They both met up at Stanford University in the US. They had this idea of wanting to create a search engine that would organise every piece of information and would be accessible to the public for free. They also wanted to make money from it to people in the form of selling ads called Adsense, which are a type of  pay-per-click ad, where you make money from showing their ads on your site or blog.

They also invented AdWords, where people would buy advertising and pay each time someone would click on their advertisement. Which is very expensive.It can run into hundreds of dollars just to pay for advertising this way. They also had a favourite recipe that their chef cooked for them, which was called Buttermilk Chicken. The meals would be provided for free to the workers and the recipe itself was Google-sized to the max. Sergey and Larry wanted to change the way the world searched for and researched for information. They looked to make money by selling targeted advertising to businesses on the results pages. They wanted an accessible search engine that could be searched by people all over the world for free.

Blogging Heroes By Michael A. Banks

“Blogging Heroes” is a great collection of the world’s 30 top bloggers. Michael A. Banks goes into detail as to how he got in touch with them, and how he transcribed their words into text for inclusion in his book. He did it by using software that helps you dictate words into sentences on the computer screen as you speak the words  out via audio tape. The software is called “Naturally Speaking”.

The bloggers themselves go into great detail as to how the came into blogging, what their previous experiences were before they tried blogging, What sort of jobs they had or still have and how much time they devote to it. Some of them (in fact, most of them) blog full-time and write content for much of the day and for many hours. I was gobsmacked as to how many blogs that they themselves looked at via rss readers and the hundreds of blogs that they read per day to do research for their specialised fields.

No doubt about it, you have to be dedicated to your craft if you want the loyal readers to keep reading your blog. Why do they blog? because they are passionate and enthusiastic about doing it and it consumes an incredible amount of time.  They give plenty of tips for the newbie blogger, such as:  Be passionate about the topic you are writing about.  Good content will outbeat SEO tactics all the time.

Read and comment on other blogs, and continue the discussion rather that leave a short note. Google will bring a trickle of traffic to you forever.  And lots, lots more. And some of them have books that were written before the blog was created, others had email newsletter lists. And some even worked for Microsoft.  Dave Taylor, of AskDaveTaylor.com had this really good description of how to attract readers to your site. He likens it to going to a party. But you don’t go to a party and just leave. You go and engage in discussions. You have to make yourself known in the blogosphere, and people will want to come to your party, as it were.

You can download the Corporate Blogging Guide from Alex’s blog, actually the e-book worth to be paid for, as Alex did a great work on it, but all what he is asking for is to subscribe to his blog feed to download the e-book, I personally won’t mind subscribing to his awesome blog even if there is no e-books, and no body is asking me to do so as I recommend his must read blog!

I want also to point to Alina who helped on translating and editing the e-book, she is the creator of Words of a Broken Mirror (WoBM), it’s a PR and Marketing blog aiming to help companies and PR professionals improve their strategies, campaigns and daily communication tasks.

It’s always good to discover new valuable blogs and to get to know interesting people, this is my way to have fun while working.