Three blog contest winners announced

On the 10th of July, we launched our second competition, which saw three blogs (Technology Bloggers, Blogging Fever and TechAtLast) join together, to give you, the readers of Technology Bloggers the chance to win one of three $50 USD prizes.

The competition was a huge success, with a total of 6,590 entries!

I had initially set a personal target of 10,000 entries, however soon realised this was probably a little out of reach. I changed the target to 5,000 entries which I thought we could just about achieve, however we smashed this, gaining close to 7,000!

Entrants could achieve a total of 59 entries, and then a further 5 entries every day, were they to revisit and share the giveaway again.

In total 342 people took part in the competition, which works out at an average of 19 (19.269) entries per person.

On Saturday I used the Rafflecopter widget to randomly select the winners. The winners were:

  • Asha Marie Pena – winning with her entry “Follow @TecBloggers on Twitter”
  • Peter Lee – winning with her entry “Follow @Blogging_Fever on Twitter”
  • Arjun Yadav – winning with her entry “Subscribe to Blogging Fever Via Email”

Asha, Peter and Arjun all won a $50 USD prize – or equivalent amount – to be paid via PayPal.

Technology Bloggers three blog $150 USD giveaway winnersAsha’s winnings are to be paid by Olawale Daniel and Arjun’s are to0 be paid by Alan Tay.

I was left with Peter, and I have already sent him his winnings – I am unsure whether Alan and Olawale have yet.

Here is what Peter had to say:

“Dear TechnologyBloggers.org, BloggingFever.com and TechAtLast.com,

Congrats to you all for doing such a great contest… it was very well done (especially since all of you are from different corners of the world), easy to enter and I enjoyed it very much.

It is such a pleasant surprise to hear that I am one of the contest winner! I joined the contest because it was organized by my fellow blogging friends, Christopher and Alan. I never thought that I would be one of the lucky winners and become $50 richer. For that, I thank you and keep the contest coming! 🙂

Best wishes,
Peter Lee”

One happy customer 🙂

It is good to see that people from our blogs that won the contest. The loyal readers/subscribers among you will probably recognise Peter Lee. He is a regular reader and often comments. He also reads Alan’s blogs and has his own, called Computer How To Guide. Recognise his avatar?

Peter Lee's Avatar

Peter’s Avatar

Arjun is also a member of the Technology Bloggers community. Arjun first commented on my article about the online profile maker About.Me. He has been a loyal reader ever since, and occasionally drops a comment if he has something to say. Another very worthy winner.

As for Asha, I am unsure how she found out about the contest, maybe she reads Alan’s blog, or maybe she found us on a contest site, or via social media. She could well be a reader who just chooses to lurk, rather than be one who comments. Who knows.

Congratulations to the winners, and thank you very much to everyone who entered, I hope you enjoyed the contest.

Watch this space, as maybe soon we will have another contest on the way…

Friday the 13th and 1 year for Technology Bloggers!

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!

First birthday candleI 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

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 🙂

Technology Bloggers
Read | Contribute | Benefit
A whole community of technology bloggers!

My 7 Links – An interesting blogging idea

The other day I got an email from one of our commenters, Peter (from Computer How to Guide) in which he said that I had been nominated to continue his ‘7 Links Challenge‘.

After reading Peter’s article, I did a bit of digging and managed to find out what the 7 Link Challenge is, and who started it off.

The 7 Link Challenge (or My 7 Links as it is called by its founder) is where a blogger writes about seven articles they have written, and then nominates other (usually five) bloggers to do the same.

It is an interesting idea with three obvious intentions: firstly to create awareness of ‘posts gone by’ (old posts which have sunk into the archives); secondly to create a flow of PageRank, or ‘link juice’ between a whole host of different blogs, ultimately pushing everyone up the rankings – in theory; and thirdly to drive more traffic to different sites, by bloggers raising awareness of other blogs that they read or contribute for.

The goal of the challenge is

“To unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.”

I think Technology Bloggers could benefit from such a post, and I would like to dig back into the archives and find my seven articles, so I am going to give it a shot!

The seven categories bloggers are suppose to find an article for are: your most beautiful post; your most popular post; your most controversial post; your most helpful post; a post whose success surprised you; a post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved; and the post that you are most proud of. I am only going to do this for my posts, so other authors with sufficient posts can do this too 🙂

My 7 LinksOkay, here goes…

My most ‘beautiful’ post

A bit of an odd name, but I guess this means a post you feel is brilliantly crafted/well written.

The thing is, if I don’t think an article is brilliant, I won’t post it, therefore I love all my posts almost equally. How can I choose my favourite? I don’t think I can, so I am not going to – no one post stands out for me. Check out all my posts in my writer archive to see which ones I like 🙂

My most popular post

This one was an easy one to pick, I just had to see which posts had been read the most, and which had the most comments.

That post was: Is your computer damaging your eyes? The post has had hundreds of views, 37 comments to date, and users spend on average over four minutes on the page, making it the overall most popular post that I have written.

My most controversial post

I hate to sound like I am chickening out again, but I am really not sure what to pick! I try to make sure that most of my posts stir up a bit of a debate, but again, no one really stands out for me. Do you think I have a most controversial post?

My most helpful post

I like to think that all my posts are helpful, either by updating you on the latest tech news, by reviewing a product, or by telling you how to do something.

The post that should be crowned my most helpful post really depends on who you are. If you are a blog owner who wanted to find out how to claim your blog with Technorati then that article was probably the most useful to you, again, if you were interested in new radiotelescopes, The world’s most powerful radio telescope is now functioning! is probably of more use to you. What do you think my most helpful article is?

The post which I was surprised by its success

There are a few posts which I was surprised with, either because they didn’t really get the response I thought they would, or because I was pleasantly surprised by the response.

I have chosen an article which pleasantly surprised me, as I shouted out to the community, and the community responded! That post was: Why would you turn comments off? you can read the follow up post here: Why you would turn off comments.

The post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

At the beginning of last month I posted an article entitled Are you doing your bit for the blog? and I really hoped that it would receive similar community attention to what the ‘Why would you turn comments off?’ article did, but it didn’t, and that somewhat disappointed me 🙁

The post that I am most proud of

Looking through all my old posts, this one jumped out at me straight away, as I remember how stunned and please I was when I wrote it. There was no other post that I could be more proud of (yet) than this one.

What was it? This: Look what WE have achieved! after just two weeks the blog was doing so well, and I was just so pleased and proud of my creation 🙂

My nominations

Okay, time for me to challenge some people to find their seven articles. My nominations are:

  • Jonny – One of our fantastic authors
  • James – One of our friends from Windows Talk
  • Ari – Someone whose blog I have been following for many years now
  • Chadrack – A good friend of mine in the blogosphere
  • Lillie – Someone who has provided me with encouragement on many projects
  • You – If you have a blog, I challenge you too!

If you want to find out more about My 7 Links, click the link and it will take you to what I believe to site of the founder of the challenge.