Other blogs in an effort to improve their own incoming guest posts run contests to encourage that. One such community is Blog Engage, and their current Guest Blogging contest runs through the end of March 2011.

Although there are cash prizes for winning, my main purpose for entering is to put my writing skills up against other bloggers in the big bad Internet and see how I compare.

As a requirement for entering, we must blog about the contest on our own blogs and list the generous sponsors (which if you think about it, is a pretty ingenious way to automate its promotion!):

Virtual Assistant

Guangzhou Web Design

Conversion Optimization

Lab Coat

I recently reviewed one such book, with an eye-catching yet appropriate name: “Friends with Benefits:A Social Media Marketing Handbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. This is a pretty thorough book that covers subjects like whether you should start a blog, how to reach out to the rest of the social world, bet practices, and importantly how to measure success.

You can read the full review at Blogcritics.

There are actually quite a few Twitter WP plugins available now, and we’ve been testing out some of them. If you do a Google search for “WordPress Twitter plugin“, you will get in excess of 800,000 results. [BTW, some of the results include some useful pages that summarize and recommend some of the other Twitter-related WP plugins.]

But let’s get back to what we were looking for: basically a plugin that publishes to Twitter whenever a new post is published to your blog without any intervention. We tested 3 until we found one that works. First up was Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Normally, Alex makes fantastic WP plugins, and we even use some. However, we found that Twitter Tools, while having a host of features did not perform the function we wanted it to.

Next up was Twitter Updater. We found multiple variants on this one as the original author stopped updating it. However, it had a bug that caused it double-tweet. Show-stopper in our books.

Third time’s a charm. We found WordTwit which so far (knock on wood) has been working as claimed. It’s also the simplest so far: Twitter username/pw and the format you want the tweet in. Perfect.

When Bargains for Geeks was first released a couple years ago we counted on outsourced people to cover the deals for us. Quickly people dropped off and quickly this became expensive for us so this time around we’ve automated the process of aggregating bargains, deals and coupons from various sites. We simply over-engineered the first attempt for this site and while it made money, the site really took up our time from working other ventures. In addition to automating the process of gathering data for the site, we’ve also created a documented process to create the site so we can quickly reproduce as needed (and not just for bargain or deal type sites).