I have received emails in the last few weeks asking for advice on blog hosts. There are four important things you should check before paying for a hosting service:

• High uptime ratio (will your blog be up and running all the time?)
• Availability for patches & updates
• Cpanel (one click WordPress installation)
• A server located in USA (because Google treat them special!)

Since very long time I am using Host Gator and I am very satisfied with their service. Their service met all above mentioned criteria. Apart from their monthly maintenance, my websites and blogs never went down. Their uptime ratio is quite high.

I preferred Host Gator‘s Baby Package with its $7.95 per month price. You get unlimited Disk Space/Bandwidth/Domains with that price. What else a problogger can need?

I still wonder your choice. Which hosting company do you prefer? What do you think about them? What suggestions would you give a new blogger shopping for a host for his new blog? What are your blog hosting recommendations?

It’s been almost one week since I launched Mert’s Blog Academy(MBA). Frankly speaking, I did not expect it to become so popular in such a short period of time. Today the academy was mentioned on Haberturk, one of the most popular daily Turkish newspapers in Turkey.

As I mentioned before, the purpose of the academy is to establish professional blogging sector in Turkey. We also teach Internet Marketing and advanced SEO techniques. The best of all, we accept our participants as our business partners. After graduation, we will still be promoting and showcasing their works. I guess there is no such an online academy at the moment. Do you know any other online academy that is teaching Internet Marketing, Professional Blogging, SEO and promoting its students at the same time? This is our main difference…

What makes a good blog? Is that all about the number of readers? Daily unique visitors? Google PageRank, Alexa or Technorati ranking? What is the most important thing for having a good blog?Is it theme?

After 3 years of blogging, I found the answer:  a blog written on a specific topic that is helping  the writer lead a group of likeminded people.  Building a community, and leading them. Google PageRank, RSS counts, Alexa, Technorati can always be improved.

As a person if you can not build and lead a community,  chances are you will never ever become a good blogger, and have a good blog.

So if you have a blog or about to launch a new blog, before everything, just think about how you can lead your readers on that specific topic? Try to gather a group of people around your blog who are sharing the same purpose. Why should they follow you?

Discover the hero within, and become a thought leader on your topic. Put targets for your community, empower your followers. Act like a big enterprise with your followers. The small is the new big today. That’s the secret formula…

Finally I launched the Mert’s Blog Academy blog coaching program. It  is available for only Turkish bloggers at the moment. The purpose of the academy is to establish problogging sector in Turkey. It is a big fight in a country like Turkey, where people and most companies still consider blogs as personal diaries. But somebody has to do that, and I like all kinds of mental and physical challenges.

The  program is a combination of  Internet Marketing, Problogging and SEO Techniques. We preferred an open source distance learning program called Moodle. The lessons are on weekly basis, and supported with my videos and MP3 audios. The program is for 6 months.

We currently provide two different packages:

• Silver package        : $27 per month
• Premium package    : $77 per month

I guess you are asking to yourself why there is big gap between these two packages. With Premium participants get additional benefits such as;

• We guide the participants on SEO, even do the SEO for them until they stay in the program.
• The participants can contact me on daily basis
• Some more extras.

So far this has been a great experience for us. We will use this know-how when we launch our English blog coaching program soon…

If you are a blogger who is struggling to find blogging content, here is a nice solution for you. Marro.ws is web-clipping tool that works like cutting the newspaper parts or a board-marker.

The good thing about Marro.ws is that you are able to save your valuable contents in their unlimited box.  The best of all, you can easily access it from everywhere in PDF, TXT, HTML formats. The developers are working on other formats at the moment.

Instead of saving whole links like delicious, you can just save the most valuable part of an article with Marro.ws. It provides you an un-limited text area to save your valuable content from all different web sites. You can literally create an unlimited content database for your blogging.

Developers of  Marro.ws has made a presentation on Next’09 event in 6 May. You may take a look at their presentation by clicking here