3 Ebooks To Read This Summer

When you summon the power to move on, to continue on your path, to just not quit, magic things are happening. Almost 2 years ago I didn’t even imagined that I would come to know so many interesting persons through blogging. Today, I think I have a close blogging friend in every country I would like to travel to. At least. For instance. I personally know all the authors presented in this article. Many of them are blogging buddies, met through social media. Today is a day when I gladly take the time to celebrate some of their achievements.

Upgrade Reality – by Dirk de Bruin (Diggy)

I met Diggy online 2 years ago. Just like me, he just started to blog and I was simply stunned when he told me he was only 23. It certainly didn’t sound like a 23 years old to me. I started to follow his blog and we quickly become friends.

Last week he launched his first ebook, called Upgrade Reality. He also nick-named the ebook: “The no-nonsense guide to overcoming personal obstacles and getting the life of your dreams.” We’re dealing with 122 pages in which he’s talking about: achievement and success, productivity, confidence and self-esteem, business, body and mind, people and relationships. And many more.

The ebook is easy to read but it’s not an easy ebook. This is just a short part that got my attention:

“The point of this book was not so much to give you solutions for specific problems rather than to give you an awareness and a sense of consciousness that it is possible to overcome anything and achieve your goals.”

If I would have to share in a single paragraph what I got from this book, it would go like this: a fresh and honest perspective on self-improvement. I wonder how many of us would write a self-improvement ebook at 25. How many of us would be ready to share their frustrations – and the corresponding breakthroughs based on those frustrations at this age? Even if it would be only for that, I would recommend giving Diggy’s book a try.

It’s available for 27 USD by clicking here.

Follow Diggy on Twitter: @UpgradeReality or visit his blog: http://www.upgradereality.com.

The Personal Excellence Ebook – by Celestine Chua

I met Celes about the same time I met Diggy. To be honest, one of the most intriguing part about those two people was their geographical location: Diggy is from South Africa and Celes from Singapore. And yet, despite this huge distance that separates us (I’m from Romania, by the way) we still found a lot of common ground.

Celes launched her first product too a week ago: The Personal Excellence Book – with a name obviously coming from The Personal Excellence Blog, the brand name of Celestine outlet. It’s not an ebook. It’s a compendium. I think it’s the biggest ebook I have ever seen. More than 800 pages of self-improvement content. Most of this content is based on previously published articles at Celes’ blog, but I don’t see how this could be a problem. On the contrary.

If you just want to get a glimpse of what’s inside, here are the main sections: Purpose and Meanindg, Awareness and Growth, Passion and Dreams, Goals and Success, Emotional Mastery, People and Relationships, Maximizing Productivity. An interesting part is the one that contains inspirational quotes.

Main impression: a very powerful feeling of ambition and persistence. Beyond the regular articles (which are way above the average, rest assured about that), this ebook gave me a very strong vibration of determination. I think the main benefit of this ebook would be exactly this: a personal example of personal power and self-discipline.

The Personal Excellence Ebook is available for 24.95 USD by clicking here.

Follow Celestine Chua on Twitter: @CelestineChua or visit her blog: http://www.personalexcellence.co.

Evernote Essentials – by Brett Kelly

Back in the golden age of GTD, Brett Kelly was one of the distinct voices. I remember that his blog was one of the first I read on the topic. Time passed by and GTD is no longer an option for me. Instead, I created my own productivity system, called Assess – Decide – Do (and in case you wonder, yes, there’s an app for that). But I kept an eye on Brett’s work, keeping in touch via Twitter.

A few weeks ago he launched his first ebook, called Evernote Essentials. If you don’t know what Evernote is, I’ll let you know briefly that Evernote tries to become the Swiss Army knife of productivity. It’s a collecting, processing and storage tool. An all-in-one pack that really works. I’m a constant user myself so I just couldn’t miss Brett’s view on this one.

This would be a completely different read, but hopefully in a very balanced way. If you’re a long time user of Evernote, you will surely find some hidden gems. If you’re using Evernote for the first time, you will spend at least a few full days only exploring the possibilities. All in all, it’s an 80 pages geeky (and relaxing at the same time, in a surprising way) read.

The ebook is available for 25 USD by clicking here.

Follow Brett Kelly on Tiwtter: @inkedmn or visit his blog: http://nerdgap.com.

2 Free Bonuses

I know I told you about 3 ebooks, but I thought to give you some pointers for another 2 additional resources, from 2 of the very well respected bloggers I know. Those 2 are completely free, by the way.

How To Get 10.000 Subscribers To Your Blog – by Steven Aitchison

This is the first attempt of Steven to create a product in direct relationship with his readers expectations. The ebook is the result of a poll Steven ran on his blog, in which he asked his readers what were the topics they want him to write on. He gave at least 7 different choices but apparently the vast majority of people picked this one.

I think the title says it all, so if you’re a blogger, or you just fantasize about how to be a blogger, grab it, read it and don’t forget to breathe. You can thank me later.

The ebook it’s available for free at Steven’s blog: 10000 Subscribers.

Follow Steven on Twitter: @StevenAitchison or read his blog: http://www.StevenAitchison.co.uk/blog.

Binaural Basics – by Carl Harvey

I’m a long term fan of binaural beats, but only recently I started to use them on a constant basis. I also realized I was a little bit behind because there were some newcomers to the party since I didn’t touch base with this area. Iso-chronic files, for instance, were something completely new to me. So, I felt the need to update my background a bit and the most interesting resource that came to my attention was Carl Harvey’s blog binauralbeatsgeek.com.

You can get this ebook completely free if you just sign up for his newsletter (which, to be honest, it’s an incredible resource in itself, if you’re interested about this). Just go to http://www.binauralbeatsgeek.com, find the newsletter form and sign up. You get a 80 pages ebook giving you a very detailed description of various types of brainwave tones, of the scientific research on which they are based and the major differences between different types (iso-chronic versus binaural or monoaural).

Either you plan to deepen you knowledge (or practice, why not) on this fascinating field, Carl’s free ebook is a very useful resource.

Follow Carl Harvey on Twitter: @pdplanet or read his blog: http://www.binauralbeatgeek.com.

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Tools

That’s the last post from the series The First 6 Months Of Blogging and it will be about tools I use when I blog. Every activity is enhanced by tools and blogging is no exception to this. Today’s post will be rather technical or at least strictly focused on the technical part of the whole blogging process. If you came here directly, you may want to have a look at the previous posts of this series:

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing
The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Promotion
The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Money

Without further ado, let’s start.

iBlueSky

iBlueSky is a mind mapping application for iPhone. I already wrote a review for iBlueSky, so if you’re curious you can go directly to that page. I’m often stroke by some idea or thought in the middle of something: while I walk, while I exercise or while I’m reading something. Most of the time I have my phone with me and I use it to quickly capture that idea. Mind mapping is sometimes faster than linear writing and it let me empty my mind pretty quick. I guess around 30-40% of my blog posts are ideas sketched using iBlueSky.

Evernote

Another fantastic application I use for capturing ideas is Evernote. Evernote lets you capture text, audio or photos using your iPhone (or anything else if you’re using the desktop client). One neat thing about photos is that Evernote process them for writing recognition and made them searchable, which is extremely useful. Evernote is well deserving a post on itself, but until then, I will just emphasize on its versatility as a capture tool. The notes are stored remotely on Evernote dedicated servers and can be accessed with the Evernote desktop client for further tweaking. Most of the time I record voice notes using Evernote client for iPhone which I process every 2-3 days on my laptop.

MacJournal

I do all my writing using MacJournal. I already extensively wrote about MacJournal here, and if you’re interested in more details you can always check the post about power blogging with macjournal, GTS style. I use MacJournal not only for blogging but also for writing ebooks. There is a post which details my ebook writing setup, if you’re curious. MacJournal is also offered with a significant discount to DragosRoua.com users, so feel free to check the monthly MacJournal promotion.

Woopra

When it comes to analytics software, Woopra is one of my favorites. I’m a veteran of Google Analytics and although I highly appreciate the reports in Analytics, Woopra has several things that make it stand out. One of the most important would be real time alerts: you can set up as many visitor alerts as you can, based on a countless choice of parameters, and Woopra will alert you in real time whenever the criteria are met. I can see in real time my visitors from StumbleUpon, Twitter or Digg, for instance. There’s a 50.000 monthly impressions limits to any Woopra account right now, but even with 50.000 impressions is enough to get an idea about your blog traffic.

Thesis

I use thesis, a commercial framework for WordPress, or, in plain English, a commercial WordPress theme. The main reason for using thesis is its flexibility. Thesis features a hooks system  by which you can greatly enhance your blog theme without compromising future upgrades. I already wrote about how you can customize thesis with some simple hooks for Twitter, Digg or StumbleUpon. Thesis also features an affiliate program for those of you who are interested in promoting it, you can sign up here.

Blog Audit

This is a wordpress plugin I wrote several months ago in order to assess my blogging progress. This plugin lets you create blogging goals like the number of posts you intend to write per day, per week or per month, the expected number of comments per post or per day and the expected number of pingbacks per post. After setting up your goals, you can asssess your pogress by checking up Blog Audit main screen and see if you met or not your goals. Blog Audit is in a very early stage, at the version 0.1 beta, this is the reason why I haven’t yet officially launched, but it can be downloaded if you want to play with it from a separate page dedicated to blog audit.

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Those are my main 6 tools I used in my first 6 months of blogging. There were of course some other plugins or experiments in using other tools but none of them lasted more than several weeks.

Interesting enough, when I intended to write this post, I wanted a short list of applications, nothing complicated. Call it synchronicity, but today’s assignment at the “31 days to build a better blog challenge” is exactly that: write a list post.

I guess I just did