Blog Resources and Blogging Tools

It took me some time to create this page on Blog resources because I wanted to make sure that every resource and tool you find here are among the best around and are relevant and helpful to your blogging success.

This page is also one of the most important pages on this site, without it you're like a farmer or gardener surrounded with many tools, not knowing which ones you actually need to quickly get the task done.

The blog resources here are just enough for any beginning blogger to start a blog and make money blogging. If in the future I find other resources and blogging tools that I think will improve your blog and blogging experience and eventually make you more money, I'll update the page and include them. So I recommend you bookmark this page for your reference and convenience.

My recommendations here are influenced by my personal experience with them, trusted colleagues recommendation and a detailed research. So you can't go wrong with the blogging resources below.

Blog Resources - To Blog or Not to Blog

Blogging is not for everybody. If you don't yet fully understand what blogging involves or how it works, I strongly recommend you download my ebook, Blogging at a Glance. I am yet to read any ebook that is as honest about what blogging is and involves as the Blogging at a Glance ebook.

It sets the record straight for you right from beginning. And the better you understand what you're going into before starting a blog, the higher your chance of succeeding in it.

There are millions of bloggers but only 5% or less are actually successful with it.

Blogging at a Glance is free for download upon your sign up to Beginners Blogging Guide monthly newsletter .

Blog Resources - Should you Build a Blog or Website?

A Blog and a Website are simply different formats used to present content on the web. You can make money online using either formats following the same process. But they both have pros and cons, which one to use will depend on your goals online.

Compare a Blog against a Website

Blog Resources for Choosing A Blog Topic

Keyword Research

Your choice of keyword is everything. It determines whether or not you make money from your topic, how much you make and how soon you make it. I always advice that you do whatever it takes to get this step right. Not just to succeed with your blog but to succeed online. When you understand how keywords work and how to find profitable keywords to build a site around, then you can make money from anything online.

I strongly recommend you read the articles and book below.

Effective keyword research : This article takes you step by step on how to do a keyword research and choose a profitable topic, using this site's topic as an example.

Effective keyword research part 2 : This article explains how to go about the research necessary to ascertain whether or not you can make money from a certain topic, before starting a blog on it.

The ebook Keyword Research Made Easy will teach you all you need to know about keywords, how to choose really profitable keywords and even apply them properly on your site.

For keyword research tool to use for your research, I use SBI Brainstorm It! tool . It has several tools for research built-in to ensure you get the best keywords possible for your topic, but the tool is only available as part of the Site Build It! tool , an all in one tool for building a website. You have all the tools you need for your online business in one place.

But if you're not ready for such a tool now, then I hear market samuarai is great. But since I don't use it, I really can't tell you much about it.

Blog Resources - Still On Keyword Research for Choosing a Blog Topic

Free keyword Research tools

WordTracker Free Keywords Tool : Can be used to quickly find the popularity of a keyword. That is the search volume.

Google Adword Tool: A tool designed to help advertisers decide on keywords to use for Adwords campaigns. But it can also be use to check the popularity of keywords and their ads competitions.

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: Usage requires registration. You'll get more data about your keyword to select some good keywords.

Why Pay For a Keyword Tool When You Can Use Free Tools?

Free tools won't give you the insights you need to generate more traffic, outperform your competitors and multiply your profits. This is because the data free tools give are usually very limited. If you rely only on free tools, you'll hardly be able to compete in your niche.

I always take time to talk about keyword research, because it is everything. You get it wrong, you could as well forget about making money blogging. Picking the right keywords will mean, less stress, quick ranking at the search engines for any published post, little backlinks to rank well, high increase in daily blog visitors and make money quick with your blog.

Blog Resources for Blog Setup

Blog Publishing Platforms

No doubt Wordpress is the no. 1 blog publishing platform. This is because it gives you flexibility in the way you customize your blog, with so many plugins to make your life easier. See Wordpress tutorial for all the article guides on how to use Wordpress for Blogging.

Or better still, learn everything about using Wordpress for blogging through high quality HD videos at WP101 .

For free blog set up, Blogger is the best. But I seriously discourage the use of a free blog. If you decide to use it anyway, See the article on using Google Blogger for blogging.

And the book:

Google Blogger For Dummies by Susan Gunelius

Get a Domain Name

Once who have chosen a profitable keyword, decide on a domain name and register it with Godaddy . You can find helpful tips on chosing the right domain name and the step by step process of registering a domain name with Godaddy in the article How to Choose Domain Name .

Get Hosting For Your Domain Name

Host your domain with Hostgator. It is best for beginners because it only attract $4.95 per month, and they offer a generous 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth, 24/7 phone support, and a free domain for life. Plus they have all the tools you will need to get going quickly, like one click Wordpress installations and superb backup tools.

If you use my coupon code beginnershostdiscount you will save $9.94 off pack price.

Upload Important Plugins

The greatest benefit of working with Wordpress is because of the thousands of plugins available to optimize, customize and automate some of your blogging tasks. But you don't have to upload every single plugin you find, else you could get into trouble. So I have helped you picked out the best Wordpress plugins , which are really all you need.

Better Yet, Get a Customize Blog Set Up for you.

If you don't want to bother yourself with setting up your blog yourself, then you can get a professional to set up your blog for you, with every thing ready to go with it. All you'll have to do is start posting.

Ninja blog setup service is one of the best sites that provide this service. The blog set up attracts a fee. How much you pay will depend on your taste. There are different specifications to chose from. They also offer a free blog set up with a simple condition attached.

While having a professional set up your blog for you is cool and fast, it could also make you a zombie if this is your first blog. The good thing about setting up your own blog is that you learn in the process and the experience could help you with future blog set up. With the blog resources here, you can easily learn and set up your own blog.

However if you don't have the time, or just want a professional's touch, I recommend you use the service.

Blog Resources and Blogging tools to Build Your Blog Following

Set up to Start Building your List

Once your blog is set up and you've started posting, it's time to start building your list. Internet marketers will say "the money is in the list". I don't know if I completely agree, because all they do afterwards is push products on people.

However, I believe building a list is essential, because it gives you another opportunity to build credibility with your readers, promote your best blog posts, get repeat visitors to your site and get targeted customers for anytime you launch your own product. Customers who already trust you will most likely buy your product without even reading your sales page.

See this article on email list building for tips on successful list building.

A good way to build a list is to offer a newsletter subscription.

There are a good number of good email marketing services. But I recommend you use Getresponse . They're one of the guys that have been around offering good service for a long time, and their monthly subscription fee is a little cheaper than what other services offer. Moreover, there payment option is straight forward and fast.

If you think you can't keep up with a monthly subscription just yet, then you can start with MailChimp . Mailchimp has a Forever Plan that allows you to build up to 2000 subscribers before you start to make payment.

I recommend you read their terms before signing up with them, I hear they're against affiliate marketing .

They also don't have phone support except email. So if you need their assistance, you can't get it immediately. You have to wait for at least some few hours for them to respond to your email. This I believe is a big deal to consider.

Also if you don't see yourself keeping them when your blog grows, don't bother starting with them, because you might face some issues when you want to transfer your list to another service.

Social Media

No one can doubt the role of social media sites in driving traffic to blogs and websites. They are here to stay and many people are maximizing them to generate high traffic. Most social media traffic will be useless to you if you don't plan and use them strategically in a way that most of your visitors will be targeted.

There are many social media sites, but to get maximize result and save your time, find 2 or 3 good ones to use properly. I suggest facebook and twitter.

A good way to use facebook to drive traffic to your blog is to create a fan page for your blog. To create a fan page is very easy, you can use facebook help. Then use the article on creating facebook landing page by Pat to make your fan page look professional. Or the one written by Glen of Viperchill.com , The Highest Converting Facebook Fan Page I Have Ever Seen

To use twitter to promote your blog and generate traffic, I recommend the book Twitter for Dummies . It's great for beginners to twitter and even for people with some experience. The best part about the book is that it gives additional resources that provides you with update on outdated information should there be any.

This is important because social media use change regularly, without updates, some of the information provided could become outdated and useless to you.

Blog Resources for Building Backlinks

Building quality backlinks to your blog is essential to rank high in the search engines for your chosen keywords and get thousands of free search traffic.

There are different ways to build quality backlinks, one of such ways is link exchange. Link exchange simply means, you link to me, I link back to you. But looking for sites to exchange links with is always time consuming and mostly fruitless.

So while you look into other ways of building backlinks, sign up to Sitesell's Value exchange program. You'll be connected to relevant, quality sites who are interested in link exchange. Sign up is free.

Blog Resources for Blog Monetization

Ads on your Blog

Google Adense is one of the easiest and simplest ways to make money with your blog. How much you can earn depends on how much blog traffic you get. The higher your traffic, the more money you can earn.

Chitika Ads is like adsense. The difference is that chitika ads only shows up to traffic that comes from the search engines, and that makes your site more friendly to regular readers.

Banner advertising works well for high traffic blogs. And it comes with a lot of work. Finding advertisers, pricing and remembering when a certain advertiser has to renew his advertising.

So when you're ready to sell ad space on your blog, I recommend using OIO publisher . They'll deal with all the tasks involved in selling ad space for you automatically and even get you advertisers.

Other Blog Resources for Blog Monetization

Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored reviews is another good way to make money from your blog. You write an honest review for a product or a website and post it on your blog and you get paid.

You'll do better here when your blog traffic is high. Afterall, paid review is a marketing strategy for the advertisers. So if you don't have much readers, you'll hardly get advertisers.

When you're ready good sites to use are sponsoredreviews.com and reviewme.com

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to make money with your blog. When properly done, affiliate marketing can bring in big check every month even without having thousands of daily visitors.

Networks to find great products for your niche are:

Clickbank

Commission juction

Amazon

This article explains how to hide your affiliate links. Why hide your affiliate links? Affiliate urls can be very long. Aside that, some readers might want to cheat you off your commissions by removing your id from the link.

Writing and Selling Your Own Products

It is necessary that at some point you create your own product for your market. Writing an ebook is the easiest way to create a product and you can put it together without spending a dime, if you know how to use word doc. and some graphics.

You create it for close to zero cost and it brings in money for years to come.

It is easy to create a product especially ebooks. But how do you do it in such a way that it appears professional and appealing to prospective buyers and you maximize profit? This single question is why some people make a 4 figure income daily just selling their own product and others make pennies to zero sales.

So I recommend you read the books :

How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit: Your Guide to Writing and Publishing Books, E-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, and Other How-To Content

The book is by Robert Bly, a man with over 30 years experience in the information marketing industry, and so far he has published over 80 books. He left nothing out in the book. And all the strategies he discussed require no special tool to implement.

Make Your Knowledge Sell by Monique Harris and Ken Evoy.

MYKS is a great ebook. Both authors are quite successful at what they do. Best part is, the book is free for download and requires no opt-in.

Ebooks the Smart Way by Pat Flynn. Another great free ebook. Requires an opt-in to get a download.

Blog Resources - Other Great Books to Learn to Blog Like Pro

Blogging All-in-One For Dummies Publisher: For Dummies by Susan Gunelius.

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series) by C.C. Chapman

Blog Resources for Tracking Blog Performance

Google Analytics : Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. It gives you a lot of details about what is going on your site, these details you can use to optimize your site for better result.

Clicky : Clicky is just like Google Analytics except that it offers real time stats unlike Google Analytics which displays data one day behind.

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