Resources

Some Other Great Blogs

Who better to study than those that have already established successful online presence and businesses? These blogs belong to some of the top blogger’s in the blogosphere. These blogs will keep you up on everything from affiliate marketing to personal branding. If you are looking to become a serious blogger or make money online, the following blogs should be on your “must read” list.

ProBlogger - Problogger is the blog that ALL new bloggers must go to. Authored by Darren Rowse, you can learn some of the most basic and essential things about blogging, as well as tips and tricks that will help take your blog from good to great to superstardom. Darren has over 30,000 subscribers, so you know that it is a must-read!
SEO Book - SEO Book is known as the Bible of Search Engine Optimization. Aaron Wall has been an expert in the field of SEO for many years. Aaron has also written a 300-page SEO Book that we recommend every one of our clients reads.
John Chow – John Chow is referred to as the “evil blogger.” While we can’t deny that, we can assure you that his blog is filled with great posts on how to make your blog grow, and how to make money online. His blog has gained over 10,000 readers in the past 12 months and grossed over $180,000, so you can bet that he knows what he is talking about.
Shoemoney - Shoemoney, a.k.a. Jeremy Schoemaker, is one of the more famous and celebrity-like affiliate marketers on the blogosphere. He is most widely known for a picture of him with a six-figure check for one month’s earnings from Google Adsense. You will find a plethora of insightful articles related to internet marketing and business on his blog, so make sure to check it out!

Stat Tracking

These tools will allow you to keep up-to-date statistics about your blog including the number of RSS subscribers, website visitors, other blogs that are linking to you, and even tracking where your visitors are clicking. We recommend anyone with a blog or website sign up for these great services.

Feedburner - Your feed count (total number of RSS subscribers) is the foundation of your blog’s authority and credibility. By tracking your feed count using Feedburner, you monitor the popularity of your blog over time. This is one tool that every blogger should employ on their blogs. Besides, if you don’t know how many subscribers you have, you don’t know the true health of your blog.
Technorati - Technorati is the leading blog directory. Technorati tracks over 80 million blogs and keeps up to date information on all of them, including how many other bloggers link to them, the topics they write about, and the frequency of their posting. Your Technorati “authority” is determined by how many unique blogs have linked to you within the past six months.
Google Analytics – Google isn’t just about searching… They provide tools for you to monitor and analyze your traffic in ways that you never thought possible. With the ability to analyze your daily traffic down to minor details, you can streamline the performance of your blog so that it is always running on all cylinders. You MUST use this tool!
CrazyEgg - Crazy Egg is an incredible heat-map testing toul that will allow you to see and analyze all of the clicks that are occurring on your site or blog. Not only can you see how many clicks are occurring on your blog, but you can also see where they are coming from, and if from a search engine, what they searched with to find your blog!

Advertising Programs

G oogle Adsense - Google Adsense is by far the easiest way to monetize any site or blog. Although we don’t recommend it for everyone, if you’re running a celebrity-gossip site or anything that is related to products, it may be a good fit for your blog.

AdBrite - AdBrite is the Internet’s Ad Marketplace. The company makes it easy to buy and sell advertising online, giving advertisers and publishers more transparency and control than any other ad network. With banner and text ads, as well as innovative formats like BritePic, InVideo and Full Page Ad, AdBrite has created a simple and more effective advertising marketplace for advertisers and publishers of all sizes. AdBrite helps advertisers tap into highly targeted demographics across 70,000+ premium and trusted sites, reaching over 85 million unique users every month. AdBrite serve ads on over one billion pages a day.

Photos / Stock Photography

One way to dramatically improve your blog is to find and attach appropriate photos to your blog posts. Adding a unique photo to a blog post is a great way to make your blog stand out.

Stockxchange - Stockxchange provides a great cullection of stock photos for you to use, and not to mention, it’s FREE. You can find all kinds of photos for just about anything and you won’t have to worry about spending a dime or infringing on a copyright. We highly recommend this site to everyone.
iStockphoto - This is our favorite royalty-free paid stock photo site. You can purchase high quality photos for royalty-free usage for as low as $1. They have an incredible selection of photos for almost every keyword you could possibly come up with.
Flickr - Flickr is one of top photo sharing sites on the Internet. Why is Flickr so popular? One reason is that you can store a up to 200 photos with a basic account. Add to that, they provide numerous ways to syndicate your photos, such as displaying as a gallery on your blog or sharing them with your friends. You can see an example of our blog’s Flickr integration on our blog’s sidebar (the photos are automatically updated when new ones are added).

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is something that all bloggers should keep in mind when it comes to marketing their blogs and increasing their readerships. We recommend the following social media websites.

Twitter – Twitter is a micro blogging service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected. You can write write short updates, called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search (search.twitter.com).
Digg – The Digg Effect… You may have heard of this site, and for good reason. Many sites and blogs have “spiked” their traffic from the massive audience that can be reached by simply being voted to the top of the site’s stories. If you make it to the front page, you may find yourself with so much traffic that your server crashes…
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is one of the better social media marketing tools. With over 4 million active Stumblers, it has become very easy to see a surge in traffic thanks to StumbleUpon. They have also built some great social networking tools in StumbleUpon, so it is easy to keep up to date on your friend’s Stumble activities.
Del.icio.us - Del.icio.us is perhaps the most popular social bookmarking website. Users “post” their favorite stories to Del.icio.us and their friends can see what articles and other websites they bookmarked. Not only that, but if enough people bookmark your link, it will go to the Del.icio.us Popular page, bringing you tons of traffic!
Technorati - Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around since the beginning of the web, but it is something we are seeing more and more bloggers start to practice. Email marketing is simply sending out a monthly newsletter promoting your blog or your company’s products and services. When it comes to email marketing, there is only one company we recommend.

Aweber - We recommend to all of our clients to actively engage their readers with periodic email updates. In our experience, the best and easiest-to-use email marketing software is Aweber. The cost is nominal, and in conjunction with the right “blog marketing,” it can do wonders to increase the ROI of your online business.

Other Great Tools

The SEO Book Keyword Tool - I use this on a daily basis, primarily for the keyword research of all my websites and article marketing efforts, but it’s useful for selecting niche phrases for any type of website. It’s like any other keyword tool, the results aren’t exact, but it’s worked quite well for me. I would recommend it to everyone.
Instant Article Wizard Pro - This is the first article “creator” I’ve ever recommended. My initial feelings on this type of software was that it was impossible for software to create an article that was actually readable and useful to others. I can honestly say that I was wrong. I started using IAWP about a month ago and although some articles need a little editing, it’s cut huge amounts of time off of article writing. I’ve been having my sister write my articles lately and she’s been using this and sending twice as many articles than before.
Rank Checker - This is Aaron Wall’s newest tool from SEO Book, which provides a very simple way to check your sites rankings on Google. It is also a Firefox addon. You just open it up, insert the domain name and the keywords you want to analyze and it shows you the rankings.
SEO for Firefox -This is possibly one of the most useful and time-saving tools I use. It inserts loads of useful data directly into the search results of Google and Yahoo. You just do a search as usual and directly below each result you’ll see data such as PR, Age, Cache date, Yahoo Links, DMOZ, Alexa etc. It makes analysis of the competition much quicker and easier and is just neat all around.