These tools and sites can be helpful for trying to build traffic and analyze your site's success, even if you aren't monetizing your blog quite yet. After setting up a free blog (Blogger or Wordpress), these tools help your blog become one of the most cost-effective ways earning online incomes these days.
1) Google Reader - a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google. Some of the features are:
* A front page that lets you see new items at a glance
* Import and export subscription lists as an OPML file
* Keyboard shortcuts for main functions
* Choice between list view or expanded view for item viewing (showing either just the story title or with a description, respectively)
* Automatic marking of items as read as they are scrolled past (expanded view only)
* Search in all feeds, across all updates from subscriptions[3]
* An easter egg that allows a special "Ninja!" skin to be accessed if the user inputs the Konami Code.
2) Feedburner.com - Sign up now at Feedburner.com for a free account. Feedburner is a management system for your blog's RSS feed and can bring your blog more traffic. Feedburner can find your feed address pretty easily just by typing in your blog's URL at the main page when you register. From there, Feedburner offers you a host of cool and free options to help people subscribe to your Blog's RSS feed. You can then provide links on your blog so that people can subscribe by email or a feed reader, and you can also design your own widgets to promote your blog headlines (for places like Myspace, etc). One other thing Feedburner will do is "Ping" various blog services, and it does this every 30 minutes. Ping lets these services know you have a new blog entry, and can potentially bring you traffic. If you aren't using Feedburner.com, head over and get signed up so you can benefit from its many great features.
3) zoundryraven.com - Zoundry Raven™ is a next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster. It's as easy to use as a word processor, plus we include simple tools to add links, tags, photos, music and video files, and more.
4) ScribeFire Blog Editor - an add-on of Firfox and 100% compatibled with Syncr Community / Wordpress Platform. It’s enables users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory directly through the Firefox browser.
5) Google Analytics - In general, signing up for a free Google account makes sense. You can set up a free Gmail address to use just for your blogging, sign up for Google Adsense program and use many more cool free tools. The Google Analytics tool helps to measure traffic stats for your blog or site, simply by inserting code into your blog template. Analytics then can present data on web search terms that brought your blog/site traffic and tell you daily/monthly visitors, time of visit and even the general geographic locations of your visitors. A powerful tool for measuring you blog's rise or fall in success.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
6) BlogRush Widget - This is new and in beta as of right now, but many of the best bloggers in the business are jumping on to use this tool already. It is so popular already that the site has had a temporary slowdown in terms of its features offered because they are working extra heard to improve the user experience. With BlogRush you register your blog and its details, choose the most appropriate category for it, and then insert a piece of code where you want the widget to appear on your blog. The widget (about 200 wide by 400 tall) will display 5 headlines from blogs with related subject matter to yours. Every time your blog gets a visitor, that widget counts it and then displays a recent headline from your blog on someone else's widget (on their blog). This makes sense in that you can capture new visitors, subscribers and readers for your blog.
Sign up now to get your BlogRush Widget installed:
http://www.blogrush.com/
7) MyBlogLog.com - An online community and collection of blogs on every topic imagineable. This is yet another way to bring traffic and also measure stats for your blog. My bloglog provides a snippet of code to insert into your blog and begin tracking traffic and visits. It also provides a cool widget to show the latest readers of your blog (if they are registered with MyBlogLog). You can upload a small icon to represent your blog and it will display if you visit other blogs using the widget. Use an interesting pic to capture attention and you may benefit when you read high traffic blogs. Also, join other blog communities online to start promoting your blog. MyBlogLog currently offers a 3 day free account, and then you are switched to a standard account, or can choose to pay $3 a month for more features. Just for the basic account in 3 days, it can be very worthwhile.
8) The Social Bookmark - Addthis.com - You may not be tremendously familiar with social media sites such as Digg.com, Del.ic.ious and Reddit, but they also can bring your blog new visitors, fans and subscribers. Installing this small bit of code will let you place a "Bookmark this" button on your blog. That button will allow readers to send your blog story to various social media sites should they want to save or share your headlines. Yet another potential way to bring in new readers. In addition, addthis offers a great button for RSS subscribing (first use Feedburner as mentioned above, but this can be a very clean button to use and allows your readers to subscribe by several popular feed readers).
9) Pingoat - a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog's popularity.
10) IceRocket - a search engine for blogs. It has a special focus on blogs, but search services include MySpace, video, news and image search. IceRocket’s top blog search tools include Link Tracker, Topics and Trends.
These are 10 definitely free and helpful additions for your blogging needs..Add each of those in today and keep blogging at it. They will help you measure your traffic, increase it and gain new fans and subscribers. That all translates to more money based upon how you choose to monetize your blog!
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