50 Blog Tools to Help You Blogging

Blogging is more than just posting your views, thought, opinion, and share. There are many specialized tools available on the Internet that can enhance your website to a outstanding extent and the only way to know what is going to work to your profits is to giving them try out! Here is a list of 50 useful blogging tools that will help you in picking up your choice.

Part 1 - Let's kick off with 'Hosting, DNS and domainname'

1. Domainscour: This is a website which helps you to find all the available domains in your niche within a span of few seconds. Powered by web 2.0.

2. MyIPneighbours: Snooping is always fun, right? This IP search facilitates in finding out how many other websites your 'shared host' is hosting! This information if handled appropriately can be useful in web analytics and SEO.

3. WhoIshostingthis: A simple tool that enables you to find out the hosting company behind any website! Looking for a change in website hosting?
4. You Get Signal: This is a collection of various network tools and has in store, some of the best tools in the internet community. A treasure of useful resources!

Part 2 - Design and Color

5. GenFavIcon: An online tool that lets you select or create your own Favicons - Unique little icons that are displayed alongside a site's name in the address bars of browsers.

6. Color Palette generator: You want similar colors (if not the same) like the ones in that particular image? Well, just type the URL of that image and you are gifted with a color palette, matching it. Simply wow! Isn't it?

7. Color Scheme Generator 2: The tool basically generates a wide range of color schemes using the best optical impression

8. Font Tester: The right tool to find out the right style/font/size/color for your website has arrived! It's a free online font comparison tool that does almost everything in the world of fonts.

9. Screen Size Tester: Unless you want your website to look distorted in different available browsers, you better check out this tool - it will definitely make your job a lot easier!

Part 3 - Programming and coding

10. Grid: The fundamental of layouts is grids. 'Grid' is a manipulative and intuitive tool that facilitates the overlaying of a layout for any grid-based website.

11. CSS Superdouche: A superb tool that sensibly reduces the complex and unwanted parts of your CSS code to trimmed ones. You can call it the 'designer of code'!

12. Centricle: You've done the finest coding possible for your website! Great! But one simple question - Is your CSS file compatible with all the browsers? Get your answers with this tool.

Part 4 - Web forms and its guild!

13. WuFoo: It's an innovative HTML form builder that aids you in creating some of the most beautiful forms, invitations and surveys.

14. Web Form Factory: Standing true to its name, Web form factory is an open source generator of web forms. It automatically generates the much needed backend code to hold a particular form to a database.

15. PHP form: Stop drowning your heads into 'Dummies for PHP' and related books! It just takes three simple steps with this tool, to create a PHP form!

Part 5 - Content!

16. Orangoo spell check: It's an online spell checker, a kind of free proof-reader! The results are very accurate and you don't even need to download any kind of software or toolbar.

17. TheCompleteWord: Creative minds do need rest or maybe some new sources? Scourge through millions of articles here by just typing the necessary keywords!
18. WorldLingo: Just the way you don't understand the language of people at the other end of the planet, similarly they don't understand yours! Find the perfect translation of your language in English through this tool

Part 6 - Social Bookmarking

19. AddThis: This tool spreads your website links throughout the internet at virus-like speed (although it's not considered spam!) and makes it easier for people to bookmark your 'darling' and share it with others.

20. Social Marker: The promotion of your website is bound to take a huge leap with this tool in your kitty. This website offers free service through promotion and social bookmarking of your website. It saves a lot of your time and money for the PR!

Part 7 - Logos and more

21. Logo generator: It has a self-explanatory name! Generates lovely Web 2.0 logos for your website.

22. Buttonator: This tool gives the liberty of creating, dragging and dropping buttons to your website (web 2.0 compatible).

23. MyCoolButton: Creates marvelous web 2.0 buttons! It's renowned for its user-friendliness and a host of options to help.

24. StripeDesigner: Create stripes - the easy way. These little things do add on to the Web 2.0 look.

25. Spiffy corners: Create rounded corners with the HTML and CSS provided by the tool, without the usage of some heavy images and JavaScript (this one's heavy on brains, not size!).

26. Tartan Maker: If you aren't the 'stripes' types, then create and use 'tartans' for your background. Try this tool!

Part 8 - SEO and marketing

27. URL trends: UrlTrends is a service that helps you track your marketing, perform competitive intelligence and get the data you need to make better domain purchases.

28. Word-tracker: "You enter a keyword and you get back hundreds of related keywords and an approximate of their daily search volume"- This isn't fiction, it's the functioning of this tool!

29. Crawl test: The search engine crawling issues of your website will be taken to task from now on. This tool happens to be a crawling issue diagnose specialist.

30. SiteUptime: A monitoring service for your website that notifies you via SMS or email in cases of your website is unavailable.

31. HostTracker: Register to this service and it'll set some monitoring points, which will be monitored carefully in case of errors and other problems in your website.

32. OnlineMetatag: Good Meta tags will help you in fetching a good rank in a search engine. This tool generates different Meta tags for various search engines.

Part 9 - Rankings!

33. Blog Juice: Blog Juice Calculator Determine the "blog juice" for your blog using this tool from Text-Link-Ads and compare with various other blogs from the blogosphere. Juice is determined from your Bloglines subscription, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and inbound links in Technorati.

34. DNScoop: How much is your domain name worth? Use dnScoop to check and verify before you buy or sell, then discuss buy and sell domain names in the dnscoop forums.

35. Xinu: Check PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more.

36. Website grader: A free SEO tool from HubSpot that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website. Tips on how to improve your existing website are also suggested by this tool.

37. Page Strength: Like its name, the tool weighs a site's or more commonly the page's visibility and relative importance.

38. PR checker: By adding our Page Rank Checker tool (page rank icon) to your site you can instantly and easily check the rank (check PR) of all your web site pages right on your web site.

39. Test Everything: CSS validators, HTML validators, web proxies, SEO tools, image tools and more - just check everything about your website here!

40. Popuri.us: It's an indicator of the 'popularity quotient' of a link. A link's popularity is checked on the basis of its ranking, social bookmarking, blogs and other factors.

Part 10 - Stats and Feedback

41. Google analytics: A gem of an analytical tool from Google. Forget the mundane information, it even prompts you on where your visitors come from and their interaction in the website too.

42. WebAGogo: A free online tool to test the quality of a website in tandem to its own set of established/relative parameters.

43. Piwik: It's an 'open-source' web analytics software revealing some juicy and interesting information/reports of your website.

44. PHPmyvisites: An open source software for audience measurements, tracking of visitors and web statistics. One of the powerful and accurate in vogue!

Part 11 - Miscellaneous

45. TagCloud generator: It generates web 2.0 tag clouds corresponding to the keywords on your website.

46. GickR: The online tool lets you create GIF animations. It's free and instant.

47. Searchamabob: This tool facilitates your website visitors to search using Google or any other search engine that's added along to this cool widget.

48. XML sitemaps: Placing this tool will help search engine crawlers to get to your website and track the changes in your pages more easily.

49. ShrinkTheWeb: It's a website thumbnail provider, in fact the most powerful one.

50. Website ribbon: Create a unique ribbon for your website and lets you add it to your website instantly. It builds on the 'brand' image of your website and makes it look cooler than ever!

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How to Use Blog Commenting to Drive Traffic to Your Website-Blog

Blog commenting is an excellent marketing tool to drive traffic to your online presence - whether it is a website or a blog. But, it must be done in a planned-out manner. Following are three things to keep in mind when you use blog commenting to drive traffic to your website/blog.

i) Choose Blogs in Your Niche: Select a list of blogs in your niche that you want to start commenting on. Take the time to research and gather a list of 10, 15 or 20 that you can regularly interact with

It's important to choose relevant blogs because they will not just drive traffic, but they will drive relevant traffic. And, this is what blog marketing is all about. For example, if you're a scientific writer, you'd hang out (eg, post comments to) those kinds of blogs.

How does blog commenting lead to sales? In short, referrals, builds name brand recognition and builds a body of work you can show to potential clients (especially if blog posting is one of your services as a freelance writer).

ii) Target Well-Ranked Blogs: The main reason to comment is to get traffic. Where are you going to find traffic? At well-ranked blogs.

If you have problems trying ot figure out which blogs are getting good traffic, use the following tech tools: Alexa.com, Technorati.com, Page Rank and Statbrain.com Check the status of each blog you're thinking of using on each of these and you'll soon find yourself with a list of highly ranked blogs to work with.

iii) Leave Meaningful Comments: This is perhaps the most important tips. Many blog commentors in essence spam other blogs. And increasingly, spam is being thought of not just as some weirdo posting Viagra ads, but as those posts that add nothing to the conversation at hand, eg "Nice post! Visit my site at thisismysite.com"

One of the best posts I've ever read on the subject of blog commenting is by Jennifer, the blogger at CatalystBlogger.blogspot.com The title of that post Don't Be a Comment Whore: Attract Traffic, Not Annoyance (Google that exact title).

In it, she lays out proper blog commenting etiquette. She sums up the post by writing, "Leaving comments isn't just about getting your link up in as many places as possible. It's also about introducing yourself to a community. Make sure you pick the right community, put your best foot forward, and avoid being promotional. Think quality rather than quantity, and grow your audience over time--and you're sure to see success."

Couldn't have said it better myself. Blog commenting is an excellent blog marketing tool - if it's used correctly.

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How to Increase Blog Traffic

These days everyone has a blog but most of them float unread out on the internet cloud. So the big question I keep hearing is how do I get more traffic to my blog? The answer is simple, and if you are willing to put in a little time you can do it for free as well.

Blogs are more or less just like any other website out there. Sure they are designed to make it easy for bloggers to post news, images, and video without much computer savvy but in reality they are just user friendly mini-websites. So now that you have one you want to get more traffic to it so here's a few of the free and basic first steps to increasing your blogs traffic.

#1 Blog About Something People Care About

Seriously - if nobody cares about your blog because it's just random talk about what you ate that morning you aren't going to pick up a lot of traffic. However, regardless of how weird your interests may be someone out there also cares about them. So this one is an easy - just blog about something that someone else can relate to.

#2 Submit Your Blog to Directories

This one is also easy but takes a bit of time. There are a lot of free services out there where you can submit your blog to. They are basically like giant phonebooks for blogs and once you add your blog to their service more people will be able to find your blog. You'll be able to categorize your blog and many of them let you use your own "tags" which are basically key words. Just jump on your favorite search engine and type in something like "free blog submission" and you'll find lots of sites which can help you out.

#3 Have a Blogroll

Blogs often have a list of links somewhere that lists the other blogs or websites that are related or that the blogger enjoys visiting. If you want to help increase traffic find some sites that will trade you a link on their blog for one on yours. Don't get too carried away with this though as you can actually lose traffic if you abuse this. This is where you start to get into the internet's deeper and more inner workings so for brevity we'll just leave it with this: you don't want more than about 100 links on your front page or you might actually decrease your chance for big traffic.

#4 Submit Your Blog to Feedreaders

Most blog services have the ability to create a "feed". You might hear people talking about RSS, syndication, or feedreaders. Basically what this means is each blog creates a list of what posts have been added to it much like headlines for a newspaper. You can find sites out there like the Blog Directories which you can submit your blog feed or RSS to. If you do this they'll pick up your headlines and people can then dig through them for interesting blogs. The best part about these feed systems is that most continue to check your blog for updates so once you've submitted it you can just reap the benefits!

#5 Blog Often and When Appropriate

One mistake some people make with blogging is blogging when they have nothing useful to say just to get another "post" on their blog. If you are doing this then you are going to have a hard time making fans who are interested in saving your page in their favorites or bookmarks. However, you want to often update your blog. If you don't post regularly then you'll bore your fans. Blog often, but make sure you're blogging something of interest.

#6 Make Sure Your Blog Has a Theme

If you're blog is all over the place you'll have a hard time putting together a fan base. You may get a few hits here and there by random people but you want to build a community. To do that you'll probably want to pick a few categories you're going to post about and stick with them. If you are the type who likes to make random posts sometimes you could just make a category called Random Thoughts or something along those lines but again be careful.

#7 Pingbacks and Trackbacks

If you want people to visit your blog then visit other blogs that are related to yours and get involved. You'll find that people often leave comments with links back to their own blog or another related blog in the comments. These are part of the pingback/trackback system which can be a lot of fun and also get you a lot of additional traffic. Avoid spamming though as you'll just irritate potential friends and you'll likely have your comments removed and lose your comment ability.

#8 Appearance Matters

Every blog service offers templates which can make your blog look unique or have a style you feel fits. Often you can also customize your blog with custom graphics and tinker with the layout. While this can really help your blog be careful that you aren't making it irritating to potential readers. Not many people want to come to a blog that hurts their eyes to look at or which has loud music they don't like.

There you go, 8 simple tips on how to increase your blog traffic. The last thing to remember is that building up your blog traffic is going to take time. Depending on the potential number of people interested in your topics and your other blogging related skills it could take weeks and even more likely months to really get things going. If you blog it, they will come!

Happy blogging :)
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Traffic to Blog - 5 Fun and Fast Ways to Drive Traffic to a New Blog Within 24 Hours

Many blog owners struggle with getting traffic to their blog, especially when their blog is brand new. Generating visitor traffic to your blog takes a little effort on your part but thankfully modern technology is now making that task a lot easier.

The most common blogging platforms online are Blogger, Wordpress and installing your own WP blog on your domain. It's possible to get traffic to your blog on its first day of launch once you put these tips into practice.

I created a new blog in a health niche on 17 September 2008. Within 24 hours of creating that blog I generated enough traffic to this weblog to award me with a sale.

Let me give you an example of what I do when I start a new blog.

(1) RSS Feed Syndication

Every blog has an RSS feed. By submitting your RSS feeds to the most popular feed services online you can get very quick traffic to your site, particularly if you are focusing on keywords with lower competition in the search engines.

All that you need to do is submit your feed url to a range of services (these are free) as soon as your site is live.

The ones in particular that I highly recommend are:

1. Feedage.com
2. Feedagg.com
3. Feedraider.com
4. Feedfury.com
5. Feedsubmitter.com
6. Feedest.com
7. Search4rss.com

Now when you submit your rss url to these services it's absolutely critical that you carefully select the right tags to include with the submission. It is these tags that will help drive traffic to y our website. The best tags to use are the ones that are you targeting your site about -- plus what you believe your search engine visitors will put in the search box in order to find out what you're offering.

(2) Social Bookmarking Your Blog

Social bookmarking involves bookmarking your blog, what it's about and what it has to offer at the most popular social bookmarking sites online.

It is important not to overuse this method or to spam these sites.

Simply do a short post explaining why you believe this site or product will interest other people on these sites.

Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are:

• Digg.com
• YahooBuzz
• Technorati.com
• Del.icio.us
• Propeller
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Fark
• MyBlogLog

(3) Social Networking

Social networking is slightly different. Probably the most popular social networking site is Facebook. When you create an account at Facebook or other social networking sites like Myspace you can connect with other people online and create friendships and networks with these people related to your niche.

It is through these networks and relationships that you can then promote your sites or products (although VERY subtly).

Some of the more popular social networking groups are:

1. FaceBook
2. MySpace
3. Classmates Online
4. MSN Groups
5. Yahoo Groups
6. Xanga

(4) Google AdWords

Paying for traffic from Google isn't for the faint hearted. Done incorrectly you could achieve no sales at the end of the week but a Google AdWords bill of hundreds of dollars. However, done correctly you can actually get in front of surfers within about 15 minutes of writing your ads.

(5) Video Marketing

Millions of videos are watched daily by surfers all over the world. Video marketing is really the next wave of internet marketing online. By creating video clips or short video articles and then linking to your url in the video and also in the description box of the video sites you can get high rankings very quickly and drive traffic to your blog fast, provided the quality of your content is good.

Here are some of the easier to use video sharing sites online:

1. YouTube
2. Blip
3. VideoEgg
4. DailyMotion
5. GoogleVideo
6. AOL
7. Eyespot

Conclusion

Many people online choose to put in as little effort as possible into creating blogs and promoting them.

However, by incorporating some of these simple but more advanced traffic generating methods it is possible to drive targetted traffic to your site within 24 hours of its creation.

Whether you actually make sales after this point is entirely dependent on the feel of your blog, your site layout, the ease of navigation, the quality of the content and the kind of Plugins being used to entice your readers to stay on your blog longer.

:)
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Blogs - 4 Steps to Write a Winning Post

Blog posts are a great way to bring traffic to your web site. If your blog offers interesting and useful information to the visitors and is updated over regular intervals of time, chances are high that people will visit it. So, to make the most of this tool, it is important to know what makes a blog post interesting and attractive to the visitors.

The following are some of the factors that will help you to write a winning blog post:

• Catchy titles: Your blog should use titles effectively. A catchy and search engine friendly title goes a long way in making your blog work. It also helps readers scan your post quickly. If your title catches their fancy, they will even read what you have written in your post.
• Use bullets and bold fonts to highlight matters: Most people scan information on the net rather that reading the full matter. So, it is important to use techniques to get their attention quickly. Using bullets, bold fonts and highlighters can be used in moderation to draw attention to the important aspects of your blog post.
• Original content: People love to read content that echoes their feelings and thoughts, is unique in its approach and has a creative and fresh feel. Writing the same thing that everyone else is writing in the same way as others will almost ensure of your content being largely ignored. So, try to bring your unique approach to oft-repeated facts and try to write about something new and in vogue.
• Use of images: Images are a powerful medium that can communicate in ways, which words cannot. Try to include some visual elements in your blog that will provide another point of interest to your readers. It is not necessary to use images in every post but whenever you have the chance of using one, do it but ensure that the images are in tune with what your content wants to convey.

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5 Top Tips For Creating Blog Revenue

Creating blog revenue is simply a matter of properly setting up your blog with various income producing products and programs, and then getting as many new and repeat visitors as possible to view your pages on a consistent basis.

So here are five easy ways for you to begin generating a blog revenue.

1. Google Adsense

The first thing I want to talk about is setting up your blog to offer the Google Adsense affiliate program.

If you have a blogger.com blog, putting Adsense on to it is very easy. If you are not a member of the Google Adsense program you will need to apply for it first. Just go to the Google homepage, click on the advertising programs link (bottom left) and follow the instructions for setting up Adsense.

Once you are approved you can add different block sizes of ads to each post just by clicking on a couple of buttons. This is something you will want to play with in your blogger.com account when you are setting up your blog and when you are posting various articles to it.

If you use another form of blogging platform, such as WordPress.com, there are plug-ins that can be installed that will instantly add Google Adsense ads to various locations on your blog including your header, sidebar, footer, and in the body of each post.

The Adsense revenue that you earn is paid each time a visitor clicks on one of your ads. This can range from a few cents per click to as high as several dollars per click depending on your niche.

Over the course of a month this passive form of revenue can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

2. Banners

Another good way to make money with your blog is to add banners to various affiliate programs that you can join for free.

The key here is to join affiliate programs that match the theme of your blog. For example, do not put cooking banners on a music blog.

You can join affiliate programs and be assigned an ID number that is coded in each banner that you place on your blog. Each time someone clicks on one of those they are taken to your affiliate webpage, where if they make a purchase you earn a commission.

Banners are great to add to your blog because they add color and excitement as well as give you another form of income when you make a sale.

3. Hyperlink Keywords

A third way to make money blogging is to hyperlink keyword phrases in each blog post back to a sales letter or affiliate page where you are offering a product.

As you get better at doing this you can even upload pictures and hyperlink those pictures back to sales pages.

Clickbank.com is a great place to find affiliate products to sell relating to almost any blog article.

It's the largest information e-book affiliate program in the world and once you become a Clickbank affiliate you will have access to thousands of potential products that can earn you money on each sale.

4. Sell Advertising Space

Number four in my blog revenue tips is selling text link advertising to other bloggers or websites.

If you do not want to, or don't have time to find people to sell to individually you can investigate companies such as Text Link Brokers and make money selling text links through them.

Your blog will need to be established before you can start offering this, as potential advertisers will only be willing to pay good money if their ads are going to be seen by a large amount of traffic.

5. Build That List

The final way I want to discuss is building an opt in e-mail list.

By adding a sign-up form to your homepage, and every single other page, you can capture names and e-mail addresses for future follow-ups in an auto responder.

This is a very smart way to make money from your blog because it gives you a way to follow-up with visitors in the future that you would not otherwise have.

You will also hear many experienced marketers keep saying 'the money is in the list' and it is estimated that each person on your list should make you, on average, $1 per month so, build your build your list up to 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 and you can see what potential this technique offers!

Ok, so there you have it, my five favorite ways to create blog revenue.

There are many, many more ways to make money with your blog, and as you begin to develop yours it is just a case of implementing the ones with which you are most comfortable.

My advice is to have at least 5 or 6 different income streams set up so that if there are any problems with one of them it's not going to hugely impact your overall blog revenue.

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