Social Media
Top 5 Must Have Blogging Tools
posted by Jason Fleck @ January 5th, 2009
People ask me all the time what programs or services I use when it comes to blogging. So, here are my top 5 favs (which are in no particular order).
5.) WordPress — When starting a blog, you need to choose a platform that’s customizable enough to meet your needs yet robust enough to stand up to the constant changes of the internet. WordPress works like a charm. Everything from its slew of features to it’s easy-to-use interface makes choosing WordPress a no-brainer. I’ve been using it for the past four years and still love it.
4.) Google Reader — Now that your blog is online, you must start posting content. Starting your own directory of blogs is a great way to start. I read probably close to 100 blogs a day and I find my best inspiration comes from what I read. Reading keeps your brain working at full capacity and always gives you new content to write. Google Reader makes reading your favorite blogs a breeze. No longer do you have to load individual web sites. Just add every RSS feed you want to follow into your Google Reader account and Google takes care of the rest!
3.) ScribeFire — This program allows you to write blog posts without actually logging into your blog site. It runs as a toolbar in your browser and creates a new window within your browser when you venture onto your website. Pretty freakin’ cool if you ask me. The only way to feel its full awesomeness is to try it out. Oh - and as a bonus you can advertise through them or earn a little extra revenue by allowing others to advertise on your blog.
2.) Twitter — Now that you’re posting content on a regular basis — ahem, and you are posting regularly, right? - I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder: - where are your readers? Since your blog is fairly new, you’re probably not receiving a lot of search engine traffic and that large number of page impressions you’ve noticed is probably from either yourself or your close friends. Getting an audience quickly is where Twitter reigns supreme. Start following people on Twitter who have similar interests to you and soon you’ll realize a lot of those people will follow you back. Use Twitter to update your followers on your latest blog posts and if you have memorable content, those followers will retweet your blog post to their followers and so on creating an exponential growth of visitors to your site.
1.) Google Analytics — The tracking service your web host provides is — at best - alright. You can typically get statistics like page impressions and unique visitors, but not much past that. Google Analytics takes statistic tracking where it belongs. It’s by far the best site tracking program I’ve found to date. It tracks all your visitors, breaks them down into geographic locations, tells you what time of day they visited, which pages were visited, where they came from, if their visit resulted in a conversion, and so on. The list continues and the best part of this service is that it’s FREE.
Are there any others that should of made the list or do you disagree with any of my choices? Let me know by commenting below.
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6 Responses to “Top 5 Must Have Blogging Tools”
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January 6th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Twitter is great, as long as you’re aware that it–like every other online service–is not bullet-proof. The service was hacked in two different attacks this week. See . One attack took over Obama’s, Fox News’ and other high-profile accounts and sent fake messages from them. Online living/marketing is necessary, but be aware of the “bad guys” and how to mitigate the danger. Kudos to Twitter in admitting what happened right away and how they are handling it.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Jennifer –
I think Twitter handled the situation the best they could. It’s sad but phishing does exist and Twitter can’t prevent fraudulent people from obtaining the passwords of others. We all just have to remember to change our passwords on a regular basis and not use the same password for everything we do online.
Thanks for the comment.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
What about AdSense or something similar? What are your thoughts on using a blog as a source of revenue?
January 6th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
when it comes to adsense, it all depends on what you want your website to achieve. are you running a content site that’s not selling a product? well then it may be a good candidate for adsense. on the other hand, if you’re promoting your own blog, you don’t want to push people away from your site with annoying advertisements.
only a small number of people make large sums of money from adsense off their blog alone and honestly, people are becoming more oblivious to the adsense ads now more than ever. adsense is good for pocket change on personal blogs, but that’s about it.
to make good money off adsense you need to be driving millions of page views a day to the targeted advertisements. if you can do that, you’ll be making the big bucks.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
All those tools are great. Google reader is amazing. The biggest pet peeve of mine is USE SPELL CHECK. I’m pretty sure wordpress has it built in and many well-known blogs have posts that either haven’t been proofed or they just didn’t run spell check.
It’s pretty annoying.
January 13th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
In regards to spelling, Google has a built in spell checker on the Google Toolbar. Definitely worth the install. Checks your spelling on everything as long as it’s within your browser.