hoard her money and buy a few cheap properties like the blue set of Euston Rd etc, shy at buying houses and conservative about spending her money. I on the other hand played pretty aggressively, securing the orange set of Vine Street early on by buying 2 after landing on them and bartering the sale of the 3rd to complete my set. I then sailed pretty close to the wind by developing on them early leaving little in the bank but asset rich.

Landing on the undeveloped land meant I was charged rent but it was only £4-£35 a time and hardly put me to the sword where as I had spent the last of my money developing my land to the point that if anyone landed on it I could charge them hundreds, this meant I could buy more houses and in the end take over land & property from others as my bank roll went from nothing to thousands owning a few hotels.

The similarity between Monopoly and domainer/developing was more than a little eye opening, the only real way to upscale is to take some chances, play aggressively and develop to raise income levels to a point you can re-invest. Having some small cheap areas of land that bring in low yields and having money in the bank proved to be a false economy in this game for my wife, sure I could have over extended myself and got into trouble but my strategy paid off, I’ve dwelled on what happened ever since, not only is it still a really good game that stands the testament of time, it made me focus and analyse what I’m doing and think about it slightly differently and the bigger picture. If you have never played Monopoly this post will make no sense, if you have it stored away in a cupboard I’d recommend digging it out and giving it a go, it would be so easy for them to create a version of this game relating to the internet, domains & websites.

David Beckham had a new tattoo done a couple of day before Christmas, at the time I couldn’t say anything but now it’s public knowledge I can reveal we did to translation for the tattoo.

It’s a biblical quote in Hebrew which says “My son do not forget my teachings, but keep my commands in your heart” doing any translation for a tattoo demands accuracy but doing one for a celebrity brings a certain amount of attention & scrutiny. If your looking for a Hebrew translation then we can help you out as we use a professional human translator, don’t make the mistake of trusting lists online or computer programs, people still do for some reason.

Just a little anecdote on that subject

For the translation page I needed a sample to show potential customers what it would look like, I asked the translator to send me anything in Hebrew. I then listed some common question that I get asked like “Can you do I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine” – this was a famous tattoo Victoria Beckham had and often requested.

Using the power of the internet someone Googled “I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine” and found my translation page, they then took the huge leap of presuming the example image on the page was “I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine”  and without contacting me at all printed it and had it tattooed. It was only a year later they contacted me to ask what it said and confessed their stupidity and wanted to know what they had on their arm, I didn’t know so asked the transaltor…. “my name” replied the translator. When I told the person they took it well and emailed me back to say “Could be worse I guess”

I’ve enjoyed doing a few speaking gigs this year and intend to do more next year, the first of which is going to be Think Visibility organised by my good friend Dom AKA The Hodge.

Think Visibility is in Leeds on 7th March 2009.

Think Visibility is a one-day mini conference with a focus on the areas of web development and marketing which are usually left behind in the creation process:
SEO, PPC, Monetisation, Blogging, Accessibility and Usability.

Tickets for the conference are limited (~150) and cost £30 which is an absolute bargain. There are 32 great speakers, I won’t mention them all but there are certainly names people in the industry will instantly recognise, like Dave Naylor, Patrick Altoft, Tim Nash, Peter Cooper, the list goes on (check out the speaker bios here ).

There will be plenty of knowledge to pick up on the day itself and even more at the after party afterwards (this is the best time to learn the less public stuff and network like crazy). If you’re in the UK and a regular or a conference virgin this is no brainer to attend. IMHO there are only two things wrong with it, it’s too cheap and there are too many speakers but that can only benefit the networking for everybody.

Hope to see you all at Think Visibility.

It’s my super busy time of the year and I’m trying to make the most of the Xmas shopping season. I outsource most of the content creation on Coolest Gadget and have a great team of writers however I still post each week with the coolest gadget of the week contest and for the past few weeks have been producing various gifts guides. I didn’t want to outsource either task but needed to make them a bit less time intensive, so a bit of automation was called for.

Previously with the gift guides I’d created a template in notepad, then for each product I’d copy and paste the relevant details in (myltiple times). I’d also save the image locally, resize it and then upload via the WordPress “Add Media” button. This was both time consuming and error prone. As I come from a coding background should know there’s a better way than copy and pasting.

So to ease the job I’ve created a WP Plugin where I can specify a set of common fields and then a template.

So for the Product details template that I use on my gift guides I’ll need to enter 6 fields and these will then be automagically populated into the template. Most of the fields are used multiple times (the affiliate URL is used 5 times ) but only needs to be entered (or pasted) once. Thus reducing errors.

The next image shows the data entry form that’s created, it’s ugly but functional.

When the data entry form is submitted the template is filled and the image is copied over to my server and resized to the dimensions specified in the field type. Producing the code for the blog post:

The plug-in is very rough and designed for inhouse use only but I wanted to share the details as an example of how automation can save a lot of time and errors. Previously it would take me half a day or so to knock a gift guide together, it now takes about 30 minutes (just finding the products and copying the relevant fields) and they are all laid out exactly the same and easier for readers to follow and optimised (the product name is relevantly used 4 times in each post). I also added the functionality to save and load different templates so will now use it every week when posting CGOTW contests.

If you find yourself repeating the same actions over and over is there a way you can automate it, either by using something that’s already out there, coding it yourself or outsourcing the coding to somebody else. With this example it has easily paid for itself time wise (in hindsight I should of coded it 6 months ago) and the gift guides created with it have already generated $10K+ in commissions.

I’m not releasing this plug-in publicly as yet but if you have a need for it, leave a comment explaining why and I’ll see what I can do. I’d also be very happy to hear other ideas on things that can be automated, as I must admit I really enjoyed getting my hands dirty coding for a change.