I got goose bumps the other day and I was literally tossed back into the stone age when my iphone hung-up on me. The wretched device is a moody one; this wasn’t the first time this happened. Inspite of the bad experiences, I am too lazy to take a back-up of all the data in my iphone and you can well imagine the plight of my work day without that data — bank account information, contacts and their email ids, etc.

What might happen to us bloggers when technology decides to give up on us? Chaos. What did I learn from my iphone blackout that could be used for a safer and planned approach to blogging? Here are some starters:

Your hosting account, does it hold itself together?

Hosting account for your blog is the  spine that your entire enterprise rests on. Have you done enough research to figure out which hosting account you should pick up? One of the most important things  you must note before picking up an hosting account is that it should have a reputation for rock-solid reliability and a top-notch customer support that will scramble — like it’s some kind of war-alert — to help you and resolve your problems quicker than it took you to send that email or open a support  ticket. I know that you would have your own favourites. My favourite companies for a reliable hosting account are lunarpages, 1and1, and hostgator.

CMS, Email Hosting Solutions, Autoresponders, etc

When it comes to CMS (Content Management Systems), I won’t even hesitate to say that wordpress is simply the best — highly reliable, always comes with progressive upgrades and has a large community to support you ( Did you know that blogging elements is a part of such community?). I won’t waste words here to compare, eulogize or speculate.  Aweber, would be the first name that pops to my mind when talk about autoresponders come up; you do have options like ConstantContact and Vertical Response, though. Most of the hosting providers have robust email solutions and it would make sense to go with them.

Note: In case you are looking for a Plan B with regards to email, you may have all your email routed to gmail, or use Google’s Gmail package for corporates( a part of Google Apps).

Mobiles, Smart Phones, iphones and Berrys

For us who live and breathe on the Internet, smartphones — like Palm Pre, Blackberry and the iphone — are indispensible. I, for one, came to depend so much on my iphone that I can’t think of business or life beyond that phone. Now, all this dependence has a huge downisde to it. If your smart phone fails, you fail. Your business can be hit and it would take a long time to get all your contacts back.  I don’t even want to talk about what will happen if your smart phone gets stolen.So, what do you do?

• Make sure you back up all your data with your computer.
• Have another handset — probably a cheaper smart phone as  your alternative phone in case something happens to your primary phone.
• Don’t enter any sensitive information into your phone. You could actually use the good ol’ dairy way to note such information down (not that it is safer, but at least it won’t act cranky or get jinxed).

I would love to hear from you if you have had experiences such as these before.  My hosting account never gave up on me, but my phone did. How about you?

I have been writing for eons now and the frustrating part of the writing process is the lack of research material to base your writing on. It so happens that I can write pretty quick on articles or blog posts based on topics I am pretty familirar with but the issue pops its ugly head up when I have to write on subjects like pets, weddings and wood-working that  I have no idea about.

Just to give you a perspective, I can write about 5 articles on business — marketing, finance and general business technology topics — in an hour flat and about 3 articles on technology in an hour. That translates to 12 minutes per article for the former case and 20 minutes for the latter.

However, for topics like wood-working, pets and health I tend to take a whopping hour or more per article. This is an insane amount of time and my hourly worthy drops considerably due to that (not to mention the drop in money earned per hour and productivity).

So, how do we write on niches that we may not know much about but you do know you are being asked to (guest blogging) or when you operate on such a niche yourself?

The key to do that is a virtual library that facilitates your research and helps you achieve a lot more with much less time expended. One of the best libraries I’ve found is Questia which is aa huge repository of journal, articles, thousands of books scanned and presented for you to read, etc. Yet another place you could think of is highbeam which houses thosands and thousands of magazine articles and archives of some of the prominent magazines like the Wall Street, The Economist, and many more.

A cool place I did find for a sort of a dashboard for expedited research across topics of popular interest is CEOexpress – it houses a simple layout which resembles a portal and provides you some quick links to resources categoried into different topics.

Needless to say, there is an endless list of options available for you to do research from. Pick your niche and find the best virtual library you can find. It’s amazing how much time you could save ( and hence more money you could earn and more productive you could get) just by making this decision today.