Essentially Yours!

To celebrate her blog's one year old birthday on 22 June, Charlene over at Essential Keystrokes is holding a one week long birthday bash where readers can expect a full week of spectacular posts and prizes galore to be won! Yes, you heard it right, you do not have to bring presents, instead prepare to win one! How fun is that!! The prizes just keep getting more and more as more sponsors donated generously for the blog's birthday bash! Charlene is indeed a very popular blogger.

I must admit, albeit embarassingly, I'm a new reader of Essential Keystrokes, and I'm already gate-crashing the birthday bash! The least I could do is to wish the blog a big

Happy Blogging Birthday!

One of her post I enjoyed tremendously is "How Do You Explain Blogging To Your Mom?" In the post, Char wrote about her brilliant analogy of the whole concept of blogging which she created and used to explain to her mom. Do check out this and many other interesting posts on Essential Keystrokes.

To enter the contest, just link to any of her posts and leave her a comment to tell her which prize(s) you would like to win. The contest closes at midnight EDT on Friday, June 29, 2007.

Win A USB TV Tuner from Beyond The Rhetoric

Beyond the Rhetoric is the official blog of Michael Kwan, who is a professional freelance writer based out of Vancouver, BC Canada. His freelance writing services can be procured on his website MichaelKwan.com. The purpose of his blog is to serve as an outlet for his creative juices to flow without inhibition.

With Beyond the Rhetoric, Michael writes in a more casual tone than is allow on his professional freelance writing site. It certainly brings a personal touch to his writing, and reveals some insights into the man behind the keyboard. From the categories section, some of the topics that Michael blogs about are automobiles, food and drink, technology, video games, and many other random stuff which he come across in the process of researching for his freelance writing projects.

Those blog posts are fun, interesting, and easy to digest(definitely not heavy subjects like SEO, or how to make that million bucks from your blog) and will appeal to casual reader who's looking for interesting read online.

Michael is currently holding a contest where he is giving away a USB TV Tuner with PVR and time-shifting capabilities, worth $80. Michael has provided 3 different ways for bloggers to enter the contest and you can earn up to 5 entries by combining all 3 routes. Reviewing his blog had earned me 1 entry, and adding Beyond The Rhetoric to my Technorati Favourite blog earned me another entry.

By subscribing to his full RSS feed, and posting the screenshot in this post, I've earned a bonus entry, making a total of 3 entries earned.

To earn the maximum 5 entries, you got to be the Top commentator for the month of June.

The contest is open to all residents of the world, provided that you have reasonable access to some sort of postal service. You don't expect Michael to mail the TV tuner to Antarctica right? The deadline for entering the contest is 12:01AM PST on July 1, 2007.

Post Comments and Make Money at Pure Blogging

Over at PureBlogging.com, David Culpepper is holding a contest which can potentially make you up to $200 of cold hard cash! Although you must be a really really lucky 'son of a blog' to win the $200.

This unique contest is broken into 2 parts. Part 1 of the contest is designed to increase comments that contributes to meaningful discussion in his blog posts. The blogger who post the 1000th comment will win $100 (paid via PayPal). This part of the contest is totally dependent on luck as all comments will be strictly moderated by David and short irrelevant comments will be deleted. (Comments made by David and his guest bloggers will not make the count towards 1000th)

Part 2 of the contest is base on the usual run of the mill 'link bait' strategy. To enter, just blog about the contest, linking to PureBlogging.com homepage and the contest page, then email David the url of your blog post. You will be entered in a random drawing for another $100 CASH prize.

This contest is open to everyone, anywhere in the world. As long as you have a blog, no matter what language your blog is in. You can choose to enter one or both part of the contest. This contest has no fix closing date but will be closed once the 1000th comment is received, which is likely to be sometime in the next two weeks, by David's estimation.

Review of Productivity501

Mark W. Shead is a consultant who use technologies to help business solve problems. He authors a blog called Productivity501 which is dedicated to bringing you regular tips and tricks to help increase your personal productivity. Mark focuses on publishing original content and share useful ideas which has helped him be more productive in his practice.

This blog is hosted on Wordpress with a 2 column layout. The header image of a jigsaw puzzle missing its last piece goes well with its tagline "Pieces of the productivity puzzle". It formed an image in my mind that Productivity501 hopes to be the missing piece of puzzle(yellow piece which stands out) to complete the whole set, which translate to being the missing link in the readers' life. Productivity501 is completely ad-free and without those flashing banners which try their darn best to shout out to readers to click them or to purchase the advertised products, the blog is uncluttered and gives a very clean feel. I admire Mark for not waivering under the huge temptation of blog monetization.

The furtherest dated post on archive goes way back to Sept 2005, so I'm assuming this blog got started then, some 21 months ago. During this time, Mark had published a total of 195 posts (till Jun 2007) which are confined in 11 categories. That average out to about 9 useful posts every month, not a lot for his readers to read in one month. But if you dig deeper, most of his posts are lengthy, very detailed and well thought out, containing very useful tips. I do have a slight problem with his categories though. Only 13 out of the current total 195 posts were spread among 10 categories, with the other 182 posts tagged as 'Uncategorized'. This sort of tells me the redundancy of too many different categories which were not properly utilized.

I particularly enjoyed reading and can relate to his post '4 Reasons You Should Use a Credit Card' as I subscribed to all those 4 beliefs myself. Another post I find very useful to most of our technologies-laden life is "10 Tips for Creating Secure Password". I'm sure most of us at one point or another had difficulty remembering or generating easy-to-remember yet secured passwords for so many of our online accounts. The tips offered in this post may be able to help us solve this problem.

Mark is currently holding a contest where interested bloggers can participate in 4 different ways to win an iPod Shuffle.

1. Full Review of his site - 10 chances to win
2. Link to Site & blog about the contest - 5 chances to win
3. Subscribe to RSS - 1 chance win
4. Subscribe to Email - 1 chance to win

Be sure to submit your entry to this iPod Shuffle contest before all the chances are taken up.

In conclusion
This is the first time I come across Productivity501 and I'm not going to pretend I know Mark, his blog and his writing style well. In fact, base on my first impression, I'm going to offer a humble suggestion that maybe Mark can do something to improve on the shortcoming of the categorization of his posts which I've pointed out earlier. I've also pointed out that his blog gives a very clean feel, sometimes to the point of being too clinical - hospital-kind-of-clinical. My humble suggestion to tackle this would be creating a personal touch to his blog posts, and one way he may want to consider doing would be to add and sign off his blog posts with his signature.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed.

Book Giveaway: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

The winner of the Brian Lee's Day Planner 2.0 giveaway contest had been announced, it goes to the lucky Ms Caesi.

For his next contest, Brian is giving away a copy of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. I am very familiar with this book, it has been on the bestseller list of major bookstores for many years. To be honest, other than reading the book review on newspaper column, I never get down to actually reading it!

To enter the draw, simply link to his review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad using the same anchor text and notified Brian of your post url by leaving a comment on his post.

Robert Kiyosaki is a Rich Dad because he don't work for his money(that's poor dad's style), instead, he let his money works for him! If I have the luck to win the book, I really do not have any excuses left not to read it and hopefully, start transforming from being a poor dad to a rich dad!

Why I Love PayPerPost

PerPerPost was the first paid-to-write program I joined right after I got my PR ranking at the last updates(end April 2007). I came across the PayPerPost banner in so many blogs I visited and wanted to join this wonderful program earlier but during that time, my blog was new and PR rank was zero. I waited as I thought with a higher PR rank, I could expect more and higher value opportunities to be avail to me.

I love PayPerPost because it made my dream of getting paid for doing what I love, which is writing, comes true! PayPerPost is the leading marketplace for Consumer Generated Advertising and I'm proud to be part of this growing online community of movers, shakers and money makers.

I really like the user-friendly feature of a self-service marketplace where posties like myself can browse for qualified opportunities and select those which are relevent to our blog niche.

With their huge network of thousands of bloggers who spans the globe and covers everything from stay-at-home mothers to technology gurus, I can make friends with people of internationally diverse backgrounds all coming together with a common cause - to make money blogging.

Win a 24" Wide Screen LCD Monitor

Back from his trip in Taipei for Computex 2007, John chow is back at his evil best to help his readers make money online. This time, he is holding another evil blog contest. No, he is not giving away his booty haul of goodies he got from Computext Taipei, at least not yet. For this contest, he is giving away a massive 24" wide screen LCD Monitor sponsored by the good people at Bluefur web hosting who wants you to know that they are hosting Canada and the rest of the world.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is write about it in your blog. The contest ends on July 31st 2007 and is open to anyone, anywhere in the world (as long as you have a blog). Non English blogs are also eligible as long as the correct linking rules are being followed.

Good luck and have fun!

90 Days Pit-Stop!

Today marks the 90th day this blog had been 'reborn' since 17th March. What I mean by 'reborn' is that I committed myself on that fateful day, last March, to blog consistently while having fun learning this online trade.

It has been one hell of a journey thus far, there were sweat and tears, and there were smiles and jubilation too! Blogging is fun but blogging is definitely not easy-fun, it is hardwork-fun I must tell you. My biggest obstacle is finding time to research and write unique and interesting topics , in between my regular 44-hours week day job, and balancing the demand of family time with 2 young children and keeping the household in operational-ready conditions (we do not have outside help).

Having said that, I've learnt a lot during the last 3 solid months of blogging(part-time). I've learnt blogging is not just about writing, it is much more than that. Blogging is also about branding, packaging, marketing, networking and much more. I've also made many great blogging friends, and definitely have fun interacting with people from internationally diverse backgrounds, all coming together as a community with a common love(for writing).

I'll take this chance to update some of my rankings here, some of them I'm quite satisifed with, but some I still need lots of improvement on. To begin with, 2 weeks ago, I posted that this blog manage to break into Technorati Top 100 most favourited blogs. And today, I'm glad to follow that up with the announcement that this blog had achieved the Technorati Top 10k ranking and is now rank 8831, with an Authority 401.



Compared to Technorati ranking, my Alexa ranking does not paint such a rosy picture. My ranking today stands at 397,599! The only consolation I can give myself is this ranking 3 months ago was in the region of 2.9 million! This stat is definitely my Archillies' heels, and my next phase of blogging with be skewed towards improving it.

The next 3 months

The initial phase of relentless link-building operations had achieved its desired result, far more than I have ever dream of. For the next phase, I'll be focusing more of my time on sniffing out useful web resources, and of course blogging tips and money making tips and resources! In short, I'll be focusing on writing and publishing quality content on a consistent basis.

Before I sign off, I want to thank everyone who had read, commented, linked, favourited and subscribed to this blog. You are the catalyst that keep me firing on all cylinders and keep me going. Stay on course with me through this wonderful journey and exciting adventure online!

Win Free Business Books!

Ever since doing a Review Exchange with Matt of the Entrepreneurial Blog of Matt Huggings, I've became a regular reader and had witnessed the transformation of his previous blog theme and layout design to the current new 'resorty' look. Despite the transformation, Matt still churn out great content for his Make Money Blogging series continuously to share and engage his readers.

In his effort to continuously improve and promote his blog, Matt is holding a easy contest whereby 6 participants stand to win free business books, on top of getting free link love from his PR3 blog.

Those promotional copies of Secrets of Successful Blogging were generously sponsored by Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates. Each is a 40 page compilation of 101+ tips for blogging more Efficiently, Effectively, and Profitably.

For this blog promotion contest, Matt was bombarded by a certain Mr Levison who rode on his high horse and critisized Matt for crossing the line by gaming the search engine when he asked participants to link to his blog using his preferred anchor text. There were some interesting exchanges in the comment section of his blog post "Since When Is Link Baiting Unethical", check out the post for various viewpoints about this common link bait strategy.

Here Comes The White Elephant!

Having won herself the new "white elehpant" gift from John Chow's contest, who incidentally also re-gifted after winning it himself at a networking event. Ms Danielle has no need for the "piece of crap" since she's already got 2 iPods, she is re-gifting the 30GB Microsft Zune in her own back link promotion contest to promote her new blog site.

Since she received the "white elephant" (disguised in doo-doo brown color) prize in mid May, Ms Danielle had been busy getting her swing right on the greens(or is it the range) and also busy hosting a flying trapeze artist from down under. She finally got down to postingthis contest and offering the Zune up for grabs!

To enter the contest, simply create a new post in your blog linking to both her home page and one other post on her popular site — pick any post you want. Use anchor text that includes the phrase “blog site.” Examples include Danielle’s blog site, popular blog site, blog site about marketing, golf beginner’s blog site, ppc blog site, etc.

The "white elephant" is starting its "world tour" soon, hope it makes a cross-continental trip to the far east and make a permanent stop at my doorstep! I'll make sure it is "white elephant" no more!