4 Essential Blog Tools For New Bloggers

Once you have created your blog, there are essential blog tools to add to your blog to make them more user-friendly and appealing for your visitors.

Some blog platforms don't require a RSS setup as it's already done, but if you created a blog on Blogger the first thing to set up is your RSS feed. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. This is a format used to publish updated blog content in RSS readers like Google Reader.

The easiest way to set up a RSS feed is to use Feedburner.com, a free RSS service. Feedburner offers a lot of great features and information like which posts were the most viewed, how many blog subscribers you have and other feed statistics. They also offer feed icons to put on your blog.

You can create a free account and follow the instructions. Your Feedburner URL should look like this http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourdomainname. Once it's set up you can log back into your Blogger account and click on "Setting" then click on "Site Feed" and enter your blog's feed URL in the box "Post Feed Redirect URL" and save.

You can add social bookmarking and share icons that appear after every blog post. Social bookmarks act much the same way as your favourites on your computer except it is public. This allows visitors to share with others if they find your post resourceful. It's a good way to get more exposure for you and more traffic to your blog.

To enhance your blog and make it interesting and visually appealing, you can integrate images, photos or video. You can buy stock photos or go to stock exchange for free photos. Remember to read the image license agreement before using them.

One last and very important blog tool to have is web statistics. All self-hosted blogs have these statistics available in their hosting cPanel, but for non self-hosted blogs you have to add this. You can get popular web stat trackers at Stat Counter, Feedjit or Add Free Stats. Stat Counter and Add Free Stats offer invisible tracking buttons.

If you want more in-depth blog stats, you can use Google Analytics, a free tracking system that generates reports of your site. You can also monitor your marketing effectiveness, AdSense placements and Adwords campaigns. It's quite extensive, but it's a valuable tool to have.

There are many more blog tools you can use as you become more experienced in blogging, but for now these four applications are must-haves for every newly created blog.

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S McIntyre is the founder of WorkAtHomeSpace.com, a free work at home resource focusing on providing work at home jobs, daily telecommute job leads, articles, business resources and other work at home related topics.

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