Many Schemes and tools out there has been to massive and heavy to mess around with. But the other day I finally found a cool online tool that makes tracking and assessing my goals simple. It’s called Disciplanner.

We all have a bunch of habits. Both positive and negative ones. (At least I do) And Disciplanner let me make categories for them. This way I can track how long I watch useless TV shows (negative habit) instead of working on recording great new content for my subscribers (positive habit)

All I need to do is to visit Disciplanner in the end of each day and put in the number of time spent on the different categories. (You need to be honest with yourself here) And after a week or two it will all make sense with a cool graphical report. Now you ca see where your time went. Finally!

Best of all it’s totally FREE but you need to register for an account. (How else will it be able to track you?)
It’s time for getting rid of those bad habits!

Visit Discplanner.com here

At least Google’s Gmail started to fix the problem and made threaded conversation easier to follow.  At least it was a big step up from my Outlook inbox. Now Google is doing it again. They invented a new platform of communicating. They call it Wave. You have probably heard something about it but are not sure how it will work. Here is a great animated explanation that I just found.

What is Google Wave

One of my marketing strategies to get more traffic and build backlinks is to comment on other blogs. I want to be one of the first to comment on a blog for 2 reasons:

1. I get more traffic that way since there is a bigger chance that other comment readers are reading the first comments then the 48th comment.
2. I have a bigger chance of getting noticed by the blogs owner for the same reason as described above.

Here is my 44tips.com Review
To keep track of all the latest blog posts on the blogs that I follow I use Google Reader, but after trying out 44tips.com I now see that login in to Google reader to catch up on important blogs is a lot of job and takes time that 44tips.com saves me.

As an Internet Marketer I’m also monitoring my Twitter, Facebook and a few other social medias. I’m searching for pictures for my blog posts and  I often watch youtube clips on various topics. And don’t forget music. I always need my music when I’m working and I stream it from youtube or get the latest re-mixes from many different music sites.

Am I getting to the point soon?
Yes! My point is, 44tips.com has gathered all this information on one nice start page. You can connect to every social network and at the same time get faster to your bookmarked websites and follow all your RSS subscribes sites in one place. It’s super awesome and time saving from an Internet Marketing view.

You should absolutely try it out.

The podcast’s name is Internet Marketing This Week and is brought to you from four of the biggest Internet Marketers out there. You should by now know the name and faces of Ed Dale, Lynn Terry, Michelle MacPhearson and Paul Colligan. Every week they get their skypes together and talks about various topics that is important in the Internet Marketing world.

I really connected with them on a whole new level when listening to them every week talking about their up’s and downs, what type of products are selling best, different kinds of product launches, what mistakes people do and what super cool product creation tools that are out there.

You learn so much more then just jumping around their blogs and you get an insight of how much work it actually is to be one of the best Internet Marketers out there. So start educating yourself on what’s new in your industry. Listen in on Internet Marketing This Week now.

Jason brings on like minded people from new and upcoming startups on the Internet, and on This Week in Startups it’s one of the 3 founders of Posterious, Garry Tan.

Now I’m a big fan of Posterious and have been a user since the 28th of June 2008. I’ve been using it a bit on and off, but when I use it it’s mostly for posting pictures from my phone. It’s so easy to do. I just send and email with pictures as attachments and Posterious makes it all look perfect on my Posterious blog.

Jason brought Garry Tan on this weeks program for 2 reasons. Not only have Garry Tan and his team made a super easy to use blog platform, they have just recently made a kick ass Autopost to Everywhere future that makes your posterous posts show up automatically on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or your other blogs. That means there is now just one stop to get everyones attention from just one email.

This is such a time saver and really a powerful marketing tool. So if you want to drive traffic to something, this one tool automagically tells all the traffic sources for you. You can be sitting in your car sending an email and soon after, your Twitter list, blog readers, Flickr fans and Facebook friends will all get your message and link . Let the traffic come and the money grow.

So listen to Jason when he talks to Garry Tan about his startup and learn about what’s to come in the near future for Posterous. It’s gone be awsome, that’s for sure.

Google Analytics is still free to use and it’s still one of the most powerful analytic tools for the web out there, so why not learn to use it and get the most out of it?

If you are one of those that uses Google Adsense as your part time income you are also in for a treat. Google Analytics will show you how to monitor what people read on your page so that you can preform way better with adsense ads on your site.

So head over to Smashing Magazine to get the complete Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools now!

I know a lot of the right people that are helping me, but what I struggle with is maybe not what you struggle with. So with a better understanding I hope to make this a better blog. So please take a few seconds and help me out. Also if you can, give me some comments so I have more to go on. Thanks!

Every now and then when I send out a link that I want to share with people around 2%  of my followers will click it. That’s one if the reasons to go out and get people to follow you and follow them back. Other reasons is to find cool people to connect and network with, maybe find a future business partner.

There is a big difference between a mass follow and strategic building of your Twitter list. The two products I have used the past 9 days  explains this very well. People uses Twitter for different reasons, mine is to network with other marketers and teach and learn things to build my business.

So here is how I went from 380 – 2058 followers on Twitter in 9 days…

Twitter Traffic Machine
This is a short but very good Twitter training program by @BillCrosby. He has put together 6 videos, 60 minutes total of pure twitter value. In the videos Bill shows us how to get started, how to attract the people you want to follow you and most important how to automate most of the process.

So why do you want to automate most of this process? Well you really don’t want to do the manual job of approving every 20K follower that wants to read your twitts. Also to attract and keep people interested in you, you need to share valuable stuff. You kind of need to be active 24 hours a day and that’s way you need to automate some of that process too with something Bill calls a content farm.

Bill Crosby shows you a handful of sites and applications and how to set it all up so that you can use your valuable time to do fun stuff.

All in all this is a very good product. It only cost $27 but you get a good chance to earn those money back. Bill Crosby also shows you how to set that stuff up. I wanted more info about how to track more stuff and build even more targeted list, but I have learned those skills from other sources and I will share them soon.

Get a kick start with Twitter Traffic Machine here.

Dominating Twitter
This is an easy to read 24 pages report on Twitter from @GarryParkes. This is super fantastic to understand the basics of how to grow your followers. Garry takes you through a bunch of good points and shows you with great screen shots and drawings how it all connects.

Garry Parkes also have some great tools up his sleeve that he recommends. I use both of those tools everyday now to make the 140 character experiance on twitter as smooth as passable.  Garry only used a few months to get 15.000 followers in his account. A nice litle fan base if I may say.

The best thing about this little e-book or report if you may is that it is totally free. He is also working on a 2nd edition with even more cool Twitter stuff and he told me that we also will get that report for free. What a great guy!

Get the first edition of Domination Twitter here.

Conclusion:
By reading Garry Parkes report and buying Bill Crosby’s videos I manage to build my list from 380 – 2058 followers in only 9 days. It’s close to 200 new followers everyday. My blog daily gets over 100 visitors a day from Twitter users alone. That’s 80 more then I managed myself.

A huge thanks to Garry and Bill, and I hope you guys get some great value from those two products too.

Have you any experiance with Twitter Traffic Machine or Dominating Twitter or maybe some other Twitter products? Let me know in the comments.

But when you have 5000 friends on Facebook, 40.000 followers on Twitter and even a bunch of followers on MySpace, LinkedIn and many more it’s hard to be productive and get down to a personal level

First Things First
Facebook newly got a nice “hide”- function on the main feed. It’s really easy to use. If you don’t want to hear any more from the people that update their status every minute or those guys that always take those quiz’s to find out who their real parents are or who they are in the show “How I Met Your Mother”, you can easily click the hide function and remove them from the feed. (They will not even notice) Then…

This Is What I Do With Twitter
I use various twitter applications for productivity but the one I use to filter and monitorize is the TweetDeck. With more then 1000 followers I found that there is a lot of spammers and some people that doesn’t always have something good to say. But within all the craziness I find someone worth following every now and then. I put them in a special group where I can follow them extra close. It helps me to RT and Replay them more easily. Right now I monitorize my Direct Messages, Replies and my Favorite Group.

This Is What I Do With All The Rest
In one simple word: RSS Feeds. Hmm, I guess that was two words and neither of them is very simple. But here is how it works. I’m not using any time to login to my Facebook or Myspace account if I don’t have to. I am bringing the action to my social start page with the help of the websites RSS Feeds. That way I can decide if the update is important or not.

You can find the feeds for Facebook under inbox and Notifications. The feeds for Twitter you find when you scroll down to the bottom on your right-hand bar.

If you want to make your own social start page you can use one of the following sites and bring your feeds there.

That way you have only one site to hold you updated on all your online social life. And you only need to login to the main site if you find something interesting. Combine this with rss feeds from your most visited blogs and you will have a killer start page for your online needs.

This is how I do it, now tell me how you manage your online social life.

First, let’s answer an important question. What should be included in a custom Twitter profile background? Short answer, everything you can’t fit into your profile bio. All types of contact information,  more websites you would like to draw attention to, a bigger picture of yourself and a bigger about you text. It also depends on why you are on Twitter. But if you are there for business and networking, you should draw attention to your business and tell people why they should follow you. But don’t over do it. Less is still more on Twitter too.

Knowing that her is my 5 ways to pimp your profile.

1. Design it yourself.
If you are a graphic designer or you have a little know how on how it works your should totally do it yourself. Some Twitter background guidelines will help you out with the template sizes and what to do and not to do when making your own profile background. Remember that there is a lot of different screen resolutions out there, and you don’t want important information disappearing in the background of your profile.

Here is also 2 templates in Photoshop format to help you get started. Big thanks to @epelboin for making them available on his blog.

2. Awesome tiled pattern backgrounds
In the Twitter design settings you can choose if you want to tile the background or not. If you are using a big picture it’s normally a smart thing to not tile the background. Since it looks stupid with the same picture tiled side by side when it’s not supposed to. But here is many cool tiled background to choose from if that’s your style. There will be hard to get your personal information on tiled background but you can draw some kick ass attention from it.

Here is 26 awesome backgrounds for twitter fanboys. (and girls). and Twitter Patterns to help you get started.

3. Find nice background on Flickr
There is a lot of good website backgrounds out there but my favourite place to look for images for backgrounds is Flickr. So many talented and skilled photographers on one single place can never be wrong. Be sure to ask the owner of the photo if you can use their picture for a background. In most cases this will not be a problem. And for an easy move of the picture use Flickr my background and your profile will be updated in no time.

4. Twitter Themes
If you are not into custom made backgrounds, don’t find tiled pattern backgrounds good enough for you and didn’t find anything good on Flickr, there is people out there that solved this problem for you. Finished and ready to install Twitter Themes brings you everything from your favourite car to your favourite celebrity to your Twitter background.

5. Little bit of both worlds
The last tip I will give you is a little bit of both worlds actually. I found this site called My Tweet Space that let’s you pick a theme/background and then bring it to an online generator where you can custom make your badge so that you will get all that personal information I talked about in the beginning of this post on to the background. You can then download the background and add it to your twitter profile. Works like a charm.

Do you have more great tips about how to pimp your Twitter profile, let me and everyone else know in the comments.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter too: @skavhellen