I have not been updating my blogs for a while. That was not laziness: like many bloggers my excuse is just I was so busy. I had been hopping into one freelance work after another. In between that I try to manage a few hours finding new jobs for my team members who are doing freelance jobs part time while learning all I can about WordPress blogs.
That freelance experience those past few weeks was a race against time. That had really put my time management skills to test. I had to make the best use of my time. I had finally reached the point where I have a constant stream of clients both old and new ones. When my long term projects runs dry, new opportunities keep coming up. It’s a fact that full time freelancers don’t just work with one client – they have to very good masters of their time to be able to work and earn from different projects coming from different clients.
During that time I was semi-active in social networks, Plurk and Twitter. Since both networks allow only 140 characters, it was easy for me to get interactive without the need to write a full well-researched or well-thought out blog post.
For those very hectic days I just get down to do my freelance work. At the end of the day, I find myself mentally tired to compose a well-researched blog post on any of my blogs.
This next week is yet another busy week for me.
I will not say anymore that I am back to blogging, as other do. I am always here. If you don’t find me on blogs, you could always contact me through other social networks, or through my email. Some of you are even in my chat. If you don’t find my updates here, you can always interact with me in Plurk or Twitter.
I see a number of bloggers who are starting out with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. I have been into Twitter before sponsored tweet opportunities had started out. Now I noticed an increase in the number of people who use Twitter to tap the potential of earning bucks from their Tweets.
In case you are not yet aware on what Twitter is all about, it is a site that allows anybody to answer the simple question: “What are you doing?â€. However, I don’t use Twitter only to report what I am doing. I use Twitter to announce that I have a new blog post, share some news or ask help. This combination is the most effective way for me. The video below describes what Twitter is about.
Like blogging, there are some sites that offer opportunities to make money from Twittering away. Except for SocialSpark, I have not used all of these sites personally so I cannot guarantee success with these services. continue reading »
Since I had decided to embark on full-time freelance ventures, there is only one application that I use most often than any other installed in my computer – Firefox. I just realized that without this beloved browser, I would find it difficult to do freelance work. It is actually the tons of add-ons that are already written for the browser which made my work a lot easier to do.
I have around 25 plugins which I find indispensable in doing web design work and blogging. I don’t plan to discuss all these twenty-five plugins here but I would like to mention those that relate to my blogging work.
UPDATE: PlurkYM isn’t working anymore because Plurk had enabled the service, in addition to Google Talk.
CarloReid had already made his own blog post packed with more commands to the PlurkYM bot. Check out his post about PlurkYM in his blog.
Plurk had not yet offered the capability to send status updates and microblogs through YM. Carlo Reid had suddenly thought of creating PlurkYM that makes it possible for users Yahoo Messenger to post status and microblog updates on Plurk. I caught him testing this and I got curious: he was trying to make PlurkYM work!
Yahoo Messenger cannot post updates to Plurk
From the screenshot above, Plurk can post updates using Google Talk, MSN and is now trying to add AIM to list. I was disappointed to see that Yahoo Messenger is not included.
PlurkYM is still in its testing stage. Please direct all comments, suggestions and bug reports to Carlo Reid through his blog.
Privacy
To make this work, the PlurkYM bot asks for the Plurk username and password during registration. Carlo Reid assures privacy of this information:
PlurkYM saves your password in encrypted format that isn’t readable by an ordinary human being. It’s transmitted to plurk.com in an encrypted format too. I am committed to provide maximum security on personal information that PlurkYM collects. Please be assured that all information gathered by the PlurkYM bot are safe, secured and will never be shared with anyone. If you feel that your information has been compromised, please unregister with the service immediately and report the problem to me.
There are actually other sites that ask for your username and password to use Twitter and Plurk, such ping.fm and many third-party Facebook applications.
Those avatars are my followers on Twitter. You might not believe me, but some very famous bloggers who are earning five to six-figures are my Twitter followers! Can you spot them?
If you had not been following me, then follow me in Twitter now. Also, you can get your own Twitter mosaic by clicking the link below.
There’s more to this than simply showing a mosaic. You can order a shirt or a mug and show up some of your Twitter friends or followers (you can manually remove the ones that you don’t want to show on your mug or shirt).
