Techtreak.com announced a review contest today where you just have to write a review and if your review is selected, you can win some cool prizes. Contest is open to all bloggers from any country and rules are very simple. A total of $700 worth of prizes will be given so you just can’t afford to miss this one! A special eBook on web design worth $50 from theNetGuruZ.com will also be given to lucky winners. Go to the contest page, read the rules (simple) and make your entry now. Contest start today and end on 28th Nov. 2007.

Contest Ended !

Blogging has now become much more popular and matured. These days it has become very easy to start a blog and indulge in blogging. Gone are the days of sub domains, more and more people are now shifting to their own domain and paid hosting for their blog. Since blog is also a type of website, people used the power of blogging for variety of uses. Advertisers were also interested in promoting their product / service thru blog advertising. Sites like Smorty are a big advantage for bloggers as it connects them with advertisers who maybe interested in their blog and pay them for writing their opinion about their product. Some people called it against the blogging ethics but I feel that when a blogger get paid for blogging, he do even better blogging as he can now upgrade to better hosting or spend it on buying something for himself which will encourage him for even better blogging. If one has aimed to only blog for money and his blog only contains sponsored post, survival of his blog is difficult. Making money blogging is good but only blogging for money is not.

As a new blogger I always use to visit successful blogs to know what they are doing, to whom they are affiliated with and get ideas etc. I was posting about stuff I was interested. I am a gadget freak so use to post a lot about gadgets and gizmos, but sometime I use to think that I am publicizing their product and in return these companies offer nothing. Although some visited my blog, posted their comment, emails me personally with appreciation and that use to be my good day. I saw some bloggers placing ads on blogs or better call it advertorial. I was amazed that now these companies are ready to pay us for posting about their products or services! This was all made possible by a website called Payerpost which connected bloggers with advertisers. If you are a new blogger and want to make some real money out of your blog, I recommend payperpost. Apart from this, you can also try affiliate programs and PPP direct which let any advertiser who visited your site to contact you and offer you to write about them. Go, join now and indulge yourself in new standard of blogging!

Just like this post itself, if you are a blogger what you do after posting an article in your blog? Here is a list of things which I do (and will be doing after posting this one) if you also do many be prove very useful for your blog.

1. Ping
Pinging a blog link and its feed URL makes your newer post appear in many other blogs and sites which can give you some good blog visitors. I use Pingoat for this purpose. All you have to do is enter your website and feeds (optional) URL and push a button to ping to various other services.

2. Socialise
Digg it, Slashdot it, make it delicious and do as much social bookmarking as possible. It’s surely providing a good traffic, after all what’s the use of posting when no one reads it?

3. Search other blogs
Do a google search to find blogs (which allow comment) for similar article that you have just posted. Comment on other blogs and post the link to your new article (only if it’s relevant, otherwise it will look like spam). This will again give you some visitors and if not a good blog reader, you should definitely get some hits at least.

4. Look for stats (Optional)
I can sometime become excited and what to see the result of how’s my article doing right after publishing it. Look at your blog stats by using a service like Statcounter which provides instant website traffic data. You can spend hours playing with this site and cheer at your blog progress.

If you are a blogger don’t you feel sometime too lazy to login to your blog admin panel, then type the post and publish articles? Yes I was, and due to my habit of typos and slow typing I use to first write in WordPad, then copy paste it in my blog. This was still a long process and those html codes were looking dirty in WordPad.
Microsoft Live Writer allows blogger to post from desktop! It’s very simple, all you need to install this small software and then what you get is a full WYSIWYG editor to write post, include all the media content and then post it directly to your blog without any delay from the software itself. Sweet! Windows Live Writer supports almost all major blog service like wordpress, blogger, typepad etc.
The benefit I see by using this software is that now I can write post offline and also from anywhere and any computer, also using media content in blog post is easier now. This software is still in Beta phase and it requires .net framework to be installed.

Download Windows Live Writer Beta

When anyone start blogging after few post he starts worrying of data loss, like what will happen if the post get deleted and I loose all my work ? what people often do is make backup of their database which makes sure you don’t loose your data, in case something happens, one can always restore the database and get all the post back ! but I am that kind of person who want to be ready for any disaster, as I know my computer is quite old now (5 years) and hard disk is only reliable upto 3 years, so whatever I keep on my hard disk is not safe now, what to do what to do ? making backups on cd’s will be messy job and time consuming. Few days back I found a website called blogbackuponline which offered free backup of your database, now this looks suspicious but to my surprise, they just ask the blog URL and nothing else, no server or database details. So I though to give it a try and I found it very easy and using it as a secondary backup of my blog now. What this site does is that it crawls your blog for html codes and save them. The downside is that there is a limit of 50mb, so I will have to delete previous backup (I think so), let’s see, and let the 50mb fill up first. I will suggest bloggers to try this service as it supports all types of blogs and even let you restore to a different blog type! However for fool proof backup, I am gonna buy an external hard disk now.