This review is of Daniel Scocco’s website Daily Blogs Tips.  It will come as no great surprise that what this site does is give a daily tip about blogs.  Lesson number one from Daniel is that a website’s domain name can be helpful in telling a potential reader what the site is about.

A few years ago Daniel took the decision, after leaving college, that he did not want to work in the corporate world and he decided to work from home, in lovely Brazil, (and I envy him looking out of my office window on the cold, wet drizzly England of today).

He has gradually built up a range of internet businesses of which Daily Blogs Tips is one.  I know he has a Daily Writing Tips and is in the process of launching a Twitter product.

The Daily Blogs Tips site

A quick glance  shows a very simple, easy to navigate site.  A simple heading with obvious links to an rss feed, twitter and newsletter.

Down the left sidebar is a list of a reasonable number of blogging related categories.  A click on any of these links gives an impressive long, long, long list of articles.  Beneath the list is a button showing, boasting, how many RSS subscribers that site has, which is just under 35,000, plus an unobtrusive set of Google Adsense ads.

In the centre there is either the full post or on the home page a large section of the most recent article and underneath short excerpts from the previous seven.  All, of course, with a link to the full article.

The right hand side has a number of sponsored ads, plus a list of popular articles.

Simple, but good design

The layout is an example of good design.  It is easy to find your way around and more importantly it is aimed at bloggers.

They don’t want and don’t need anything too fancy.  They want to go to the information they want very quickly.

And they can.

The content

As with all blogs content is king.  Daniel has worked hard to bring useful hint a day, which is quite a hard task.  The variety is good, ranging from the technical, such as discussions in the change of Google’s page ranking system to discussions on how to be more productive, such as only looking at your emails once or twice a day, or limiting the hour of hours he was online.

In addition Daniel has regular sessions, Q and A,  where he takes a question or two  from his subscribers and answers it.  He also has an occasional session, called Blogger’s Face-off, a lot friendlier then it sounds, where two established bloggers are interviewed and compared.

The Blogger’s Face-off is particularly useful to newcomers to blogging as it gives you a variety of views,  lots of websites to review and lots of different business models to compare.

Daniel’s writing style

is informal, friendly and supportive.  The posts I particularly like are where he is being thoughtful, such as his his thoughts on personal productivity or when he analyses a new trend, such as Twitter.

He is also very good at challenging the reader to comment and under most of his articles there is a long list of contributions.

Business strategy

Daniel’s business is to produce quality and useful content targeting the blogger community, both newcomers and the experienced.

The advertisements on the site are there if you want them on a take it or leave it basis.  Daniel also mentions in his post developments, such as Problogger’s Darren Rowse’s 30 day, excellent ebook on setting up a blog.

There is no pressure, NO YOU MUST BUY this PRODUCT NOW!!!! type promotion.  It is discussed and if you want to go for it, then you, as an intelligent human being,  must decide for yourself.

This would be the same as a trade magazine mentioning a business course.

Conclusion

I like reading the daily tips.  I usually check over the site when I have my tea break, (I’m English and by law we have to drink tea).  There are useful hints which I gradually absorb into my work.

There are a couple of minor quibbles.  One or two of the guest posts were not quite as good as Daniel’s post.  They weren’t bad, just not quite as good.  And, and this is my preference, I would like slightly more images in the posts, though I accept that this would slow Daniel down.

The site is definitely worthwhile reading or putting onto your RSS reader.   I have learnt quite a lot from Daily Blogs Tips and I have been boosted by reading the articles.