Personally my graphics design skills suck big time, but if you’re more of an artist than me and up for a little challenge then there’s a nice opportunity to get some exposure for your design business.

You see, in February I won a T-shirt from tungle.me which just arrived in the mail the other day – and now I just got an email from the team at tungle.me that they are holding a Tungle.me T-shirt design contest.

There’s a few bucks to be won – $500 to be specific.

But the best part is the exposure your name/brand/website/company gets on the T-shirt, on Twitter and on FaceBook.

I got access to it for free, and so can you – just click here

There’s no money in it for me, but there’s a really neat reward.

Frank is putting together Core Influence 2 and what better way to drum up business than by letting people see what Core Influence (1) was all about.

But Frank likes to go viral, so he’s giving away Core Influence 2 to anybody who refers 10 people to watch Core Influence (1) for free. So in return for giving away a modest number of the new version he’s getting a stampede of new people signed up for when he’s launching Core Influence 2.

So, if want to help me get access to Core Influence 2, then click the link – please :-)

Core Influence is supposed to be really good, but I’m only 1/3 through the download, and after that I’ll have a good 2 hours watching and taking notes ahead of me before I can personally say anything about it.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be notified about the following three things?

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

Well, if your sites are registered in Google Webmasters Tools then that’s exactly what you’ll be notified about (in Google’s own words) whenever they detects any of the following on your site.

Hacking, comment spam, spammy link profiles and probably other forms of spammy user-generated content on MU-sites and other blogging systems is a pain to have to deal with, so having Google looking out for you is a nice addition to whatever anti-hack and anti-spam system you have in place.

Most blogging software have some sort of anti-comment-spam, for instance Akismet or WP-Spamfree on WP platforms, and the same goes for forum platforms, but what about anti-hack features?

Except for keeping my passwords hard to brute-force crack and keeping WP relatively up-to-date I’m not really doing anything to prevent my site from being hacked, and this is where I think I will benefit the most from this new feature from Google.

It’s not that I expect to be hacked, but it’s nice to know that if I should be targeted then I’ll receive a notification from Google.

When you have internal meetings you just schedule them with whatever scheduling software you already have in the company.

But when you try to schedule a meeting with someone outside your company then the problem starts because you don’t have a shared environment, a common platform that you both use.

So scheduling a meeting takes plenty of email ping-pong, and if you’re trying to set up a meeting between several participants, then things really gets ugly.

If you’re strugling with setting up meetings then Tungle.me might be the solution for you.

It’s quick to set up, it’s free, syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and Entourage, and they even have a neat iPhone/iPod Touch application for it.

At one point in time I had an almost empty email inbox – and that was a few seconds after I set it up.

From there on it just kept filling up.

And around january each year I make myself a promise that I will declutter my email inbox, cut back on unnessecary newsletter subscriptions, and neatly organize every email as they arrive.

And every year I fail miserably.

It always starts great as I sprinkle a bit of “organizing dust” on my inbox.

Getting my inbox organized is 1 part deleting unneeded emails and 1 part unsubscribing from non-essential newsletters to keep it from getting cluttered again.

So during January I slowly work my way through the pile of emails that have accumulated during the last year.

I usually just sort by “From” or “Title” and start looking for batches of unopened emails because anything that is generally left unopened during the year can’t be that important.

That alone takes care of 80% of the clutter.

It’s amazing how many newsletters and email lists I sign up for during just 12 months.

One thing that is definitely not helping here is all those squeezepages you encounter as you try to learn more and more about internet marketing.

There’s always somebody telling you that they’ve found the holy grail of internet marketing and that you can have a free report or a free video if you just enter your email.

It’s a bit like buying a mystery gift bag – sometimes there’s something useful inside, and other times you’re just left with a piece of worthless junk – except that mystery gifts usually don’t try to upsell you ;-)

And once you’re on one list you’ll soon be joining more and more – it spreads like ripples in a pond.

Biggest “culprits” are giveaways – be lured into just one of these and bam, you’re signed up for 50 lists.

And out of curtesy you stay signed up for their list after having downloaded their free gift, but only to realize one year after that they have provided you with absolutely nothing of value if their followup mails.

So the clutter creeps up on you and you need to organize your inbox – and keep it organized.

Because otherwise you might end up missing important emails – emails from *real* newsletters, emails from *real* people, emails that provide value to you.

I currently have 24225 unopened emails in my inbox – how about you?

And what are you doing to prevent it from growing back to those sizes again?

Looking back on 2009 Bob decided to look at his successes and accomplishments instead of looking at the things he failed at.

And wow, did he ever accomplish some great things in 2009.

It’s a good read and definitely something you should sit down and do for yourself after reading Bob’s Report Card for some inspiration.

It’s always a good exercise to look back and recognize the tasks you’ve completed instead of always just looking for the things that you’ve missed or failed at.

I did 3 great things this year:

1. I changed job – best work related change of the decade
2. I lost 20 kilo and got back into shape – best health related change in 15 years
3. I revived my internet marketing adventures – best creative change of the last few years

How about you?

What did you accomplish in 2009 that you’re proud of?

What did you do in 2009 that laid the foundation for the plans you have for 2010?

It’s the fake “Beta testers needed” approach which I’ve stumbled across too many times in the past few weeks.

Normally with beta testing you get a bunch of people outside your company to test out unfinished software to find and report bugs.

It might seem “unfair” to let other people find bugs in your software, but it’s a very powerful way of testing your software on a variety of computers, operating systems and browsers.

Another thing that makes beta testing powerful is that beta testers tend to find bugs that the developers and in-house testers have missed because they maybe use the software slightly different.

The final thing that makes beta testing effective is the determination of beta testers to actively look for ways to break the software – they are actively looking for bugs, and not actively looking to prove that the software works as designed.

Oh, and let’s not forget that plenty of beta testers are geeky code nerds that thrive on messing around with unfinished code – I know I am at least.

So when I see “Beta testers needed” in my inbox I open it and click through to see if I can help another coder get his product ready for the masses.

I do this because I love to help people – and it’s because of this that I’ve been sooo pissed off lately.

You see, there’s a new trend developing where internet marketers are looking for beta testers.

Only “catch” is that you have to pay to download a beta version – but since you’re a beta tester you’re “fortunate” enough to get it much cheaper than other people.

What a bunch a fake advertising – I have never in my 25 years of involvement with software development come across a beta test where I am going to pay to help another coder get his product ready for launch.

Another alternative to paying to beta test the software is a setup where the software is free, but you have to pay to host it. The last one of these scams I saw was a $97 hosting fee.

No matter which scheme they are trying to pull I end up taking money out of my own pocket in order to spend time testing an unfinished product for one of these internet marketers – and it makes me sick to my stomach.

Come on, put some integrity in your business and reward beta testers for their efforts or stop pretending that you need beta testers when in reality you just want people to “feel” special (without actually treating them that way) while you take their money away from them.

Cost: Your name and emailaddress

If you are the least bit interested in being professional in your IM business then this report is a must read.

For me its integral view brought back memories of NLP/SD/Graves and the reports really struck a cord in me – so much that I had to write Alex and let him know what I thought about his report – something I didn’t do with the previous 100 “special reports” I’ve downloaded or subscribed to over the years and months.

Split-Testing : The Secret Weapon of Experienced Online Marketers

No special and expensive software needed to get your feet wet with split-testing – Google’s Website Optimiser is completely free to use.

Some of the features that I would like it to have is:

1. The ability to feed the respondents emailaddress to an autoresponder (Aweber).
2. The ability to let radio-button answers determine which autoresponder should be used.
3. The ability to have check-boxes in place to subscribe to several newsletter/list/autoresponders at a time.
4. The ability to specify the final thank-you-page so I don’t end up with a standard “thank you for completing this survey”-type of page.

If you’ve used a survey tool with these features then I would love to hear about it.