10 Tools To Help You Blog Better, Stronger and Faster

Blogging is as easy as it can get today. With a wide choice of platforms and self hosted options available more and more people are turning to blogging than ever before. The trick with blogging, as with anything in life, is being consistent and staying motivated. What if I told you there are some tools that you can use to blog better, stronger and faster?

Here are 10 tools that can take your blogging to new levels.

Writing

If you are finding it hard to blog because you have to log in every time to write and/or format your content then you should look into getting an offline editor. Here are some of the top choices available today.

1. Qumana – This tool is available for Windows and Mac users and is quite versatile in its features. Use it to write your blog posts when you are offline and simply upload it to your blog when you are ready. It’s a good fit for the occasional or professional blogger. Download Qumana here.

2. Windows Live Writer – If you are a PC user then you need to get yourself hooked up with this application. With easy media support, spell checking and an extensive community that releases plugins to extend the application it is one of the most popular offline blog editors around. Get Live Writer here.

3. Ecto – With Ecto you can write and manage entries for your blog(s) offline on your Mac. You can compose, save or edit your entries and enjoy many other features such as spellcheck, creating links, adding attachments, and much more. Get Ecto here.

Notable mention – Scribefire for Firefox.

Staying Up to Date

How does one keep up to date with information that is relevant to their interests today? Especially when it moves so fast and it is easy for you to lose track of whats happening in all the noise. Here’s a few ways that have helped me stay up to date.

1. Google Alerts – Google lets you set up “Alerts” for virtually any topic you like. Simply go to Google Alerts and type in any term you want to be updated on whenever it gets mentioned around the web. You have the option to choose getting alerts from blogs, news articles, videos or a comprehensive alert from multiple sources. This way when something happens in your topic of interest you know about it instantly.

2. Delicious – One of the premier bookmarking services on the web, Delicious is still going strong and can be used to your advantage quite effectively. When you visit the “Popular” section of the site type any term you like and you will be presented with relevant results. Once you do that you can see more “Related tags” on the right sidebar, from here you can dig deeper to get more targeted results.

Creating an account lets you save and form groups for various topics of interest.

3. Twitter saved searches – Twitter saved searches are almost as good as Google Alerts, if not better. On your twitter sidebar you will see a search field, go ahead and type in any term you like. After your results are displayed you will see a prompt to “Save this search“. Once you have saved it will show up on your sidebar as a Saved Search. You can then do a one click search of your term to see the latest tweets about it whenever you like.

Staying Connected

Most bloggers tend to think that the conversation starts and ends on their blogs. Wrong! It can go far beyond that. Here are some tools that you can use to stay connected with your readers.

1. Aweber – Email newsletters have almost become a necessary element of blogging. Aweber provides a great opportunity for you to connect with your readers on a personal level which has worked tremendously for a lot of bloggers. Plus this way you can track everything that happens with your email and even promote special content to your readers. Sign up for Aweber here.

2. Subscribe to comments – If you want your visitors to keep visiting your blog then you need to enable your comments to be subscribed via email. WordPress has numerous plugins that let you do this, like this one. This helps them stay engaged in the discussion and helps your blog grow.

3. Conversing outside a post – Carrying the conversation outside a blog post and letting it evolve and grow is one of the best things you can do to create an engaging audience. Some ways to do that are to actively participate in forums of your interest and occasionally point or link to your blog. The other way is to broadcast your post on twitter to your followers and share other “tweets” to gain a bigger following.

Reading and Writing

1. Books - Blogging is a very literary pastime, or occupation for some. If you want to write constantly you have to read constantly. Nothing is better than refreshing your mind with fresh content.

Naturally your first course of action is to read other people’s blogs. But this can quickly lead to distraction as you are constantly online for that. Let’s face it this IS the internet. My advice? Buy or borrow a book and go off too the park. Take your moleskine notebook and draw or doodle. Do anything out of the ordinary, except sit in front of your computer all day so that you can blog better, stronger and faster when you do.

If you have any of your own tips or tools feel free to leave a comment.

• Published: July 1, 2009
• Posted in Blog
• 1 Comment »