So you’re a blogger, but you’re a bit new to how to make your blog the success you want it to be. How do you grow your audience? Improve searchability? Find images you can legally use? Promote your blog? How do you connect with the right audience? Here’s 10 Top Tools to assist you with these tasks and more. In two months, using these tools, my blog has doubled in hits from 688 in June, 966 in July to over 190o so far this month. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.
1) http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ — Favicons are those little icons which appear to the left in browser address bars next to the sites. Adding one gives your blog better branding and this site is an easy way to make your own.
2) http://www.aweber.com/ Connecting with your audience and potential customers is vital. This site helps with email marketing to follow up.
3) http://www.stumbleupon.com/ a great site which people use for searches based on their interests which really feeds traffic to your blog. One person adding a post of mine here has done as much to grow my blog as anything else I’ve tried. And you can add your own posts, too.
4) www.twitter.com Tweeting your blog posts a couple times a day to Twitter and Facebook is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. The people you’ve build relationships with through Social Media are the first ones who’ll take interest and if they like what they read, they’ll spread the word.
5) www.goodreads.com A reader and author oriented social media network is the perfect place to set up your author page and link your blog posts in a feed. Readers will find you there and take interest in your blog posts and traffic will find your blog.
6) http://w.networkedblogs.com/ Available on its own site or through Facebook, this site links your blog to many others and help drive traffic to the registered blogs. Registering is free and the traffic begins as soon as you sign up. Also a great way to find blogs and bloggers to network with in supporting each other.
7) www.klout.com Rather than driving traffic, Klout helps you an analyze your impact on it. Is your message focused? Whom are you influencing? How well is your message being spread? A great tool for analyzing and focusing your efforts.
8 ) http://cliche.theinfo.org/ Run your posts through this handy search engine and avoid those pesky cliches. It searches your text and highlights any suspects. Very handy. You can do it bit by bit with your manuscript too, if you’d like.
9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources There are two kinds of learners: verbal and visual. Stimulate both by adding both text and images to your blog. This tool provides all kinds of free images you can use without worrying about cease and desist letters or other copyright concerns. Potentially invaluable. Not quite free but still invaluable is the http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ search engine where you can find images available for use as long as you abide by the creative commons license requirements.
10) http://www.google.com/webmasters/ An essential tool for those who care about helping people find their blog in searches. There’s a site map tool to help you correct meta data and other information as well. Set your blog up so it shows as a top entry in google searches related to your content and tags.
Well, there are my 10 top internet tools for improving your blog. Hope at least a few are new to you. What are your favorites? Be sure and share them in the comments. I’m always looking for more.
For what it’s worth…