If you’ve ever been annoyed by irritating telesales callers that just don’t get the hint, just like I get daily, then you’ll be happy to know there’s now a fun solution!

Get your own back!

I have joined forces with iCandi Apps to create an iPhone app that allows you to get your own back on these telesales callers who don’t understand ‘no’.

For just 59p (UK) or 99 cents (USA) You can download the Telesales Annoyer app, to get your own back every time they won’t get off your phone, and you can just simply place them ‘on hold’!

For more info, please click here.

For the direct link to iTunes, please click here

Scan Me for Direct iTunes Link

This is a short advert/corporate video that I voiced for an iPhone app, based around the motoring industry, produced by Lambda Films.

I really didn’t pay any attention to it. I mean, why would you? We all get them daily, “Attention, your site has been compromised”, “Warning, you may have illegal access on your server” etc etc. I get very few into my actual inbox, as my spam filter picks them all up automatically. This one for some reason came to my inbox.

No problem, I thought, had a quick scan of it with my eyes, just to check, but no – all looked quite spammy to me. So, I did what I normally do and just hit delete. It was written in the style of making it look professional to make people read it, (which is why I did), but it all seemed too unlikely that I paid it no attention.

However, being cautious, I loaded up my site straight away and went through every page, just to see if there were any potential changes that I didn’t make, and wording out of place, weird formatting changes etc. Nope, all looked fine. Phew. False alarm, as predicted.

That is, until I received a text message on Sunday night from the guy that hosts my site, saying that it’s been hacked and has been shut down! ‘Oh dear’, I thought, or words similar in meaning. This isn’t good. He said he’d been contacted by the technical team at my hosts, they’ve detected things that shouldn’t be on there, and for safety, have shut down my site so nothing else could be done.

For most of Monday, I was on skype with my host and my web guy, in a three-way chat window, whilst we were trying to figure out what things had been uploaded to my server, and how quickly we could get rid of it. It took him some digging, but found 3 or 4 pages that had been uploaded last Friday which were made too look like bank login pages. The cheeky scamps. I’ve no idea if they were indeed successful for the hackers in question, but they were removed immediately, as well as some dodgy ‘scripts’ that were causing more trouble, including an additional Trojan horse virus in one of the parts of my site.

That last bit was quite scary to me, as horses are quite sinister at the best of times. Luckily my web guy, Mick, managed to remove everything malicious, de-bug everything, protect the place where they managed to gain entry from, and updated everything that needed updating.

Absolute lesson learned, to make sure everything in the back end of your site is as up to date as can possibly be. My CMS was apparently a version behind, and that was enough for this canny hacker to find the weakness and gain entry. So, if you’re not sure if your site is as secure as can be, I highly recommend you check, or get your web person to do it on your behalf.

So, by around 3pm on Monday, everything was back to normal and my site was back online. It had been down for approximately 16 hours, but that could have been a lot worse, or meant building it again from scratch. My now-learned advice – back up everything, and keep it all up to date. Big Brother is apparently always watching!

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist

There are many times in life, examples of misheard communications. Your manager told you to do something but you do something else, Ordering the wrong stock as you were too busy concentrating on Facebook friend requests at the time. Well, if this sounds like you, then you’ll like this video. A tribute to those of you who hear something else entirely!

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist

So recently, Google announced that it’s going to be launching Google Instant; a new version of it’s search engine that will provide real-time results, as you type. No longer will you have to type the whole search word or phrase, results will, as you type, display results it thinks you may want.

Some have credited it being fairly loopy and pointless, whilst others have said that it could be a whole new way of searching for things. Others have even said that they fear it will cripple their already successful pay-per-click campaigns if results are going to be generated in an all-new way. They feared are they now going to have to optimise their strategies to incorporate the 1st and 2nd letter of their search terms, so ‘v’ and ‘vo’ for someone searching ‘voice over artist’, for instance!

I’ve since been told by techies that this will not be the case at all, and the new instant search will far from kill off traditional SEO, it will merely enhance and refine it. Honestly, the techiness of this topic is far more than what my head can cope with, so these are merely my findings with it. My own stance is that I imagine it will make a difference, for the better, and make searching quicker if you find things that are relevant by clicking fewer keys.

I’ll just have to try it on my favourite search term…..Scarlett Johansson…..

/3,2,1, back in the room.

Go and try it for yourself, and have a look at Google Instant.

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist & Audio Marketing

Play Episode 7

Episode 7 of my podcasts is now released. This month we’re talking to Paul Dean from Crimson leaf, about the importance and the many applications of good copywriting. Also discussing the latest Apple announcements, the controversy surrounding Autotuning-gate, and could the popular iPhone (and now Android) game Angry Birds be coming to a cinema near you?

Firstly, I’m after a quick poll as to who uses Joomla for their CMS? Joomla and WordPress are obviously some of the most popular CMSs around. My main website is built on Joomla, whilst this blog is WordPress. Of the two I currently have experience of, my preference is certainly WordPress. I shall tell you why.

Overall, I find Joomla to be quite clunky in it’s workings. You have to do things a certain way most of the time, with not much flexibility. There are certain things it does which don’t quite make sense in my head. It also appears that you can’t make a blank hidden page on your website, like for a client’s project that you don’t want the public to know about. I’m told this is very easy on other systems.

Yesterday I had a big Joomla problem. I was editing some content, and the whole thing crashed, as well as my server, for around two hours. Now, I cannot guarantee that it was Joomla that broke first, but from the series of events that happened, it looked that way. I couldn’t even access the login page to enter the back end of the site, let alone load any of my website’s pages. Nightmarish.

Luckily, it somehow resolved and was working again within a couple of hours. And it just got me thinking. I’ve never had one problem with WordPress. Not one. It’s with the same hosts who host this blog, and I’ve not seen it crash once, or even go down for any reason. Very strange that my main site does.

There’s lots of other niggly problems that I currently face with Joomla, and have for a while, but I’m not going to bore you with them. Needless to say, I am much more of  a fan of WordPress than Joomla, for sure. I think it’s just got too many features that the average person, who isn’t a web techie, doesn’t need. If you’re a developer and you’re phasing up a website from small to big, then great. But then if I was doing that, Am sure WordPress would cater for me whatever I needed to do with my site.

What’s your experiences with either? Am I alone in my feelings towards the ‘Big J’? Please tell me I’m not.

There are many things, as singular business people, that we can do ourselves, to save time and money. We do our own marketing, sales, answering phones, doing the actual job we do, as well as all the other stuff. There are other things though, that paying a professional to do, really pays off far better in the long run.

Recently, I’d decided that my blog was simply too bland in design, so needed some imagery on the background. Naturally, my first port of call was my designer chappie, Gareth Coxon from Dot Design; he’s THE guy I go to for design, after he did a superb job on my logo (on my main site, click here), and my pop-up banner I use at networking events and exhibitions, plus other online digital signature items he’s created for me. He understands me, my brand, what I do, and knows exactly how to capture it. He’s created this fab background image that is on this blog, which certainly jazzes it up a bit from being plain white! So, kudos to Gareth, top bloke. Highly recommend him.

Secondly, I found it a tad confusing to install into WordPress, so I tweeted about it, and a friend and colleague of mine I know through 4Networking popped up on Skype, and mentioned that he could sort it out for me, as it needed a bit of code tweaking. It took mere moments for him to put it right, and get it all set correctly…….so, many thanks indeed go to Ant Hodges from ToInfinity!

See, if I had been left to my own devices, things would have gone very wrong indeed. There are times where we can do stuff ourselves. When it comes to the material you push out into the big wide world, I would only ever use professionals.

Gareth’s website – http://www.dot-design.co.uk/

Ant’s website – http://www.toinfinity.co.uk/

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist

Episode 6 – July 2010 - “Smartphone Suicide, Subconscious Salespeople, & The Importance of Networking Your Business” (17m 6s)

In this episode, I talk about smartphone suicide, how Google has now discontinued plans for both the Google Nexus Two, and even the current Nexus One. I’m also giving my take on the situation with Apple and the iPhone 4 amongst ‘Antenna-gate’; and I’m talking to Stefan Thomas from No Red Braces, who’s giving us an insight as to why all businesses, both micro and massive should be networking now more than ever

A video I came across recently, with their interpretation on what Twitter’s really for!

Definitely some truth in that!

Richard Heathcote

Voice Over Artist