Blog publishing
Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools. Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though most of the services offer this for free, some of them require that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the benefits.
Blogger – Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger possible in many different situations. It is also integrated with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes monetization of your blog quick and easy.
TypePad – Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around. As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology but it caters more to the non-technical users.
WordPress.com – one of the newcomers in the online blogging services, WordPress gets its credibility from the success and popularity of the blogging engine that it uses -Wordpress.
Xanga – Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its competitors by offering excellent community features such as blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.
MSN Spaces – Although it is relatively a newcomer in the blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base, because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging option for the existing users.
Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging platforms.
Movable Type – Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform: flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control over your blog.
WordPress – WordPress is an increasingly popular open-source blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.
Radio Userland – Radio Userland, one of the earliest content management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.
Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a persistent Internet connection.
W. Bloggar and BlogJet – these are two of the best blog-posting tools in the market, and both are available for free. They support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.
Performancing for Firefox – a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your unpublished posts.
Blog Reading
RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this category.
My Yahoo – My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.
Google Reader – Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to put aggregated content to your blog.
Bloglines – Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using Bloglines.
Blog Search
Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.
Technorati – Technorati is one of the best blog search engine, feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for those who login) and many other nifty tools.
Sphere – one of the newcomers in blog search that came even after many other engines have folded down already. It promised to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a “sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what you’re currently reading.
Blogger’s Toolbox
A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger
Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics – these are three different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details, something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog, which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see. Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google, but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.
Akismet – Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam plugin for WordPress blogs. It is free for personal use.
Feedburner – Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.
The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if it wants to be able to make more effective blog contents.
By: Danny Wirken
About the Author:
There are many steps to creating a successful travel blog, and some steps are more difficult than others. Personality is key in becoming a successful travel blogger, and your personality needs to come out through your online blog. So, the first step to creating a successful travel blog is to establish your unique persona. There are some ways to give your blog some life, the first way being using your real name on posts, throughout your website, and on social networking sites. This way, your readers are more likely to connect with you and your blog.
After establishing your blog persona, you should make sure it’s easy for readers to contact you by making your contact information easily available throughout your site. It is also helpful to give people different ways to contact you, whether it be through e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, social networking sites keep people involved in your day. If you plan on being unable to access your computer or the internet for a period of time, let your readers know! You can use the Wordpress plugin WP-ContactForm or an out of office reply on your travel email account… Continue reading
Hitting the actual top of the blogs world involves lots of commitment from you which includes posting consistently, getting your market engaged in your blog, understanding when to express your opinion and being able to market yourself on line.These will be four of the “must do things” in order to obtain acknowledgement in the blogosphere but there are other elements of blogging which any time utilized, should really elevate your on-line brand and enable you to create those much sought after qualified prospects for your main business.We have posted five Multi level markeing blog site strategies which are often not addressed and just simply make sense when you analyze them. It really is about your voice and understand it properly, the belief aspect you’re after with your audience will follow rapidly which indicates prospects and income in your pocket.MLM Web Log Secrets1. Chat directly to your target market. What we indicate by this is your core target audience. Of course you’ll certainly have passing website visitors visiting your weblog however the “bread and butter” would be your mainstay audience. Help make them feel exclusive and while they will… Continue reading
So, how much traffic are you driving to your blog?… Now, in order to have a blog that produces a massive amount of traffic for your business and then turning that traffic into a massive amount of traffic, you need to promote it.
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
In order for the major search engines to know that your blog exists, you need to get it indexed by adding your RSS feed to your search engine accounts.
Install the All in One SEO Pack plugin and use it to add title, description and keywords for your blog, posts and pages.
In your back office, change the permalink settings for your blog posts from the url that includes the number to the one that includes the blog post title.
Where relevant, link your posts to your other blog posts as well as the other sites in your niche.
2. Blog Communities
Submit your blog to good blog communities. Google will index your blog as these communities have good search engine rankings. And you will start getting followers.
3. Blog Directories
Submit your blog to blog directories in the relevant category(ies). This is very powerful, it’s like being listed in the yellow… Continue reading
