Google Wave is a cool new product made by the Google Guys which everyone wants to get their hands on and experience the wave.



Recently, I had got an option to invite new people on Google Wave.

I am giving away 5 google wave invites to 5 lucky people.

How To Enter the Giveaway:

1. Subscribe to Updates via email

Enter your email address:

2. Tweet the following

I entered the Google Wave Invites GiveAway http://bit.ly/googlewavega #googlewave

After subscribing, leave a comment with your email and twitter account, so that we know you have entered.

Note:

1. The Winners will be selected via Random.org
2. The contest ends on 13th Dec midnight.

No Idea What Google Wave is?

This video answers some questions about google wave and whether is better than the conventional email.




Product manager Greg, a.k.a. Dr. Wave, gives an introduction to Google Wave and points out parts of the user interface

Making a living from blogging is not the easiest task to do. It involves a lot of hard work, patience and money. There is always an initial investment and a recurring expenditure required to setup (for products like Domain and Web Hosting etc.). Also there are earnings to be accounted for. It becomes a tedious task to keep track of all the money spent and received. And even if a blogger does all of it by himself, he might end up wasting a lot of time.



Budget Tracker is one useful tool to help solve this problem. It is a money management system loaded with some really cool features and it makes budgeting for online businesses a simple and fun task. It features help in tracking all the money spent and earned through various sources.

It synchronizes transactions automatically or manually and one can keep track of Checking, Investments, Savings and even PayPal Accounts all from one account.
It is a really good tool for people having online businesses of their own, because it helps in Planning and maintaining balance sheets along with tracking invoices and contacts via the in-built CRM System.

It makes it easy to keep track of expenditure by the ability to record and print out shopping lists and Bills. You can upload all the receipts in form of Excel or any other type of document. These bills can then be emailed or sent to mobile so that you are constantly updated. It has a really unique feature which calculates the mileage according to gas bills.

Budget Tracker has a very useful feature of Reports and Graphs. This feature helps in tracking the money visually with the help of charts. A number of inbuilt metrics are available like Budget vs Spent ( It shows two bars showing the budget and the actual amount spent).

Other than Budgeting, it has features of an Organizer. It can store Bills, Reminders and other important office dates on the Calendar. It has the ability to save New year Resolutions (a good feature) Tasks and contact information.

If all these features do not serve your purpose, Budget Tracker has the ability to create custom applications to track anything you want.
And to top it all, it is a free service and you have to pay only if you want more sub accounts and features.

In Totality, Budget Tracker is a good tool for professional bloggers and people who own a business online.

*This is a sponsored review. if you are interested in one , visit our Advertising Page

Contest is the easiest medium to attract readers to your blog. With a little investment, you get a lot in return like increase in readership, traffic and comments. But not all contest get the desired results.
Success of a contest is very important to get the maximum goods of it. Bloggers always wonder that what should they do to make their contest a success. Here are some points i have learned while organizing and sponsoring a number of contests.



1. Its all about the prizes

Prizes are the core of a contest. If your prizes suck, your contest will too! Prizes are like magnets for readers. Good ones attract a horde, Bad ones scare away even the few that come their way. So a lot depends on the type and the number of prizes you give.
It is always better to give out hard cash than any other service or product (even if it has the same worth) because your readers may or may not like the product your giving but they will always like the money(Actually it's all about the money :)).
Number of prizes also matters, if you have prizes to give to 10 different people then it increases their chances of winning and hence increases the participation.

2. Make it Super Easy

Contests having a lot of requirements is a sure way to repel people. Contests having few requirements and easy tasks have the best turnout. For example, it is a one minute job to subscribe to your blog, but is at least an hour job to write a whole review about your blog. So obviously more people are likely to subscribe than write a review.

3. Make it a regular feature

Organizing contests on a regular basis increases participation. After certain time period the contests become known to a bigger audience and hence one gets a huge turnout after 1 or 2 contests. And the best about this is that it also converts a number of casual readers into serious blog readers.

4. Random is the way to Go

This is a bit debatable, but in my opinion contests which select winners on a random basis get a better response than the ones that require people to be best at something (eg. Have the best review or the Top commentator). For the sole reason that via Random, anybody can win(i.e have equal chance of winning) but via the other methods, only the ones that are leading have higher chance to win.

5. Broadcast

The most important step is to let others know that you are organizing a contest. A simple way is to tweet about it, if you have a good following say about 5000 then atleast 80-200 people will get to know about and the figure may shoot up if there are further retweets.
Secondly you can post your contests in popular contest blogs i.e blogs that post about latest contests online. These blogs have a huge number of followers who are eager to participate in new and interesting contests.
Another time consuming but effective solution is to contact some authority bloggers. It is a bit tedious but if you contact a number of bloggers, you mind end up getting some reviews of the contest.

Have you organized a contest on your blog? What has been your experience?