Essential Tools For A Professional Blogger

Every professional blogger has some favorite set of tools that he uses to carry out his day-to-day tasks. Some of them are quite popular among all bloggers, and some are limited to individuals. Some tools are platform independent and enjoy wide popularity among the bloggers. Here are some absolute essential tools that every professional blogger must keep handy on his desktop.

DarkRoom: A minimal full screen text editor with pitch-dark black screen and customized width for writing space. It is very popular among bloggers, as it removes any distraction while writing posts.

FileZilla: A very stable and easy to use FTP client to manage your blog installation tree. A must for every self hosted Wordpress installation.

SnagIT: Want to embed screenshots of desktop pictures in blog post? Then get SnagIT and get this excellent piece of screen capturing software. It is not just simple screen capturing software. It gives you some cool features to cut, snip, trim, decorate, add arrows, bubbles, zoom, watermark and many other special effects that can be easily added to pictures and make them more presentable for your blog readers.

Visual Color Picker: Very useful for those bloggers who work extensively on CSS of their blog template. This software easily lets you pick colors from any object on the screen along with their HEX codes. A must for those, who work with CSS code and highly customize their blog theme.

twhirl: Social Media has become such a powerful tool today, that almost every blogger uses it to network and promote their brand. twhirl is an excellent desktop client for famous micro-blogging service Twitter. Another gem for every professional blogger.

Camtasia Studio: A powerful blog marketing tool is video posts. A good number of bloggers do video posts and use YouTube for blog promotion. Camtasia Studio is an excellent software to create high quality videos for presentations, tutorials and documentaries. Through Camtasia you can easily create YouTube compliant Videos and can export it directly to your YouTube blog marketing channel.

Do you know some more useful tools for professional bloggers? Share it with others by leaving comments below.

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Useful Web Tools And Resources For Bloggers: Part - 5

This edition of web tools and resources contains twitter tools, content enhancer engines, social network mashups, some new widget services, feed aggregator mashups, micro-blogging service with video support, widgetized visit counter and much more.

Twiddict: Excellent service for Twitter addicts. We all are aware of twitter downtimes and latency in sending the tweet. With this service you can have your tweet in appropriate place in timeline after twitter downtime is finished. It stores your tweets and places it in right place when twitter is alive again.

Youlicit: This unique service lets you discover blogs and web sites related to your niche, and gives you the facility to network and socialize with like minded people. An excellent tool for bloggers to find popular content related to your niche, and socializing with fellow bloggers of similar niche.

Sphere: Want contextually relevant content for free space on your blog? Sphere is an excellent content enhancer service. You can create customized code for free space of your blog and fill it with your old posts, archives or textual and multimedia content from the web, and that too relevant to your blog's niche.

Ping.Fm: Many of my fellow bloggers are already familiar with this excellent service. It let's you update your social network services via popular messenger clients like facebook, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, AOL Messenger and many more...

ReadBurner: Very interesting service for bloggers and feed subscribers. On a single page you can access your feed subscriptions of Newsgator, Netvibes and Google Reader. As usual a classic example of mashup of different news aggregators in a single service. Worth giving a try.

iWidgets: Yet another widget generation service. The difference between others and iWidgets is the social network mashup in widgets, allowing you to easily integrate these widgets in your social profiles.

Posterous: Relatively new service that lets you post just about anything through e-mail. You can use any popular e-mail services for posting and can post almost anything (text, audio, video). Use the address post at posterous dot com and you also get instant reply about your posting from their end.

99counters: I will strongly recommend this visit counter. Apart from regular visit counts, it also displays number of users online, geographic location of recent visitors and much more in the widgetized format.

Seesmic: Is is not just plain micro-blogging service. Seesmic goes one step ahead and add video to micro-blogging. Gaining rapid popularity and has some unique features. People can see you interacting live or deferred as per your settings.

Toluu: An excellent tool to aggregate your blog feed and at the same time discover feeds similar to your blog's niche. You can easily import your feed in OPML or URL format and can get similar feeds along with feed aggregation.



Next edition will be more spicy with all the meaty stuff for professional bloggers.

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How To Backup Your Entire Blogger Blog

One morning you wake up to find out that your blog has been hacked and all the data is lost. Still there is smile on your face. You open your back up vault on your laptop, and restore the whole blog in 10 minutes. This can happen to anybody and the consequences of not backing up your blog can be disastrous. Unfortunately, a large number of bloggers do not formulate any back up and restoration policy. If you are hosting your blog on Wordpress platform, there are 2-3 back up plugins available that can be easily configured. On the other hand, if your blog is on blogger platform, you will find it difficult to create a single point restoration point for your blog. But there is a solution to this problem. Let us see how to back up the entire blogger blog, for easy restoration in case of any mishap.

Image credit: bobbigmac

Planning The Backup Strategy

A good backup strategy can save you from lot of pain, in case any disaster happens. A big question that you may ask while formulating any backup policy will be, "How often should I take backup?". If your blog is new, you can afford to take backups every fortnight or on weekly basis. On the other hand, if it's an established blog with high traffic volume, daily backups are must.

Backup procedure

At present blog export function is available in draft version of blogger. Generally, features available in draft are in developmental stage and should not be tried on your main blog having good traffic. Still, you can use the following tried and tested technique to back up your entire blog posts and comments in a single file.

Step - 1 Save you existing template on local drive.
Step - 2 Replace your entire template code with the following code.

<Blogger>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
--------
</Blogger>

NOTE: Remove any indentations present in the above code after pasting it in your blog template

Step - 3 If you are using blogger native commenting system and want to backup them as well, paste the following code just above the tag.

<BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<BlogItemComments>
COMMENT-AUTHOR:<$BlogCommentAuthor$>
COMMENT-DATE:<$BlogCommentDateTime$>
COMMENT-BODY:<$BlogCommentBody$>
--------
</BlogItemComments>
</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>

Step - 4 Our goal is to adjust the blog settings in such a way that all the posts get displayed on the index page. To achieve that, go to Settings -> Formatting and choose days on the main page option. Set the number of days to 1 more than the number of days you are blogging.

Step - 5 In Settings -> Formatting set the Date/Time format to MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS.

Make a note of existing Date/Time settings, so that they can be easily restored later

Step - 6 In Settings -> Formatting set the option Convert line breaks to No.

Step - 7 Set the Archive Frequency to No Archive in Settings -> Archiving, so that old archive is not overwritten.

Now, publish your blog and you will get a single index page with all the posts and comments on that page. Simply save the source of that page in local hard drive, and all your blog posts and comments will be saved in that single file.

After saving the index page, simply restore your previous settings in Settings -> Formatting and Settings -> Archiving pages. Restore your original template that you saved earlier. Done.

If you find any difficulty in backup procedure, just shoot me an E-Mail.

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How To Launch A Blog On Blogger Platform

Creating a blog on blogger platform is a matter of minutes. Anyone can create it very easily by following some simple steps. If you are planning to launch a professional blog on blogger platform, some things need to be taken into consideration before you create a blog. It will not only help you in creating a unique, clean and crawler friendly blog, but at the same time it will also save you from messing it up, if you do not plan from the very beginning.

How To Start?

I would strongly suggest you to go for a customized domain for your blogger blog. It gives professional look and feel to the visitor. Once you have chosen the niche of your blog, it's time to look for a good domain name.

Image credit: soschilds

Choosing a good domain name is not an easy task and requires some brainstorming. Configuring and integrating your own domain with blogger blog is not difficult at all. Add the following host record in your domain hosting control panel.

HOSTNAME        IP ADDRESS/URL              RECORD TYPE

    www            ghs.google.com.                      CNAME (alias)
     @        http://www.yourdomain.com/         URL Redirect

Once you have added these records, go to your blogger dashboard and click Settings tab, then go to Publishing subtab. Click the Custom Domain link and follow the simple procedure to add your domain URL and click ok. Once it is done, it may take from 1 to 3 days before the DNS records of your domain are cached all over the world in domain name servers. You can also see blogger help of configuring custom domain with blogger.

Choose a good theme

The next step is to choose a good theme for your blog. There are hundreds of blogger templates to choose from, and depending on the niche of your blog, you may choose a specific type of template. Do not go for bright, multicolored and fancy themes. Some good theme examples are magazine style, and revolution themes. You can find some good blogger themes here and here.

Tweaking the theme

Image credit: emagic

Almost every template needs some customization as per bloggers requirements. Designing a good landing page from your chosen template is not difficult at all. All it requires is a bit of CSS editing and some add-on widgets. With simple CSS tricks you can make your blog posts more spicy and attractive. I would suggest you to visit Blogger Buster, if you really want to make your blogger blog stand apart from others.

Initial setup

Once your theme is tweaked as per your needs, start building the core pages of your blog. Do not straight away start posting. First create Archives, Contact and About pages with old timestamps, and place a link for each page in navigation menu. It is always advisable to make these important pages beforehand, because any new post on blogger always comes in recent posts. If you will try to make them later, they will appear in recent posts. You can use Disqus commenting system for your blog, as it supports multi-threaded conversations, video comments and standard track backs. A Wordpress style contact form is must for Contact page. Blogger currently has no option to create such form, but you can use Kontactr, to create a customized contact form. I use the same service for my contact form, and I am satisfied with the service. Install at least two web analytics script in your blog template, because in case one of the services fails still you can get the traffic data from the other one. Of course Google Analytics should be one of them, the other one can be Sitemeter or Woopra. Both are excellent web analytic services and I use all three of them for my blog. Do not forget to put a search box in the navigation bar. Here is the code.

<form id="searchthis" action="/search" style="display: inline;" method="get"> <input id="search-box" name="q" size="25" type="text"> <input id="search-btn" value="Search" type="submit"> </form>

Building on foundation

Once initial setup is complete, you can start posting on your blog. The first 25-30 posts on your blog matters the most. Make good long posts and put the cream in these posts. Populate the Popular Posts section with selective hand picked posts.

Monetization strategy

After all the hard work, its time to monetize your blog. There are many approaches to that, and you have to choose the best one for your blog. I would strongly suggest leaving home page free from ads. If your new blog's home page is stuffed with ads, it may annoy the visitor and you may loose your valuable subscriber. Some 125x125 ads in the sidebar are fine, but avoid ads between posts on home page of your blog. Only when the visitor clicks the individual post, ads should be placed in the body of post.

Posting structure and frequency

Every blogger has it's own approach in building a post, still there are some common traits in every good blog post. Often novice bloggers take some time to come up with a definite pattern and structure for their posts. Whatever your approach is, stick to your style for uniformity in your blog posts. If you have time constraints, I would suggest you to publish at least two good long posts per week.

Blog Promotion

Unless you do not tell the world, no one is going to see the gem you have polished. Blog directory submissions and RSS feed submissions is must for any blog to grab attention in the blogosphere. You can submit your blog and its feed in most popular blog directories and feed syndication services here and here. Another good way to promote your blog is popular social bookmarking services.

If you need in any help in displaying Post Excerpts on home page or displaying Related Posts at the bottom of blogger posts, you can contact me.

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How To Get New Ideas For Blog Posts

Creating appealing content consistently is a challenge for any Pro Blogger. If you have high subscriber count, expectations are also high. Whatever your blog's niche is, at times you may run out of ideas for new posts. An ideal blogging state is having posts in pipeline waiting for going live on your blog. If you are an avid reader, good listener, net savvy and love socializing, then you will never fall short of ideas for your blog posts. Here are some tips to get endless flow of ideas to keep your blog filled with fresh new content at consistent pace.

Passion: Do you have it in you?

Image credit: _StaR_DusT_

The very first thing is to ask yourself and get the honest answer that, "Do I love to write? Do I love the topic of my blog?". If the fire is burning in your heart, then ideas will come automatically. It is always advised that before you plan to launch a blog, make sure you are passionate about your blog's niche. If you choose the topic of your blog carefully, you will never fall short of ideas. The zeal to write automatically increases if you love the topic.

Network, follow and read

Subscribe to popular blogs in your niche and follow them closely. You can get tons of ideas from them, from their daily life, from their posts, from your interaction with them. Network and socialize with fellow bloggers in similar niche and build strong relationship with them. It not only helps in blog promotion, but also gives you new ideas for your posts. I myself follow about 192 RSS feeds to keep myself updated about what's new happening in blogosphere in general, and in my blog's niche.

Image credit: jurvetson

You can post an interview of some blogger, or review his blog. Sometimes while socializing with fellow bloggers, you will get new idea for your post. A constructive discussion on micro-blogging service like Twitter can open doors of several blog posts.

Building on responses and criticism

Readers comments on your blog, give you ideas for new blog posts. A clever blogger anticipates reader's expectations and capitalize on it. The queries, suggestions and criticism from your contact page give you several new topics to write on. Create a tutorial on some readers grievance. Start a series of posts, giving your readers a reason to back again and again.

And if you still fall short of ideas, then create a post like this on "How To Get Ideas For Blog Posts". Does your blog post follow a predefined life cycle? If yes, does your every post fit into that life cycle, or your post building routine is random in nature?

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Blog Marketing And YouTube: An Introduction

Bloggers develop new ways to promote and market their blog. The traditional methods work quite well, but demands time and patience. Some bloggers use some new highly effective methods for blog promotion. Promo videos on YouTube is one of the best ways to get vast exposure in quick time. Let us see how to use this effective technique to get huge exposure for our blog.

Image credit: bigmick

How To Start?

Before you start to create videos for blog promotion, you must keep in mind that it's kind of viral marketing strategy and has pros and cons. A poor quality video can backfire, by ruining your blog's hard earned reputation. For creating a video you will need a good quality recording camera with at least 2 Mega pixels resolution, Camtasia Studio Version 4.x+ and lots and lots of creativity. If you are creating some tutorial on PC, then just Camtasia Studio will do the work.

Creating A Guru Account

There are two types of accounts available on YouTube. One is basic, and the other one is Guru Account, with added features and capabilities. Guru account is ideal for bloggers who are looking for some serious blog marketing features. After signing up for Guru Account, create a channel with targeted keywords and tags. Channel are kind of relay stream that arrange and present your posted videos in orderly manner. You can completely customize the look and feel of your channel and brand it with adding your own logos.

Creating Videos For YouTube

Creating videos for YouTube requires some knowledge of Camtasia settings. If you create with default settings, the video won't be compatible with YouTube requirements. Creating a basic video is not hard at all, but if you want to create some stunning professional marketing videos, you need to have some good understanding of Camtasia Video creation options and settings. Following is an excellent video about Video Creation through Camtasia.

How To Create YouTube Videos From Camtasia Studio

Remember, your goal is to give something unique to your audience. An ideal blog promotion video will be a good tutorial about some blogging tool or technique, or your own video elaborating some important tips and tricks related to your niche.

Blog promotion on YouTube can bring tons of visitors to your blog, and have the power of building your authority in your niche. One good video can elevate the popularity of your blog to beyond your imagination.

What other unconventional blog promotion techniques do you use? Is video promotion among one of them?

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Useful Web Tools And Resources For Bloggers: Part - 4

This edition of web tools contains some fresh new services launched on the web. The list features powerful commenting systems for Blogger and Wordpress platforms, a new web analytics tool, free contact form service with Paypal integration, micro-blogging and networking service, blog polls, post editor and much more...


Disqus: A powerful commenting system for blogs, with lots of features, including threaded conversations and Gravatar support. This commenting system is available for all major blogging platforms, including Blogger and Wordpress. The service is free and much better than Haloscan.

IntenseDebate: Another powerful commenting system and a direct competitor of Disqus. Supports threaded commenting and automated notifications of comments. Profile building, comment voting and social media mash up is also included among it's unique features.

Woopra: Another web analytics program with some exciting features. It is relatively new as compared to it's rivals. Still in beta stage and new accounts are made after review of your web site. Also offers desktop client to monitor your web site statistics. The statistics are real time and you can monitor multiple sites from single account.

FormSpring: Yet another contact form service for blogs and web sites. I particularly liked the paypal integration option. You can completely customize your forms, to blend it completely with your blog. Report generation, data collection and automated intimation are some of the features of this service.

Plurk: Recently, a new micro-blogging and networking service is introduced which is gaining rapid popularity. Like twitter, it has public timeline, and plurking is supported from various platforms like IM,mobile and web. But it's not a clone of twitter and has some advanced features. Worth checking it.

FeedCompare: If you want to to do some analysis of your Feedburner feed, use FeedCompare service. The site provides graphical statistics for easy comparison of your feed with your competitors feed. You can segregate the data based on time period.

Zoundry: It's an excellent post editor, supporting all major blogging platforms. You can easily place affiliate and promotional links in your posts and keep track of your earnings through it. If you have less time to spice up your posts and you struggle to keep track of your affiliate links in your blog posts, then this blog editor is the solution.

Zookoda: One of the most popular e-mail newsletter service for bloggers. You get tons of features, with complete subscription mangement features and extensive reporting features to analyze the progress of your newsletter. The newsletter design is completely customizable, giving you ample opportunity to brand it as per your requirements.

BlogFlux Polls: Yet another cool blog polling service with all the major features. Customization, data analysis, reporting is supported. You can set deadline for your polls, and can easily embed them in sidebars or in blog posts.

Mint Web Analytics: An excellent web analytics program, giving all the features of basic as well as advanced analytics service. The code is easy to install and you will get live traffic reports with extensive statistics and reporting in tabular as well as graphical format.

Do you use third party commenting system in your blogs, or go with the native one's?

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How To Apply For Adsense: An Introduction

Adsense, is perhaps the most popular advertising network on globe. Almost every blogger at some stage plan to monetize their blog. There are several pay-per-click advertising programs and each one has its own pros and cons. If you are planning to apply for Adsense, make sure you know some vital things about getting into Adsense successfully and to become a successful publisher. Becoming an Adsense publisher is not difficult and by following some simple guidelines your application can easily get approved.

First of all, I want to stress that if you are planning to join Adsense to get rich overnight, then forget about it. Do some research about all successful Adsense publishers and see there growth graph. You will find that none of them became rich overnight. Years of dedication and hard work made them what they are today.

Taking the first step

Image credit: fdecomite

Read the Google Adsense Terms and Conditions thoroughly and get hold of all major points. Remember, the terms and conditions vary from country to country, and you must select the appropriate country from the drop down list while visiting the T&C page, to get the right information. Do not give a glance and leave the page. Take some pain and read it very carefully. The time you will devote in understanding the Adsense T&C will prove fruitful in future, and you will not regret your decision of 'wasting' your time on this page.

What next?

After going through the T&C, make sure you choose the correct billing address. All your payments will be sent to this address, so it advisable to double check it. Now the most important part. Once you give your name in Adsense account, it can never be changed again. You can change your billing address, but not the name. So think twice before submitting the name of the payee. Now you have to give details of your web site in the application, which will be reviewed by Adsense team and will be approved as per their T&C. Do not panic if you do not own a web site. Create a blog on Blogger or a small web site on Google Pages. Make sure there are no broken links in your pages and the content is original.

Applied? Now what to do?

Normally, it will take about 1 to 4 weeks for approval of your application. So be patient and wait for the mail from Adsense Team. If your application is rejected for some reasons, still you will be intimated through mail, explaining you the reasons of rejection. If you have not received any mail after 8 weeks of application, you may send an email to adsense-support [at] google [dot] com.

Visit Adsense Primer, for detailed information about every aspect of Adsense.

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How To Use Images In Blog Posts

Use of illustrations in blog posts not only make them more attractive, but also help in conveying the message more clearly to the reader. Often many novice bloggers do not know the correct way of using illustrations in blog post. There are several issues related with use of images in posts, viz., how to find the correct picture, licensing issues, SEO strategy related to images, placement, spicing up the picture and much more.

Use of images in post can make huge difference in pulling more readers to your blog. A plain text post can be dull for most of the readers, even if you have written great content. Unless you are not popular like Darren, you have to put extra effort in every possible way to make your post look more attractive to visitors.

How to search images for blog posts?

Flickr is the most popular site used by bloggers for searching images. There is a large community sharing pictures with each other, giving you ample options to choose your required images. Another excellent free stock photo site is Everystockphoto, where you can find thousands of free and licensed images. Wikimedia Commons is also used by large community of users for using various types of media files, including the pictures. All pictures under this site are licensed under the creative commons license.

Licensing Issues

If we are using images in our posts, we need to be aware of its license status. Some images are exclusively copyrighted and cannot be used elsewhere, without the written permission of the owner. Flickr allows you to license your images as per your needs. You can find thousands of licensed images on flickr, which you can freely use on your blog, provided you give appropriate attribution to the owner.

SEO Concerns

If properly implemented, the images in your posts can bring huge traffic to your blog. A proper defined META description tag of your image can give your image higher rankings in SERP's of Google image search.

Proper Image Placement

Do not put a large image at the beginning or end of the post. The starting section should always be reserved for the keyword rich section. Do not stuff too many images in a single post. If the image is large align it in center, else you can align on either side and wrap it around the post content.

Spicing Up The Picture

Whenever you decide to modify any licensed image, make sure the owner has given the modification rights in his license. Various effects can be added to the images to make them more attractive. You can add shadow effect, magnify some part, put arrows, or bubble dialogue cloud in your image to explain things better in your image. All this extra work on images can be easily done by SnagIt.

Do you use images in your blog posts, or prefer plain text posts? Which software do you use to edit your pictures?

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Twitter: Building Your E-Brand

Twitter is gaining vast popularity, and is used in many ways by the bloggers to network and promote their blogs. The micro-blogging aspect of twitter gives it edge over other similar services. It's an excellent tool to build your e-brand. If we have large fan following on twitter, and we religiously interact and update our tweets, the amount of exposure we get is huge. I get about 30% of my traffic from twitter. Let's see how you can use this wonderful tool and help grow your blog in no time.

Image credit: luc legay

It's not messenger

Some novice bloggers think it, as a kind of messenger service, but it is not a messenger. On twitter you release the information that is spread out to your followers as well as to the public time line, where other users can find your tweet if they have set filters to grab tweets for particular keywords. You can monitor the twitter public time line via TwitSpy.

It's all about branding yourself

Twitter has the power to build your brand and make you an authority in your niche. Normally, new users wonder what to do after creating a twitter account. Start with redirecting your feed to twitter with the help of TwitterFeed. It will automatically tweet your posts giving good exposure to your blog. Make strong network with fellow bloggers, and encourage constructive discussions with them. Do not forget to provide useful links and resources to your followers via regular tweets. It keep them looking for your tweets for new relevant information.

Tweet, tweet and tweet

Once you start tweeting, it can be addictive. It depends on you how you face this situation and adjust accordingly. Use desktop clients like Twhirl to reduce the time lag spent via web interface.

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