25 Great Tools For Bloggers

25 Great Tools For Bloggers

Being a single mother, business woman, and a part time blogger I value each and every minute of every day. When it comes to writing it's not always easy to complete what you're working on as fast as you'd like, I found some tools that will help all of us save some time. Everyone should be able to appreciate a good time saver!

These tools include gadgets for iGoogle and Firefox add-ons that may be useful in saving time for Bloggers.

If you make the move from Google to iGoogle you'll find it has a Blogger's treasure trove of tools and applications.

iGoogle gadgets

1. Blogger Dashboard: Allows easy access to the Blogger Dashboard by inserting the ID of your blog extracting links from your group. This is a great way to edit your post, set up or edit your blog directly from your iGoogle.

2. Blogger Post: This one is similar to QuickPress available in Wordpress and it allows you to easily create your blog posts form iGoogle Home.

3. Photobucket Gadget: For uploading images to PhotoBucket. The features include:

Uploading pictures from your PC
Browsing your PhotoBucket albums
Getting the image URLs

all these features are available without access to Photobucket.com.

4. Google Reader: This one is great for research and following your Fave Blogs

5. Blogger Buzz: Delivers updates and new features from the Blogger Team.

Firefox Add-ons:

6. Zemanta: This add-on suggests tags, links, pictures, and articles in real-time. This is a huge time savor!

7. ScribeFire: This full featured blog editor integrates with your browser and lets you post directly to your blog.

8. Photobucket Uploader: Is a simple add-on which helps you upload images by right-clicking on an image displayed on any web page and upload it to their Photobucket account.

9. Blogger Toolbar: Is an amazing Blogger Toolbar, which includes a search box, links for direct access to all options available in Blogger DashBoard and "Blog This!"

10. Popular Posts: Highlights your most engaging content.

11. Google Analytics: (or Woopra for newer cool tool) Analyze and gain understanding of your Blog traffic.

12. Crazy Egg: Allows you to see what your visitors or clicking on

13. Outbrain: Allows you to get votes and recommendations from your users.

14. Soda Head or PollDaddy: With these you can engage and get feedback through polls.

15. Contact Form: Allows your visitors to contact you and give feedback.

16. Subscribe to Comments: Helps get more visitors coming back to your Blog.

17. SEOmoz Trifecta Tool: This one is cool, it compares your Blogs popularity with your competitors.

18. Turn on Google Site Search Analysis: Helps you find out what your visitors are looking for.

19. All in One SEO pack: This one is a must, it optimizes your Bog for search engines and helps you get more visits!

20. Share This: This one allows your visitors to share your great content with friends.

21. MyBlogLog: Allows you to add an instant community to your Blog.

22. MyAvatars: Allows your visitors to show their Avatars when they comment on your Blog.

23. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin: This nifty little plugin gives your first time visitors a personal message.

24. 4Q Survey Tool: Another great way to find out what your visitors think through surveys.

25. Google Website Optimizer Plugin: With this one you can start doing testing on your Blog to improve it.

I hope you find these tools useful. You can access the 25 Blogger tools from our blog.

How To Make Your SEO Blog Content Look Great

How To Make Your SEO Blog Content Look Great

If you are earning through your blogs or your blogs are a part of your business site, it is really important to Search Engine Optimize the content of your blog. This is to ensure better and higher traffic to your posts. Most people think that optimizing the content means making it very technical, not at all entertaining, stiff, and search engine oriented in order to get special favors from the search engines.

This thinking is not correct because such content will not be liked by the human readers and popularity of the post will automatically decrease. This is why it is important to optimize your posts in such a way that they are liked by search engines as well as the human readers. Here we'll see some easy ways in which your blog posts will appear nice and will get equal favor from search engines as well as the readers:

- Create interesting and entertaining posts that will attract the attention of the readers. As far as possible keep it entertaining so that readers bring out time for your posts and moreover if your readers will like you and your posts they will themselves come back to you and will also ask their friends and associates to read you. It will be a kind of branding for your posts.

- Keep the content neat and easy to read. It should not appear like a complex detective story that readers do not gain anything and keep thinking till the end of the post. Well if you happen to make the content so complex, perhaps nobody will reach the end and will feel like going away rather soon!  Therefore, keep the length short. Everybody is busy today and nobody can think of investing al their time just reading a post from a blog. It is best to make it 250 to 300 words long. This will attract the readers as they love to read less and gain more and this length is also fine to let the search engines know about your presence. Also try to maintain uniformity of the length in all your posts.

- When you're taking so much of pains to keep your posts short and sweet why making the headlines long and boring? Keep the headings/headlines smaller too.

- What kind of headline you choose also has impact on the performance of your blog-post. Sometimes you choose very commercial looking headlines like- "How to lose Weight in three day" or "Make a fortune doing online business", readers take such headlines as spam and don't try reading the posts with such headlines.

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