Al Carlton
The following Interview is with Al Carlton, one of the founders of Coolest-Gadegts, one of the fastest growing new tech blogs. Al also blogs about blogging at SelfMadeMinds.com.
1. Tell us a little about yourself and your blog.
Hi, I’m an ex software engineer and total gadget nut so when I was looking for a site idea gadgets was a natural option for me. I started Coolest Gadgets about 2 years ago and was able to leave the 9-5 rat race at the beginning of 2007 so I guess I’m now a fulltime blogger but I do own quite a few other sorts of sites as well.
2. How did you differentiate yourself and make your blog successful in such a crowded niche?
The gadget niche is a pretty friendly one with a lot of link love being passed around. The best way to differentiate yourself is to be the first to post about cool products, if you spend the time researching it ain’t too difficult
3. One of the most successful parts of your blog is the high RSS feed count. Got any tips on increasing feed readers?
It’s a nice count, we’ve got about 70K subscribers at the moment. My only tips would be make it prominent and update regularly with quality unique content. Oh and you can subscribe here 
4. Besides search engines, what are your major sources of traffic?
We normally get at least a thousand visitors a day to the site from the feed, we also attract a lot of organic back links which bring in traffic. I have documented a fair bit about traffic sources on my other blog Self Made Minds.
5. How did you go about getting some of the larger gadget blogs like Gizmodo to link to you?
I didn’t really, they just found our content and were good enough to link to us (thank you). I met a few of the writers of Gizmodo at CES and they’re pretty cool.
6. If you could go back and start over, what is one thing you would do differently?
I’d of started it earlier and also of considered the name a bit more as it cost me a chunk of change getting the non hyphenated version later on.
7. What is the #1 piece of advice for new bloggers that want to reach your level of success?
Just do it. Choose a subject you love and stick at it.
