Will these really help me improve my blog?
You might wonder why making a successful blog is so difficult. Imagine if there were 100 grocery stores within a square mile. That’s a ton of competition, and kind of like it is for the blogging community. With so many bloggers and aspiring writers out there, standing out from the crowd is extremely difficult… but not impossible. Not being proactive I’ll tell you right now will not get you the following you want. Being passive with the millions of people trying so hard will get you nowhere, I promise, I’ve been there. Take a look at these options and think what might help you. Pick a path you want to go down, a niche, be persistent, always provide the best content you’re capable of, and don’t give up. Nothing online happens overnight, especially success.
SEOMoz
Do you want to track the performance of your blog? I’m not just talking hits, bounce rate… Google Analytics can do all of that. I’m talking about where your blog currently ranks on Google and how to improve it. I’m talking about analyzing where your SEO and keyword rank currently stands and how to improve it. Between SEOMoz’s on-page recommendations, weekly crawls to notify you of changes (whether they be good or bad), exclusive videos and access to new tools currently being developed and so much more, this is one thing you can’t miss out on. Plus, take advantage of their free, no obligation 30-day trial!
CoffeeCup
Coffeecup is awesome. They have tons of free stuff to download, and what’s not free is cheaply priced. Everything from web graphics to buttons to fonts to entire layouts, e-commerce shopping carts, and so much more. In reality I don’t think there’s anything CoffeeCup doesn’t have. Plus they have one of coolest, most colorful looking websites ever.
Doba
Doba at its heart is a drop-ship company. What’s a drop ship company? You promote products (which Doba has over a million of), and once they’re sold, you do nothing and make profit. How’s that work? Doba provides you with products, not physically but the ability to sell them, you promote them, and once someone goes through your checkout and makes a purchase, Doba sends it to them. For example, if Doba’s sale price to the end-user is $40 and Doba provides you it at a price of $20, you get $20. All you do is create the sale; you’re not on the shipping or customer support side whatsoever. Some of the products you can offer include brands such as Nikon, DeWalt, Seiko, Adidas, Hanes, and Panasonic — the list goes on and on though.
oDesk
oDesk is the best place to have outsourced service done. Sometimes you don’t have enough time to do it all. Or maybe, on the contrary, you’re someone with too much time and a valuable skill that people are willing to pay for. oDesk is the place to be. You can hire (cheaply) people to do things such as write code for you, design websites, write content, just about anything online-related. You can also offer your service and work at an hourly rate. Some huge talent is on oDesk that you should definitely check out and take advantage of.
Alexa
Alexa is hugely popular. They’ve been around for a long time, have an amazing reputation, and are well known in the blogging community. Alexa started off as a website that ranked your site compared to others, and was an index alike to Google and other search engines for you to submit to, and your blog’s ranking was said to increase pretty well when being associated once becoming indexed. They also, however, provide services to website-owners that is very important when you’re simply struggling. If your blog isn’t performing as you think it should, there could be something restricting it. Whether search engines aren’t picking it up properly, your key words are not finding your target market, or your content isn’t optimized properly (where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes in to play), Alexa will tell you. Not only will the reports given tell you, but it’ll give you every single detail on how to fix it, make it better, and take you step-by-step until you reach the top.
SproutSocial
If you have a product or service to sell and you know it’s valuable, or if you can even think of one that you would want to offer, the biggest difficult would inevitably be finding customers. After all, you can have the best deal in the world for people but if the world is unaware of your existence, you don’t stand a chance. SproutSocial brings customers to you, helps your social media efforts, saves you time, effort, and even manages your contacts. The list doesn’t end there… so much more is able to be done with this software. My advice is to check it out and see for yourself!
HootSuite
HootSuite is “hoot sweet”… okay, sorry for that failure and lack of a pun, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s a pretty sweet social media tool! If you run a blog you probably know it’s annoying checking your blog’s Facebook, Twitter, keeping up to date with posts and responding and so on. HootSuite takes all your social media profiles, jams it in to one “suite” (thus the name), and allows you to to instead of having to go from site to site, manage everything in a single window. It’s a huge time-saver, provides analytics as to improve your social media standings, RSS integration, and more. Offered is a free and paid version with of course the paid version offering some features not seen in the free one.
Veer
Veer has so much stuff for a blogger. Too much stuff, almost. Fonts and graphics that you won’t find anywhere else. Lots of free stuff too. Free credits for non-free stuff when you first sign up. Pretty much just something you have to check out or else you’d be missing out big time. Become inspired by Veer’s creativity which hopefully will spark your next big idea.
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