Category: Review

40 Bloggers Sharing their knowledge — Blog Blazers

Recently Stephane Grenier from landlordmax.com released his book BLOG BLAZERS: 40 Bloggers share their Secrets, to Creating a High-Traffic, and High-Profit Blog!
blogblazers
As you know we also do interviews of bloggers, entrepreneurs etc on our blog, So we were very much curious to read this book. As we stared reading this book, we could get a lot of very good blogs, which we never knew before. And the book is very interesting and informative. This book is packed with precious information, provided by the most experienced and influential people in the blogosphere. Each interview is about 5 pages long and the book contains 206 pages.
All the interviewee has shared what they have come across, in their way to success.
According to me, its a precious book for all bloggers and internet entrepreneurs. Because its good to learn from the people who have already learnt a lot.
So we highly recommend this book to everyone.
The book includes the interviews of most famous guys like:
Aaron Wall
Seth Godin
Stephane Grenier(Interviewing himself. And its really one of the best think to read.)
Yaro Starak
and many more..have a complete look at the interviewee here.
We have got many links to great articles around the web, from this book. We will share some of them in coming days.

Some of the questions asked are:

  • What’s your best tip for writing a successful blog post?
  • What are your main avenues for marketing your blog?
  • What was your most successful blog post ever?
  • What’s the most common mistake new bloggers make?
  • What turns you off most when visiting a blog?
  • What’s the best way to make money from your blog?
  • Which books and websites do you recommend to new bloggers?
  • Which five blogs do you regularly read?

and many more!

We are completely satisfied with the book and I am sure you will also get the value out of the book. And as a Xmas gift Stephane Grenier is offering Free shipping for Canadian and US orders and 5$(55%) off for international orders, till Xmas. And to avail this offer you need to purchase the book from the official website.
Note that the ebook version is only available from the official Blog Blazers website. In addition, if you purchase from the Blog Blazer website, you will have the option to select the “bundle package” which includes both the book and the ebook (the advantage being that you can click on the links in the ebook versus having to type them in).

  • Paperback – $ 16.95 USD (Free Shipping until Xmas)
  • Ebook [SAVE A TREE!] – $ 12.95 USD
  • Value Bundle Paperback + Ebook – $ 20.95 USD (Free Shipping)

You can just Google or visit BLOG BLAZERS Review page and see what people around(who have read it) the world has to say about this book. Its worth the money and the time spent on it.

If the shipping offer is expired, you can buy the book either from the Amazon or from the official website.

Take a look at Nokia N97 — To be released

After a disappointing iPhone sales in India(Due to its insane price), and release of many new iPhone killer phones like Samsung omnia, GPhone(HTC) and many other phones, Nokia has comeup with another smart phone(N Serious), Nokia N97. It is rumored to be released in European and Asian markets in Q2 of 2009 with a price tag of $700(Fingers crossed)!
Nokia-N97 (1)
Nokia-N97 (2)
Nokia-N97 (3)
Nokia-N97.jpg

As for now, we don not have much accurate information about this phone. What we have is, some photos and an official video. We got all the below information from YouTube videos. So just have a look at these videos:






Features:
* 3.5 inch TFT touchscreen display
* 360 x 640 screen resolution
* QWERTY keyboard with haptics
* 32GB of internal storage memory
* 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and dual LED Flash
* GPS with Nokia Maps 3.0 app
* Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Infrared
* Accelerometer and proximity sensor
* 3.5mm headphone jack
* HSDPA
* Huge battery life, offering 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video
* microSD supporting upto 16GB external memory
So its total capacity would be 32+16 = 48GB! Great:)

Did you just postpone your decision to buy a mobile phone? Think again, I know that N97 is awesome, but N98 or N100 Would be much better and amazing(surly). Then would you wait for N100 to come?
Buy the present phones and change it if you really think the newer one has something really worth the change.
Only thing, which helps due to the release of these new improved devices is, companies like Nokia, Apple, Samsung, Sony HTC, Motorola etc will keep coming with newer devices with much more attractive features and price. Thus it will help the customers(most of the time, but not always!) and the people keep buying the newer once(benefiting the companies) or keep postponing the decision to buy a phone and wait until the next update! — These are just our views. Please share your thoughts about buying or changing a mobile phone. And also comment about the New Nokia N97. We would be happy to know something more from you people.

Recommending Doreo Host

Previously Technotip.org was hosted at Yahoo! and due to very bad downtime, I thought to shift it to some other reliable hosting company. I just Googled around and saw that Dreamhost was the most popular and almost all its customers were praising it in an unbelievable manner. I just jumped to buy hosting with them, and sent an email, asking for some clarifications. And I got a very fast response and with all my basic doubts cleared. I was still more impressed. But I was smelling a Rat, due to its offering of Terabytes of bandwidth and 500GB or more..of disk space.

I just bookmarked most of the websites that promoted Dreamhost and was watching for its reliability. To my wonder, all these sites had downtime of almost 2 to 4 times a day (yes, you heard it right, the downtime was on every day).

Frequent downtime means trouble to your visitors and to your SERP ranking. Search Engines will surly not be able to access your website/blog and this will surly have a very bad effect on PR and over all SERP ranking.

About the bandwidth offering from many hosting companies, are simply useless.Because, a very famous website/blog will not use even 20GB of Bandwidth.

About Bandwidth:

When a visitor views your site, all the text, pictures, and other files that make up your web pages are transferred to your visitor’s computer. Data transfer is a measure of the total amount of information your visitors view each month.
An average 5-page site with text and pictures will use 0.0003GB of data transfer per visit. A site with music and videos will use 0.02GB of data transfer per visit.

Doreo offers almost 60GB Bandwidth for its beginner hosting plan. It is cost effective, reliable, Digg proof, Spam free, very fast servers and the best hosting company with best uptime records.

Click here to see the cost of different plans and features.

Click here to see the Uptime records.

Click here to see the proof for best Spam filtering.

Update: Here at Technotip.org, we recommend only things which brings value to our visitors and to our recommendation. In order to give more value to our visitors, we had a deal with Doreo host and asked for a discount coupon or promo code.
And we are very much happy to announce that, we have got a promo code “technotip.org” (without cotes). This would give you FREE hosting for first 45 days or 12$ discount for all other hosting plans with Doreo.
This promo code works only for those who signup with Doreo for the first time.
Caution: This promo code does not work, when you try to signup from any other referral URL. To use this promo code you should go through this link Doreo.
And please leave a comment after using this promo code. And please comment, if you have any problem in using this promo code. This promo code is working perfectly.
Cheers!


And I must tell about its Support staff. They are the best and highly dedicated. They can do any kind of help related to your hosting. Many times, the Support staff itself will install software for you and setup the wordpress and everything, if you ask them to do. You will just have to start blogging.

And those who are searching for a good host, to transfer their already existing files from their previous host, then Doreo host would be a perfect solution. You will be guided by the support person so well that, you will find it no difficult in the entire process of transferring.

There are some video tutorials to help us get familiar with their cpanel, fantastico ( for one click installation of wordpress and other software) and other services.

And you can chat with the Support staff and get solutions for your problems instantly. I haven’t waited more than 5 minutes for the reply.

About their Reliability:

Doreo has been in the web hosting business for over 7 years. They have hosted websites from the smallest personal sites to high volume websites like www.phpbb.com. They strive to maintain a “small company” personality for their customers while still providing an excellence in support in reliability ( Doreo host  average server uptime was over 99.9% in 2005, 99.994% in 2006 and 99.982% in 2007 as report by HyperSpin independent monitoring ).

And the best part is, you can see the status of your server at Doreo any time.

Quality Hardware:

Doreo Hosting uses only Dell and SuperMicro servers. All Doreo web servers have the following minimum specification:

  • Dual Xeon 3.0 Ghz
  • 2 GB memory
  • Hard Drives setup in hardware RAID for fault tolerance

Quality Network

Doreo hosting provides over 15 GB of network capacity utilizing multiple tier-1 network providers. Current network providers includes:

  • Savvis
  • Leve3
  • Telia
  • nLayer

For more details on the Doreo network, please visit their network page.

Bad things with other hosting companies are, they oversell their service(i.e., by offering unlimited bandwidth/disk space or tera bytes of bandwidth/disk space etc). And they will accumulate many sites on one server and get things to jam easily. Because of this, they will have many downtime’s each day.

Technotip.org is now hosted at Doreo, and I am a happy, satisfied customer.

If you have used Doreo host , please share your thoughts and experience with us.
And also share your experience with current hosting company..

Problogger book review

For those of you who don’t know about the book… This book was written by two well known bloggers of the industry, Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.

Darren-Rowse

Darren Rowse(image, to the left) is the guy behind the successful ProBlogger.net. He has been blogging since 2005, and is a professional, full time blogger himself. He is one of the founders of b5media(a blog network) and is a VP of Blogger Training, at b5media. He also edits the famous Digital Photography School, as well as many other blogs.

He lives in AUSTRALIA, with his Wife and children.

Chris-Garrett

Chris Garrett(image, to the right), is a professional blogger, Internet Marketing Consultant, new media industry commentator, writer, coach, speaker, trainer and web geek. You might know him from his past writing for such sites as ASPToday, ASPAlliance, Threadwatch, or more recently, ProBlogger,The Blog Herald, FreelanceSwitch, Cogniview, AdSavvy and CopyBlogger.

If you are looking for a Consultant, then Chris Garrett would be the best, as he has lot of experience.

Chris was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1974. He lives in the UK with his wife, daughter and two overweight, treat-addicted cats, and a new puppy.

problogger-book

This book covers these topics:-

Introduction…………………………………………….xi

1. Blogging for Money…………………………………1

2. Niche Blogging………………………………………23

3. Setting Up Your Blog……………………………….45

4. Blog Writing………………………………………….77

5. Blog Income and Earning Strategies………………105

6. Buying and Selling Blogs……………………………131

7. Blog Networks……………………………………….151

8. Blog Promotion and Marketing……………………..165

9. Secrets of Successful Blogs……………………….189

10. Creating Something Worthwhile………………….203

index…………………………………………………….213

I have mentioned the page numbers also along with the topics, just to show how much to expect about each topic.

This book is carefully crafted and the topics are arranged so nicely that, a beginner to blogging can also understand it clearly. In fact, what I found is, this book is mainly helpful for people who have just heard of blogging and are interested in trying it out.

For those who are in this blogging business for a while will find many things in the book told over and over again in many blogs.And for those who are regular readers of problogger.net, its just the same stuffs that you find regularly, but in an very intelligently organized manner(topic wise).

In the book, we can find links to some useful websites and tools, which will help for all bloggers.

And the topics, I most liked are, Niche Blogging and about passive income tactics.

Each chapter is finished with a tip, a summary or an exercise for the reader, which makes the book look more professional. Darren and Chris have explained all the problems that they came across, in the beginning days of their blogging.

We can find almost all the aspects that a blogger should know to start a blog. And also step by step guidance to setup the hosting and one click wordpress installation.

This book would be, the best source for beginners and a handy guide for those who have been blogging for a while and a reference to advance users.

It would be wrong, if I don’t say that, all the information in this book can be found somewhere or in problogger.net itself. But the positive thing about this book is, it has everything at one place, well organized, well structured and with no extra unnecessary things. Things are written by keeping in mind all kind of bloggers(those who blog for money, fame, networking etc).

And the important thing is, it just costs $16.49.This is not a big amount for those who are aspiring to be professional blogger some day.

If you wish to buy this book, then here is the link for it ProBloggerBook

And it would have been nice, if we had got a FREE CD/DVD, containing some of the video tutorial from Darren, along with the ProBlogggerBook.

Anyway, Darren and Chris, I will be waiting for the Part-2 of the book, and now I am expecting a lot advanced topics to be covered.


And Best-of-luck for all your future projects Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett….

Guys/girls out there, have you read the ProBloggerBook? What do you feel about the Book? please share with us…