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Win 1 of 10 Monitive accounts with Technology Bloggers!

25th April 2012 10 Replies Christopher Roberts

Technology Bloggers has been growing for over a year now, and today marks the announcement and launch of its first ever competition!

We have been approached by a few firms in the past offering to give us prizes for giveaways, and have never really got round to launching a competition. However now thanks to a new widget/bit of software I have discovered called Rafflecopter, we are able to run competitions with relative ease!

If this competition is a success, then I hope that we can run more in the near future! 🙂

The Prizes

So, to the prizes! We are very lucky to be able to give away 3 Monitive Premium Accounts and 7 Monitive Basic Accounts. Check out their pricing plan page for more info on the accounts.

Monitive

The kind sponsor of this contest is Monitive, who provide site monitoring services, so you know if your website goes offline. Many people have written on Technology Bloggers how site uptime is a vital part of a hosting package, as customers could be lost, and your site could lose rankings, if it goes down.

With a Monitive account you get weekly emails, which let you know if your site has gone down. With basic, pro and premium level accounts (all but the free) you can have it check your site as frequently as up to once every minute, and if it ever finds your site is down, it can email you, text (SMS) you, and it even offers Twitter DM alerts.

Does your site go down on a regular basis, maybe at a time you are not ever online? Well without a Monitive account, you probably don’t know! If your host regularly takes your site down at night, and you don’t know, it could seriously affect your overseas traffic – especially traffic from the other side of the world.

If your website, blog, forum, search engine etc. goes down, it isn’t good. That is why Monitive offer to check it is up, by sending regular (as regular as you choose) requests from servers all around the world.

With a free account you can monitor one website, and get 4 free introductory texts. With a basic account, you can monitor five websites, and get 10 free introductory texts. Pro accounts get to monitor 10 services, and get 10 free text messages every month. If you have a premium account you can monitor up to 30 websites, DNS’s, FTP servers, MySQL databases, POP3’s etc. and you get 30 text messages every month, so if a single site, server, FTP etc. goes down, you know – fast.

I have been using the service for around a week now, and it works really well. It is easy to use and has all the data you want to see.

How to Win!

I want to make it as easy as possible for you to enter, and I want to make it so that everyone can enter, as we are a community blog, which means everyone should be able to benefit.

To enter is really easy, you only need to do a few things, but the more you choose to do, the more entries you will get.

The first thing you must do is sign up for a ‘Free’ Monitive account. Once you have done this, you can start entering.

Sign in to the Rafflecopter widget below, however you like, Facebook or email. The first thing you must do is tell us the email address you used to set up the account, as we will need this to upgrade your account if you win. After that, do as many or few of the options which become available to you, the more you do, the more entries you get!

Rafflecopter

The Rafflecopter widget loads below this text, it seems to be taking its time (at least when this article went live it was) so be patient, it should load in after a few seconds – and it doesn’t load on some pages, so make sure you go to the giveaway page to get it to work.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Winners

This competition will end at 12.00 am on Saturday the 19th of May. Winners will be announced within the following week, and then their accounts upgraded accordingly.

Best of luck to everyone!

I hereby declare Technology Bloggers first ever competition, live!

5 ideas that have become online money makers

21st April 2012 5 Replies Farshad

Hobbies have always been an inspiration for many successful people. While most of us attempt to pursue “safe careers” by going for occupations that may bring us monetary benefits, pretty often we lose sight of our hobbies in our busy lives.

However, with the internet boom many people can now change that. There are many success stories, from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who ruthlessly pursued their goals and didn’t follow the bandwagon. But in this article I am going to explore a few more down to earth examples.

What is to follow is a list of five e-businesses that started as a hobby or a small idea that brought immense success to their owners. While the below examples might not contain websites as famous as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, they are examples that we can all relate to, and maybe borrow a few ideas from!

The Million Dollar Homepage

I still remember watching a report about the guy who set up The Million Dollar Homepage on the news (can’t remember if it was BBC or CNN). The founder of The Million Dollar Homepage (Alex Tew) sold pixels of his website for $1, to raise money for his University expense. The site was such a success that it turned out to become a website that is nothing more than several pixels of small ads. I hope by now you would understand what I meant when I said, “examples that we can all relate to”.

FindAGrave.Com

When it comes to novel ideas that made people money, this website takes the cake. It provides a service that I wouldn’t have comprehended, had I not learned about this website.

Find A Grave is a website that helps people locate the graves of a famous people. It turns out that Jim Tipton liked to visit the graves of famous personalities and used this idea to create a kind of search engine that helps people locate graves of famous people.

So if you have a hobby of visiting famous places or areas that can help, say vacationers, then you might be the next big success story.

PickyDomains

PickyDomains is another idea that got me scratching my head. The founder of the site was good at coming up with interesting names, so he started a crowdsourcing service that allowed people to seek help in finding interesting domain names and slogans.

The idea was to let a community of people provide novel names and not to rely on bots, which arguably lack imagination. If you have been looking for vacant domain names in a domain search engine, then you will know what I mean.

So if your friends, family and bots have failed you, then it might be time to seek advice from a community of people, who just like coming up with cool names and slogans.

Gawker Media

While the Gawker Media website itself is successful enough, it is worth pointing out that this media groups is perhaps the world’s most famous blogging network.

The reason I have included the Gawker example is because one thing that most of us can do easily is blogging (something I’m doing right now).

Gawker Media has the world’s most successful blogs ranging from Lifehacker, Gizmodo to many others. The Gawker network was started by Nick Denton who is a journalist and an entrepreneur. While he claims that blogging isn’t that profitable, he has still made millions from his successful line of blogs.

Amazon

I know I said there will be down to earth examples in this post, but I have to add this one. I have been following Amazon since I was a child and have seen the company grow beyond belief.

What started as an online book store was soon to become one of the first e-stores in the world. But it was not just a good idea that made Jeff Bezos the world most successful e-retailer, but the fact that he took risks when it mattered.

It is said that the company did not expect any profit for five years, which also made shareholders a bit edgy. Nonetheless, the internet gold rush paid off and Amazon, which diversified, became one of the most successful companies in the world.

The above mentioned examples are just a few of many success stories that made people successful because they dared to use their ideas to materialize them into something successful (even if someone enjoyed visiting graves).

The point is that it might not be too late for any of you try out something that may allow you to turn your abilities into something successful, and to let you in on a secret, I’m already trying out something myself, guess I don’t want to regret not trying my hands at the internet gold rush either.

Friday the 13th and 1 year for Technology Bloggers!

13th April 2012 24 Replies Christopher Roberts

Some would call today an unlucky day, as it is Friday the 13th, a day renowned for its link to bad luck. It is not an unlucky day for Technology Bloggers though, as today we are celebrating our first birthday!

I want to use this post to thank everyone who has been instrumental in creating this fantastic community blog we have, and also to showcase the blogs fantastic achievements, just 1 year in.

Traffic

The first thing I want to say about Technology Bloggers, is how blow away I am by the traffic we have received. Excluding December, every single month, the number of people visiting the blog has grown.

In June 2011, we received just over 1,200 visitors, in October 2011 we received around 3,400 visitors, and last month (March 2012) Technology Bloggers had almost 7,000 people visit the blog. Don’t believe me? Check out our Google Analytics:

Technology Bloggers traffic statistics from April 2011 to April 2012

Awards

Top blogs often receive awards, and I am proud to announce that Technology Bloggers recently received it’s first award. Last week Technology Bloggers was named the British Gas Blog of the Month!

We were awarded the British Gas Blog of the Month for our work on educating people about smart meters, and how they are changing the way we use our electricity, along with our work on environmental issues. Special thanks go out to Jonny regarding his series Can We Improve the Health of the Planet?

Other Achievements

After just two weeks of the blog being live, I wrote an article about our achievements, I did the same four months in. As today is the blog’s first birthday, I thought it right to do the same sort of review today, and compare it with our past reviews.

Two weeks in Technology Bloggers had 14 articles, which had been written by our 4 writers, four months in the blog had 65 articles written by 15 writers. 1 year in, this is Technology Bloggers 205th article, and we currently have 47 writers! That means we publish an article, on average every 1.78 days, and each writer has written on average, 4 articles. Many of our writers have written just one article, whilst some like myself, Jonny and Ron have written significantly more – we average 47 articles each!

Two weeks in, Technology Bloggers had had 85 comments posted by 22 different commenters. By 4 months, we had had 788 comments posted by 120 commenters. When this article went live we had had 2,849 comments contributed from over 500 commenters! That’s a lot of comments! Special kudos to Jonny, Alan, Anna, DiNaRa, Peter and Neil, for their outstanding contributions to Technology Bloggers commenting community 🙂

14 days in, and at 4 months, I wrote about Technology Bloggers Alexa rank. To be honest, it isn’t very accurate, and I have given actual traffic statistics for the blog, but I thought I should mention it anyway, as I have done in the past. 2 weeks after its launch, Technology Bloggers was ranked in the top 1,400,516516 of sites on the internet, by Alexa. By August 2011, Alexa believed we were in the top 165,351 of sites on the web. Today our rank is 85,826, which is a very respectable rank, but nothing to become to obsessed about.

Technology Bloggers is still a Google PageRank 3, which is very credible for a 1 year old blog, however again, is nothing that accurate or to be obsessed over.

Across social media, since August we have had 41 new likes, taking our Facebook page up to a total of 52 likes, and 45 more Twitter followers, taking us up to 69 Twitter followers. Our RSS feed is also well subscribed to.

Basically, Technology Bloggers is doing really well, and that is something we should all be proud of!

Dofollow

Technology Bloggers started out as a dofollow blog, and it will remain dofollow for the foreseeable future. It is a community blog, and so that everyone can benefit, the blog should be dofollow.

Thank You

Now it’s time for me to say thank you to everyone who has been a part of the blog this year. Thank you to everyone for your contributions and efforts, which have helped make this blog the fantastic community blog that it is today!

We have already had community awards, and will have one every year. In this article I would like to pay special thanks to Jonny, Ron, Alan, Chadrack, David, Marc and Peter who have all played a massive role in ensuring Technology Bloggers is where it is today. I have no doubt that without these people, the blog would not be as good as it is today, and the community would be noway near as strong.

Here’s to the future success of Technology Bloggers!

Well done everyone and thank you, lets keep this community alive, so we can all continue to benefit 🙂

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