Posts Tagged ‘tools’
5 Handy Social Media Monitoring Tools for Bloggers
As a blogger, you’ll have to wear many hats. Spending time to plan your future posts, optimizing your website for the search engines, taking time to promote your posts, and engaging with your visitors are just a few things you will have to do. If you do a lot of these things by yourself, you are going to miss things. You don’t want to miss the coverage your blog gets (and the latest developments in your niche) in the social media. All bloggers should take time to monitor top social sites for story leads, things said about their brands, and everything in between. Thankfully, you won’t have to rely on the good old way of tracking things to keep up. There are many tools that can save you time tracking the social media. Here are 5 tracking tools to get you started:
Tweetwally: a very helpful tool that enables you to keep an eye out for topics that are important to you on Twitter. Pulls everything together and saves you time.
Twittorati: the name should ring a bell. This is Twitter meets Technorati. Bloggers can use this tool to find out about highly popular links. When you are stuck and have no idea what to write about, a trip to this site can help.
Tweetvisor: Tweetvisor is a powerful web-based solution that lets you manage your Twitter account more effectively. It makes it easy to manage your Twitter lists, gain more followers, keep track of what others are saying on Twitter, and even schedule future tweets.
5 Ways To Start an Online Shop For Your Blog
Many top bloggers have their own online shops selling affiliate products and their own branded items. You do not necessarily have to own what you sell to start a shop for your website. Let’s say you are an iPhone blogger. You can add a store to your website just to promote the best iPhone products and accessories. The same approach can be used for other types of blogs as well. Needless to say, those hot-shot bloggers do sell their branded t-shirts, mugs, and everything in between.
You don’t have to be a genius or very well-funded to start your own online shop. There are plenty of solutions that let you host your own store. All you need is a decent web host and a domain. Sounds too difficult? These 5 websites let you start your own online shop in a flash:
highwire: a complete e-commerce solution that gives you the tools to manage your orders and customers and even market your business. Gives you control over HTML and CSS too.
Shopify: a very flexible solution that creates your web store quickly. It has plenty of themes for you to choose from to customize your online shop. It offers SSL, custom domains, discounts, and much more.
aStore: Amazon aStore gives you everything you need to start selling Amazon products (pick the products you want to sell). It is pretty flexible and can be added to your existing websites if you know your way around this product. Read more »
5 Analytics Tools You May Have Missed
When people talk about Analytics software, many think about Google Analytics or Compete.com. In reality, there are plenty of less known analytical web apps that can help you find out more about your blog, social profiles, and much more. In most cases you won’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on them.
If you have tried Google Analytics and Woopra in the past and want to try other tools to gather even more knowledge about your visitors, these 5 analytics web tools are worth a try:
Klout: a wonderful Twitter analytics tool that shows you what you have been doing wrong and helps you figure out things you need to do to take your Twitter strategy to the next level.
Mouseflow: records your visitors and shows you how they interact with certain elements on your website. Great tool if you are planning to set up a landing page or optimize an existing one.
Analyze Your Twitter Account with Klout
I don’t know about you, but I have been on Twitter for a couple of years now. In these years, I have managed to meet a lot of great people online and learn from them. No matter how successful you are in a channel, you want to take the steps necessary to get more out of your efforts. In the case of Twitter, it’s always nice to have a tool that shows you what you need to do to improve your Twitter strategy. Klout is such a tool. It helps you figure out what areas you need to focus on to take your Twitter game to the next level.
Even before using Klout, I knew what areas I needed to work on to get more out of Twitter. I spend a lot of my time reading articles and going through other people’s works on a daily basis. I have been more of a listener on Twitter, learning from what others have been sharing and looking for ideas for my new projects. Klout can easily figure that out. It not only tells you what topics you have been focusing on, it even identifies flaws in your strategy.
Keep Track of Your Sleep with Yawnlog
When you are young, it’s easy to go overboard with your blogging efforts and get less sleep than your body needs without paying for it the day after. I have not met a serious blogger who didn’t wish he/she had a few more hours each day to get things done more properly. Some bloggers find those extra hours by cutting their sleep time. If your body can take it, more power to you. But research has shown time and time again that those who do not get enough sleep each night fail to reach the optimal performance level the day after. You don’t want to sleep-walk your way through your research or writing time, now do you?
Tons of sleep aid devices are available on the market. You can spend hundreds of dollars on these devices. But the first step is to figure out whether you have a problem. Yawnlog is just the tool for that. It helps you keep track of your sleep hours and the quality of your sleep. After using it for a while, you can clearly see whether you need to take drastic measures.
How To Create a Killer Resource Section for Your Blog
Building your blog into a killer authority website in your niche does take a lot of time. For starters, you are going to have master the art of content creation. Content was king 10 years ago, and it’s still king. But there is more to top blogs than just content. When you get close to the very top, every little detail can make a difference. At the end of the day, your visitors have a limited amount of time and so many blogs to go through. They usually tend to go to the website that provides them with the best value for their time.
One of the best ways to provide value to your readers is by “pimping” your blog’s resource section. If you are going to have a resource section on your blog, you may as well take the time to provide real value to your readers through it. Many new bloggers slap a “resources box” in their sidebar and add all kinds of links to it without thinking about the merits of those links. Your resource section should either guide your visitors to places to can find more information about your niche or introduce them to products and services that they may find useful. So it does take a bit of time to put on a decent resource center on your blog.
If you have no clue what to put in your blog’s resources, here are 7 things you may want to consider adding to your blog:
- Products That You Would Recommend: these can be affiliate products. But you want to make sure these products are of high quality and can come in handy for your readers. For instance, if you are blogging about the art of making money online, you can direct people to products that can help them achieve that goal. Just make sure you know exactly what you are referring people to.
- Tools: everybody loves free tools. If you have taken the time and effort to create a free tool section for your readers, your resource section is a great place to add a link to your free tools. You can also refer people to paid tools if you find those tools to be worth the money. Read more »
4 Best Twitter Tools To Develop Blogging Ideas
Filed under: Blogging Tips, Social Media Marketing | View Comments
Twitter is a goldmine. Every expert has been saying that for months. The people on Twitter can’t stop generating and sharing content. That’s only good news for us bloggers. From time to time, you may find yourself struggling to come up with new things to write about on your blog. That’s where Twitter comes in. By looking at what people are talking about on Twitter and what their needs may be, you can easily develop hundreds of new ideas for your future blog posts.
You can always use Twitter Search to search through what people are discussing on Twitter. But that shouldn’t be the only tool you use. In fact, these 4 tools are much more powerful and can give you more ideas:
Topsy: it’s quickly replacing Google for me. It makes it so easy to find new stories and hot topics people are talking about. You can always use the trends to figure out what’s hot. Pretty straight forward to use.
Tweetmeme: another powerful tool that can help you figure out what stories are currently hot on Twitter. You can think of it as Digg for tweets. Read more »
Make Your Blog Social Media Friendy with Boostpost
In the past few weeks, I have talked about how you can optimize your blog for the search engines and making it future proof. One of the best ways to do that is by optimizing your blog for the social media by giving your readers the option to share your content on top social networking website. Whether you are writing a technical blog or one about your own life, people may find your posts interesting enough to want to share them on Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Boostpost is a cool handy service that lets you give you users the option to do just that.
As long as you are targeting one of the more popular social media sites on the web, Boostpost should have you covered. It comes with a set of attractive button widgets that you can install on your blog to let your users share your stories and get you more exposure in the long run. Read more »
Find a Blog Domain with Nomaine
These days it’s very tough to find a blog domain that is easy to remember and brandable. Most straight forward domains seem to have been taken. After all, there are a lot of domainers out there that take pleasure in registering all kinds of domains only to sell them for huge profits in a short period of time. But there are tools out there that can help you find those hidden gems of domains that are still available. Nomaine is one of those tools. It’s a theme-based domain finder engine that can find you a decent domain (depending on your niche).
Nomaine is very easy to use. All you have to do is choose from the selection of themes available, define min and max limits for your domain and add your prefix and suffix words to optimize your results. The engine will go to work for you and searches for domains that are still available for pick up. The advantage of using this tool is that it can find you a general domain that applies to your niche. Keyword-based engines can be frustrating to work with and are often not that effective. With this tool, you can save time and find domain names that usually wouldn’t find with other tools.
5 Free Tools To Schedule Tweets Ahead of Time
I am personally not a big fan of automating Twitter tasks. Not the ones that don’t need to be automated (e.g. adding friends, tweeting, …). But sometimes, you’ll need to wait before you can tweet something. Sometimes, you are going to be away for a few weeks, but you don’t want your Twitter account to become stagnant. Whatever the case, having a tool that would allow you to schedule your tweets ahead of time could come in handy. There are plenty of paid tools that allow you to schedule your tweets for the future and even fully automate your Twitter accounts. While you don’t want to rely on these tools heavily, it’s nice to have them when you need them.
If you are looking for free tools to schedule tweets ahead of time, here are 5 free Twitter tools that could come in handy:
Hootsuite: the best Twitter management tool on the market hands down. I may be a bit biased here, considering that I have been using it for months. But I can tell you that as long as you don’t want to spam Twitter, Hootsuite has everything you need to manage your Twitter accounts more effectively.
Socialoomph: also known as Twitter Later. This service allows you to automate your welcome messages, schedule tweets in the future, and vet your followers at the same time. The premium version has even more flexibility to offer but you are not obligated to pay up to use this service.
Twitter Feed: another service that I have been using for months. It’s designed to help you connect your blog to Twitter. If you schedule future blog posts, this is a great tool to take advantage of to let your followers know about it. Read more »
