Laptops are clunky, heavy and a little too much for the average user. I’ve always felt that they are a little too loaded for bloggers – who surfs, blogs and reads. He tends to rove around. Some experienced bloggers even crunche numbers or dabble a little with coding or designing. Although netbooks can frustrate advanced bloggers (You may blame the overloaded 1.6 Atom processor used on most netbooks now-a-day), for everyone else with modest needs a netbook can be an ideal, handy companion. Here are some of the latest netbooks you can’t afford to miss:

Asus Eee PC 1005 H: When I first spotted the Asus EeePC 1000 H, I was wondering if such a small, slim and pretty looking, netbook could really cater to a rather rude, tough-to-nails user like me. When I actually ended up buying one, I was rather surprised as to how much this little netbook was capable off. Good things just have a way of getting better. Asus 1005HA is now a much better, evolved machine – it’s slimmer, prettier and has a much better keyboard. It’s better than the erstwhile models. No matter what anyone says, if I don’t have a better choice sweeping me off my feet and knocking my breath away, I would go for it.

HP Mini 5101 HA: I first saw the HP mini in Thailand and the first thing that struck me (apart from the unintelligible and alien Thai keypad) is the shrunken size. When compared to the other models in review here the HP Mini 5101, is truly ‘mini’. The speakers obviously suffered and took the brunt of the shrunken size and you will really cringe at the miniature wide-screen if you are used to larger laptops. The sounds coming off the speakers are ‘tinny’, according to a review on PC world; I thought I was deaf. Otherwise, the HP Mini is the perfect companion for a roving freelancer, enterprising individual and can manage to help someone do business given its ready business software suite.

Toshiba N205 – N310: First off, I didn’t like the name. Couldn’t they have something simpler? It is slow; almost pedestrian with the same overloaded 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 160 GB Hard drive and a 1 GB RAM. The display had a bit of a glare. The rant should end here because everything else about it was impressive. It claims to have the longest battery life among netbooks so far( I started to feel a little disappointed by this claim in general since so many manufacturers don’t deliver) and it really has a nice touchpad with a smooth keyboard to boot.

Say, which one would you go for?

Internet entrepreneurs are a different breed; they start with almost nothing, they work without knowing what lies on the other side of the browser, they go penniless for years before the first dollar rings at the cash register and certainly does share a lot in common withthe good old offline entrepreneur.

A blog is an entrepreneurs’ voice – offline or on: It brings out that lonely parched voice of rebels who wanted to do things their way. It documents the journey of their creation and helps to spread it out for the common good in exchange for a possible commercial reward. They are the proud makes of engines that drive capitalism and make thousands of dollars possible for the federal exchequer.

A blog is an entrepreneurs’ weapon: Think about what an entrepreneur can do with a blog – he can promote, educate, attack, inform, pamper, cajole, entertain and touch your heart. Entrepreneurs can be in touch constantly using a blog and that’s an amazing way to get closer to your customers.

A blog is an extension of an entrepreneurs’ personality: I don’t want to enter a shop I don’t know. I am an incorrigible mall hater and I detest shopping offline ( I don’t do it unless I need bottled water while cruising through the Sahara desert or if I need to buy myself a pack of oxygen if I am hard-pressed to breathe). I love the Internet and hate it when my equipment gets busted. I don’t believe in “We are a Fortune 500 company, with 165 years of experience making electric motors kind of speeches…”and I love writing that reflects some personality; not the usual corporate “we are big so you listen to us when we speak you little two-legged-nothing-overdeveloped-insect-with-a-dysfunctional brain” kind of condescending copy. Now, that’s why I think an entrepreneur or a business person should blog.

What does blog mean to you? Why are you here? What’s your purpose? Do I ever get to hear your voice?

Image: faith goble

Guest post by: Tom Walker

Finding quality and reliable advertising revenue can be a make or break proposition for many bloggers. Most bloggers understand the importance of advertising and that it is just par for the course when it comes to making their blog profitable. Discovering how to go about finding and maintaining worthwhile advertising relationships however, is often much more difficult. Making your blog profitable when it comes to advertising, first means you must find advertisers willing to promote their products or services on your site, and the following tips might be able to help you do just that.

1. Adsense: Using Google AdSense can be a great way to get your feet wet when it comes to advertising on your blog. With AdSense, you can let someone else handle the advertising for you as you begin your foray into blogging. By using AdSense, you can get a general idea of the types of advertising that might work well on your site as well as how the revenue system works.

2. Spread The Word: When you decide to branch out to do your own advertising, you will likely have to put in some effort when it comes to finding prospective advertisers. In most cases, they won’t come looking for you. Use your available resources and networks to let people know that you’re on the lookout for advertisers. Utilize email, friends and family, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and your blog itself as great mediums for finding possible advertisers for your blog.

3. Market Yourself: Most advertisers will look for a reason or reasons to choose your blog for their advertisements. Consider possible enticements to get them to look twice at your site. Are you a top ranked site in your market? Have you found a niche few others know about? Maybe you’ve won awards for your blog or blogs. Finding ways to sell yourself and differentiate your blog from the masses can appeal to advertisers.

4. Location, Location, Location!: It’s important to remember that once you begin reeling in the advertisers, to keep them happy you must often consider the location and placement of their ads. Being stuffed into a distant bottom corner, or wedged between two other massive ads probably won’t make your advertisers too happy. Of course, how much they are paying will likely determine placement on your page, but you should also consider that sometimes smaller return business is more lucrative than one-time big business.

5. Don’t Get Lost In The Fluff: When considering location and placement of advertisements upon your blog, it is important in keeping your advertisers happy to avoid too much clutter on your blog. Video clips, pictures, graphics, and text can at times overpower your advertisements. While the quality of your blog is important, it must be weighed against quantity and available space for advertisements. Most advertisers won’t be happy to find the effects of their ads diminished by surrounding graphics or lost in the fluff of your text.

6. Don’t Waffle: Moving back and forth between subjects on your blog can be a turnoff to some advertisers. When a company or advertiser thinks he is placing an ad on a blog about personal finance, and suddenly finds that you are blogging about your pet goldfish, it can be a turnoff and they could decide to pull their advertising faster than it takes those last flakes of fish food to hit the bottom of the bowl.

7. Stay Relevant: Keeping your blog relevant and on topic is one of the best ways to bring advertisers to your blog. Inconsistency in posts, letting your blog lapse into long periods of inactivity, and not staying current on the most recent subject matter relating to your blog can drive advertisers away.

8. Be Reasonable: Keeping your CPM low, at least initially can help you draw in advertisers until you get your feet under you and your blog builds in popularity. Starting your CPM too high may tend to drive away many advertisers who would have been willing to work with you. Be reasonable in your expectations and don’t become greedy. Even once your blog hits it big, it is important to remember where the money that is rolling in comes from. Angering advertisers with high CPM rates is a quick way to ensure your advertisers won’t want to work with you.

9. Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day: It will likely take you time to learn the advertising system and how best to attract new advertisers. Don’t get frustrated or pushy when it comes to finding advertisers. Enticement is good, but putting on the pressure might drive advertisers away. Just keep at it, and more importantly look for ways to keep your blog active with plenty of traffic. A popular blog will often breed advertising revenue and bring more advertisers to your site.

10. Keep At It: Turnover can be high in blog advertising. Consistency is the key to building and maintaining healthy advertiser relationships. Don’t expect to be able to grab a bunch of advertisers all at once and then sit back and put it on cruise control. You will likely find yourself constantly on the search for new advertisers. While your search methods will probably become more refined, and your time spent finding advertisers for your blog may diminish, the process will likely continue for as long as you wish to keep making money from your blog.
About the Author
Tom Walker lives in the UK where he writes and designs for a office supplies company offering Epson printer inks, toners, paper and other printer accessories. You can read his posts about advertising and design on their blog.

Yet another disaster with a Windows Machine and this time; it hit me right on my stomach. Next week is important for us here at Blogging Elements since Mike and I have been thinking of launching an awesome free report for the blog for the benefit of our readers. Just when I was getting ready for the big week, my laptop crashed again. I have no idea what happened to it since it just won’t start. The most irritating thing about all of this is the unpredictability: just yesterday night, it seemed to be working fine and now it just went belly-up. I have been thinking of the love/hate relationship I seem to be developing towards technology now-a-days. The reasons why I love technology is obvious, but why hate it?

Riding on Unknowns: I have no idea what might happen to the machine I am blogging from, right now. I don’t know what went wrong with the other laptop. I have my files stored in multiple locations thankfully, but how safe and reliable are the USB external hard-drives, online back-up systems and the hard drives on our own machines? Do I really trust these things to keep my files safe? Doing anything online or on computers reminds me so much of the 60 minute( or perhaps more for you?) commute to get to work. What can you predict about your fate on smoke-filled, overcrowded expressways and roads?

Technology is all pervasive: In spite of everything, we still depend on technology for everything. I hate it, but I can’t do without my laptop and the Internet connection. If there was no Windows, Mac or Linux, I wouldn’t be able to work on any computer. If there was no online back-up system, I will need to rely on my HDD ( which can get busted) or my USB external hard-drive which can go kaput or might get stolen. Internet connections can be unreliable but can you imagine e-commerce without it? I can’t breathe if I can’t check my mail.

Working on PC is still the best; cloud computing is still running to catch up: The new laptop I was talking about is a Windows 7 loaded Dell Inspiron. I don’t have Microsoft Office Installed on it. The other laptop (actually an Asus Eee PC 1000H netbook) has Office 2007 loaded on to it. The ease with which I can work on Microsoft word or excel just doesn’t seem to come off on Google Documents or even on OpenOffice. Mircosoft sucks, but I need to live with it.

I hate to do this; I don’t like to depend on anything unreliable. Internet and technology are really moody and cranky. We still learn to live with this bad behavior though and tolerate it all. Have you gone through problems like these? Do your machines trouble you? We would be glad to know.

I was going through the “self-employment” blues the other day and I finally realized that I can’t really do anymore than what I am currently doing to earn more money than what I  can make currently. I then realized that I need to leverage my time somehow. I know that I can’t possibly start a full-fledged brick-and-mortar office, but I can certainly hire telecommuters. I have been in this business for a long time and I know that telecommuting works for me. Here are some smart ways you can channelize your efforts, be productive and earn more money:
Hire a VA: I know I have said this before but I never got around doing it. I couldn’t take it anymore and I really needed some helping hand. I hired a VA and started getting her to work for me. Most of the mundane and repetitive tasks will now be done by her. I could use her to promote all my blogs, upload posts to my existing blogs, upload articles on ezinearticles.com, post on my forums for me and do all those things that take my precious time away from me. In the future, I will even train her (and many more like her) to do keyword research, compile lists of keywords, use tools like word tracker, market samurai, etc. All I need now is a system using which I can deploy work. I will probably just use Google docs for now. I will look at project management systems like bascecamp in the future.
Handle multiple projects: While you take the bulk of your work away and have a VA do it for you, there will be a lot of time on your hands for working on other projects that you have always wanted to do. Start those projects and work on those you are already headlong into. It is here that you will need to master the art of multi-tasking. While managing your virtual employees – such as Virtual Assistants, writers, designers and developers – you will also have to focus on marketing your websites and handling the overall projects.
Guard your time even more ferociously: I have been noticing now for a very long time since I started to be on my own that a lot of people make unreasonable demands of my time. Starting from my personal life (I guess they have a right to do this?) all the to my  professional life – including the innumerable hours spent on things like training, checking emails, meeting on IM or skype, etc. Become ruthless with your time. Don’t let anyone get near you. Lock yourself in a room. Run away to a deserted island. Do whatever works for you.

Business owners who have online catalogs are quick to discover, whether through research or trial-and-error, product library management plays a huge part in market success.  There is no secret that if someone cannot navigate your site, they probably aren’t going to buy from you.

So, what is product library management?  In essence, it is nothing more than product data management, only the product data is categorized and mapped into basically a usable virtual library.

This process is completed by data entry personnel, graphic designers, as well as content writers.  These individuals research the products and then enter them into the website database. The research includes everything from product details to other website suppliers.  Once researchers have this information, they then begin to create the catalog library.

This catalog library maps the products, matching them into specific categories and pairing them with their proper manufacturers.  By doing this, the website can be designed to help the consumer find similar products that fall under the same category or same manufacturer.

Managing the product data allows content writers to use search engine optimization (SEO) to better market the product.  Moreover, since the product data includes the product prices, by having them all entered into a database, price comparisons can be made available to consumers.  By allowing consumers to compare similar products on your site, they are more likely to buy from that site, because they will feel they had the chance to make an informed decision.

For your marketing, use product library management service providers that have proven themselves as leaders in online vservesolution.com processing. Look for those that use the most up-to-date technology to assist you and provide close monitoring which allows you to stay on top of price tracking.

Product data management is an inescapable part of providing online catalogs to your customers.  Some business people will still try to tackle these jobs on their own, and while some will do a quasi-good job at it, the majority will have simply wasted valuable time and money.  A great way to save resources and ensure that the job is done right is simply to contact a catalog processing professional before the start of your product data library creation.

When you have Google Analytics and your wordpress stats, why should you bother with any other tool for trends analysis and traffic report  for your blog? You should. Google Analytics is an excellent program and there is no doubt about it. However, it is an uncomfortable tool to use because apparently Google wuld know everything about your site; you are falling for the almost monopoly that Google is. I, for one, would never like it if all my traffic data, traffic trends, visiting trends and traffic stats are made available for someone else to keep track of. In my search for alternatives, I found the following Free but still popular web stats tools:

Analog: When you use analog, everything is displayed to you in a single HTML file and it really makes it easy for you to see all you need to know at a snapshot. Analog is a solid offering and is pretty popular with a lot of users who prefer simplicity over anything else. Of course, the disadvantages are that it doesn’t come with anything more than just the basics. It lacks any deep, colorful reporting features such as charts, for instance.

AWstats: Although it is completely free, AWstats has a very professional feel to it. The interface is easy to use and understand. AW stats is pretty popular too. Another cool aspect of AWstats is that it is written in PERL which is a robust script and is pretty much reliable. AWstats still lacks reporting features and it could have been nice to see some better charts and graphs — any visual demonstration for data presentation– although it does have some basic reporting features.  Hundreds of web-hosting providers already have AWstats installed on cpanels so setting it up is a matter of a few clicks.

Webalizer: Webalizer is one of the best free web stats tools available on the Internet today. It is efficient, fast and is written in C. It boasts of a simple interface and it adopts a straight to the point approach. However it represents the data in stacked metric diagram forms which takes some time to get used to. Also, it doesn’t even have the basic reporting features like graphs as found in AWstats. However, it is still a popular application for your use. Most webhosting providers have this web stats tool as an option on cpanels too.

The other day, I was just talking to someone on a forum I frequently visit and I was a little intrigued by the guy’s situation – he had all the skill, talent and enthusiasm that a budding rockstar blogger needs but he was just not able to do anything much about his blog except to post intermittently and bring in occasional spurts of traffic.

When I probed him, I realized that he couldn’t do anything for his blog because he had no money to do anything for it – he couldn’t invest in a team of graphic designers or freelancers, he couldn’t afford guest bloggers, promotions of any kind were out of league for him, etc. If you went through this before or if you are currently are going through such a phase, you could do a lot about it and turn the tables around. Here are some ways:

Fund through your job/business: Even if you are a student who can always claim to NOT have money for investing in a blog, it is just an excuse. I know a lot of students who work hard by baby-sitting, working for their professors and lecturers at college, doing odd chores and errands for a nearby supermarket, etc. If you are not a student and are currently working, you shouldn’t even be reading this post. There are just no excuses – you need to pump in money to make money. If you don’t have any money now, earn it.

Offer Your Blogging Services to Others: If you are a blogger and you find it hard to keep your blog up and running, you could consider blogging for others. You might do it two ways;

• Offer to write guest posts for some blogs of your interest in exchange for traffic to your own blog( which is money for you indirectly)
• Offer to blog or offer services for cash. Weekendincome has a lovely post written up on how to offer services online in detail spreading out into two parts. Freelance bloggers and freelance writers swear by blogging since it’s recurring and almost acts like a full-time job with a full-time salary.

Do affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing has always been my favorite way of making money online and I can stand testimony to its proven success trails. If you find it hard to raise cash, this could be one of the easiest ways to raise money next only to offering direct services like blogging, freelance writing or designing. Moreover, your blog is a perfect vehicle for affiliate marketing so you could be hitting two moving targets with just one shot.

On Second thoughts, how did it feel to be going through such a phase? I went through it innumerable times and each time I went through it, the only thing I could depend on was to offer freelance writing or blogging services for others. What about you? What recourse did you take?

A lot of time has gone by with me talking about blogging at length – with various inputs from Mike and other good friends of mine right here on the blogging circuit – and I realized that we are still behind computers instead of being in your midst talking, sharing and inspiring you in such a way that we could draw inspiration, learning and a life-long friendship with you too.

I was about to do another post and then a thought struck me: why don’t I throw this post open for you ask anything you ever wanted to ask about blogging, earning money online, making money through blogging itself, and anything else you wanted to know about Internet in general.

So I throw this post out to you and I hope you feel free to ask anything you ever wanted. It doesn’t even have to be about blogging, you know? I mean, why not talk about that girlfriend/boyfriend who dumped you? Why not talk about it and get it out of the way such that you could focus on blogging and doing something great for yourself?

Think about it. nts

Make sure you ask questions. This will be a continuously updated blog so keep checking it out as it grows in size.