If you didn’t already know, 59 Belts have been all the rage out on the golf course this year. I’m excited to partner up with creator and owner, Trevor Derrheim, and offer a sweet design competition to get my blog readers and fans involved in the creation of my signature “Speed Raser” belt buckle for the 2011 season. So, here’s the deal:

 
1. Download the 59 Belts custom buckle template.

2. Hand-sketch or use a computer-sketch design program to create a creative belt buckle that encompasses the GoSpeedRaser brand.

3. Email submissions to speedraser72[at]gmail[dot]com or drop a link to your design in the comments section below.

Let’s be honest, #followfriday on Twitter has been dead for a long time. I’ve become so turned off by the endless stream of @bobthebaker @garythegardener @sallythesaleswoman @irenetheinsuranceagent @timthetechguy blah blah blah blah blah every Friday that I have almost completely stopped recommending people to my followers. It’s just become too much… and no one really listens… or acts. Including me.

So, I’ve decided to highlight one person each week and write a quick post with some bullet points telling you why I think you ought to listen to what they have to say… and uh… add a ridiculous morphed photo.

WEEK 3: MELANIE NOTKIN aka SAVVYAUNTIE
#followfriday @savvyauntie



-Founder SavvyAuntie.com, a lifestyle destination for “PANKs”: Professional Aunts No Kids!
-blogger at MelanieNotkin.com
-author of The Savvy Auntie Guide To Life
-category creator
-engaging public speaker
-passionate entrepreneur
-branding genius
-forward-thinking
-creative marketer
-lifestyle expert
-savvy business woman
-natural leader with tremendous vision
-fearless
-nichey
-stylish
-classy
-dynamic
-accessible
-consistent
-transparent
-captivating
-authentic
-innovative
-commands attention
-cares about the bottom line

I’m a sucker for a good nerdy t-shirt. They’ve got some really creative and artistic designs over at hideyourarms.com. It’s definitely one of the coolest new sites I’ve stumbled across as of late. Hide Your Arms (@hideyourarms) is a very unique t-shirt and hoodie blog! They cover all aspects of the independent clothing industry, providing news on many clothing styles, with a focus on long-sleeved goods.

This goes to show that there is a place for everyone in the blogosphere. No niche is too taboo and you shouldn’t be scared to narrow your focus and target demographic. There are a variety of untapped markets out there and you always have the opportunity to become a category creator. Identify a need, fill that need with quality content, and the audience will come to you.

IZEA is getting close to launching its has launched its new platform Sponsored Tweets. The new system will allows advertisers and tweeters to connect in a more personal way.

Full disclosure will be is required and tweeters will have full control over what they tweet. You set your price and pick the advertisers that are right for you.

The system is not yet live for advertisers. This is an early signup to help build up the marketplace before we let advertisers in. The system is LIVE!

I can certainly vouch for the legitimacy of this new platform… only a couple days after signing up for sponsored tweets, I recieved my first $15.00 offer from @tedmurphy of @IZEAInc. After the offer is sent, you have a couple days to accept the opportunity and submit your “sponsored tweet”. This was my first paid sponsored tweet:

The ease of navigation and lack of friction make the Sponsored Tweets platform a highly attractive opportunity to pick and chose products and brands that fit your demographic, imagine, personality, and personal brand. Mommy Bloggers are way ahead of the game here, however, it is just a matter of time before other bloggers, web celebs, athletes, and A-Listers find their monetary niche.

Word of mouth advertising is and has always been the most powerful from of advertising. If you like a movie, you tell your friends and family about it. If you like a restaurant, you recommend it to others. Why not get paid to share something of value to your followers / audience? What do you think television ommercials are? What do you think the purpose of brand “spokespeople” are?

I pride myself on going against the grain and bring original, and authentic. I make sure that the companies and brands I surround myself with are brands and products I am 100% passionate about. Sponsoring a handful of tweets on a periodic basis is nothing more than promoting a product, that you already believe in; only you earn money on your recommendation. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

I was browsing around my buddy Ted Murphy‘s blog today and came across an article he recently wrote about the importance of imagery and design in building a brand. Ted writes:

“While your logo and blog design are your most important graphical assets you can’t forget about supporting assets like photos. I am amazed by how many big name bloggers have crappy headshots or no headshot at all.”

Ted is absolutely right. You have to figure out what it is that is unique about yourself and/or brand and be bold in your marketing strategy. You don’t have to be as crazy or colorful as Ted is, you just need to take the time to develop a memorable persona and/or distinguishable brand.

Hell, Ted even seems to be channeling his dog, Bonzo, in his new promotional headshots. The resemblance is uncanny! Now, that’s BOLD!

This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell‘s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.

Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)

The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)

LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)

WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.

Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.

About the “10 Ways” Series

The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

One of my all-time favorite movies is “Boiler Room”. If you haven’t seen it, buy it now! (that’s right, I said buy it, not rent it…it’s THAT good) The movie is about a stock brokerage firm that pushes phony stocks on unsuspecting victims. One of the most classic scenes in the movie (and in my opinion, in cinematic history) is a scene where Ben Affleck’s character is breaking it down for some wide-eyed, newbie recruits. Laying the law, if you will. One thing he says to these guys that sticks out is the phrase“Act as if”. “Acting as if” is a personal development trick where you imagine how someone who’s in a position you aspire to would act, and then do those things yourself. Watch this clip: (or the full scene here)

Ted Murphy's famous avatar

At the end of January I had the amazing opportunity to hear Ted Murphy, the CEO of IZEA, speak at the launch of Blu Frog Energy Drink in Ft. Worth, TX and WHAM! I immediately knew. What did I know? Well, I knew several things. For one, I knew I wanted to figure out a way to harness, bottle, and physically consume his infectious enthusiasm and passion. I also knew that I wanted to do exactly what he was doing. I wanted to embrace his passion for viral marketing and social networking and I wanted to empower others to think outside the box and explore the benefits of e-commerce and the power of building relationships through social media outlets, just as he does.

Ted is literally building an empire and he has barely cracked his thirties. Not only is he the Founder and CEO of IZEA, but he is the mastermind behind payperpost, CloudShout, SocialSpark, and Sponsored Tweets. He understands branding, marketing, communication, advertising, public relations, and innovation. He is humble while confident and doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s quite a package and a tremendous person to emulate.

I had the seed of desire already planted in me and all I had to do was water it and make it grow. How did I go about doing that? By acting as if. First, I decided it was okay for me to try this new “social media expert” role on for size and play with it for awhile. Then I began thinking and acting like a blogger; I came up with title, tagline, image, and brand that I wanted to build around myself. I began exploring what i would write about and how I would tailor my message. Since I identified with Ted Murphy, it was essential for me to learn from what he was doing and how he was doing it. Moreover, it was imperative to duplicate what he was doing and make it work for me. I learned how to tweet literally just by watching Ted, Mr. Twitter, himself. I even modeled my blog after his. Act as if. Fake it till you make it.

When I was 12 years old I set a goal to earn a college golf scholarship and play on the PGA Tour. I knew that I was going to accomplish my dream. I didn’t initially have the tools or skill set, but I immersed myself in the world of golf. I observed my favorite players. I dressed like the guys I wanted to be like. I mimicked certain nuances in my favorite player’s swings. I walked like them, talked like them. I bought the same clubs and balls as them. I copied their pre-shot routines. Eventually, I subconsciously started to mirror their gestures, body language, and poses. And, after a lot of training and practice I began to grow and develop into a pretty talented golfer.

I accomplished one of my goals and I am on my way to achieving the second. I acted as if until I became what I saw for myself. The same applies now. In order to develop and build my personal brand and lock into the power of social media, I look to people like Ted who are blazing a trail and setting the pace. I like the fact that I walk to the beat of my own drum and I want to be a trailblazer and do things differently. I want to develop an audience/following before I get to the big show aka The PGA Tour. I want to control my brand and my message and flip the script on the traditional means of attracting sponsors and generating money or sponsor dollars.

In a sense, it’s about changing your identity and/or outlook. Doing this can greatly affect your earning power. You have to imagine what it would be like to achieve the things you want to achieve; to be like the people you admire or envy. And start becoming the person that has already reached your biggest goal. By doing this, it will help shift your mindset and help you start thinking of ways that will actually help you reach your goal faster.

“Make a goal to become a millionaire, not for the money, but for what it will make of you to achieve it.” -Jim Rohn

You will be a different person. A better person. There will be so many different unique qualities to love about yourself when you complete your journey. But, don’t wait that long to see those changes unfold. Start imagining what those things are and apply them in your life today.

Fake it by becoming whatever goal you may have. Do this until one day you don’t have to fake it anymore. It will actually become part of your reality!