Below I have listed a number of tools and resources that I have found a great help my marketing my blogs and web sites. I hope that you find these useful for the marketing of your own blog or website:
Overwhelmed by Social Media
If your social media has become more of chore than a useful marketing channel then consider reading my post where I provide 3 simple strategies for those overwhelmed by social media. This post will provide some simple solutions that will help you to gain back control and start to see positive results from your social media marketing channels.
Effective Keyword Research
Knowing what keywords to use is half the battle when putting a blog together. There are some people who believe that a blog should be completely organic and little reference is made to keywords whereas others believe that keywords are key to attract visitors. I believe that a bit of both is vital – produce great copy but make sure people can find you! So check out my post on effective keyword research for helpful hints of how to get noticed in the search engines.
Pop-up Dominator:
Some people hate pop-ups, but in truth this product really does work. I have set it to pop-up only once a day so it should not be too intrusive for my readers. The claim is that it will increase sign-ups by 304% – I’m not sure about that yet but it certainly has increased my sign ups.
The idea is that the pop-up screen will give visitors a nudge in the right direction and will help you grow your contact list. I personally think its a really cool tool.
Blogging Software
Ok I’m a little biased, but I can strongly recommend the use of WordPress as probably the best content management system online. I have tried a few different systems and feel that on balance WordPress provides the best overall feel and offeres such versitility for both the beginner and the more advanced user. To get your free copy of WordPress go to WordPress.org. There are thousands if not millions of pages of tips and help. I have always been able to quickly and effortlessly resolve any WordPress based issues.
WordPress Plug-ins
There are hundreds of WordPress plug-ins out there, but the ones that I think are the best are ones that help you to grow the exposure of your blog across the internet. Rather than name all of the plug-ins that I use I have listed my top three below:
1. Sexybookmarks – This plug-in adds a set of sexy bookmarks to the end of your post. It looks cool and helps to increase exposure especially if your post is great!
2. WP Super Cache – Probably one of the most essential plug-ins as it helps to speed up your WordPress blog. Anything that can help with the load speed of your pages and posts has to be a good thing!
3. Subscription Options - This provides another avenue for your visitors to subscribe to your blog feed, twitter account or facebook account.
FREE FTP Software
Maintaining your own blog or webste can be a daunting thing. But if you use a stable FTP application such as FileZilla it can take much of the headache out of the maintenance of your site. In a few clicks you can have the whole of your site backed up on your PCs hard drive – the alternative is to use the FTP software within your hosts cPanel, but this can sometimes takes hours to complete the download. I can strongly recommend using FileZilla – I’ve used it for over 5 years now and have never had an issue with it. It’s as easy as using a windows based file exploring tool.
Hope that you find these all of my suggested tools and resources above useful and that they help you get your message out there across the web. I encourage you to periodically come back to this page to check in on additions to this page.
To your success!
Howard Clemence
