29 Tools to Enhance Your Business Blog
Are you looking for cool blogging tools to enhance your business blog?
The right mix of blogging plugins and widgets can make it easier to blog and also help you achieve your business goals.
To help you keep up with the latest and greatest, we asked a group of blogging pros to share the favorite new tools they’ve recently discovered.
Here are the latest blogging tools adopted by these social media pros.
#1: Lucky Orange
Nichole Kelly
Arsham Mirshah of Web Mechanix turned me on to Lucky Orange. It allows you to watch activity on your site in real time and play back people’s sessions.
I’ve been using it to watch fall-off and landing page activity. It has heat maps so you can see where people are engaging with your pages, and it even has live chat. You can proactively chat with someone who is on a page and let them know you are there to help or people can reach out to you directly when you have chat online.
26 Essentials for Blogging Success: What You Need to Know
Do you want to be a more successful blogger?
Are you keeping up with the newest developments in blogging?
Whether you are new to blogging or you have been blogging for years, you will find insight in this article.
It covers 26 blogging essentials, in an A–Z tour of the blogosphere.
Each one has a full explanation, along with a link to further reading in case you want to know more.
Note: For simplicity’s sake, I assume you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform. Many of these essentials, though, apply to other blogging platforms as well.
#1: Akismet: Anti-Spam Plugin
One problem that every blog faces is spam. Shady Internet marketers will attempt to promote their products through spam comments and trackbacks, which create a poor impression for your readers. (Imagine seeing a building covered in graffiti and scrappy posters: it wouldn’t give you much confidence in the company that owns the building.)
Some hapless bloggers spend hours every month deleting a never-ending stream of spam. But Akismet, a powerful anti-spam plugin, will do all the hard work for you. By stopping spam comments and trackbacks, Akismet ensures that your blog comments section always looks attractive and welcoming to readers. As they explain:
Akismet monitors millions of blogs and forums, watching the methods and tricks used by spammers in real time. We know all about their spambots, comment factories, buffer sites and social engineering tricks.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Is your blog slow?
Do you want to improve the experience for readers?
In this world of instant gratification, speed of content delivery really can impact your business.
Keep reading to discover ways to increase the speed of your website.
Why Website Speed Is Important
First impressions matter.
One way to see how fast your website is loading is to use Pingdom.
With Pingdom, you identify what areas of a web page are fast, slow or too big, what best practices you're not following and so on.
When new visitors come to your site, the first thing they notice is the load speed and then the design.
Even if you have a fantastic website, if your page doesn’t load fast enough, visitors might leave before they see your website design.
22 Top Blogging Tools Loved by the Pros
Do you blog?
Looking for exciting new tools to simplify the blogging experience? If so, keep reading.
We decided to get the scoop on today’s hottest blogging tools.
We asked 22 pros to share their favorite new finds. Here they are…
#1: InboxQ
Mitt Ray @MittRay
A great blogging tool I discovered a few months ago is InboxQ. I like it because it helps me come up with better blog topics. This tool helps you find questions people are asking on Twitter.
InboxQ lets you create campaigns with different keywords. Usually the best thing to do is to create campaigns with keywords from topics you specialize in. So when someone asks a question with those keywords, you will be updated about it and you can answer the question.
You can work on these questions and come up with better blog topics in your area of specialty. For example, I have two campaigns: one on white papers with keywords like white paper, whitepaper, etc., and the other on social media with keywords like social media, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc.
How to Use the New Facebook WordPress Plugin: A Complete Guide
Do you blog?
Facebook has released a highly comprehensive plugin for WordPress.
With the new plugin, you can perform sophisticated auto-publishing to your Timeline and add many Facebook features to your self-hosted WordPress blog. (This plugin does not work on blogs hosted on WordPress.com.)
This makes advanced Facebook social sharing features accessible to everyone.
This detailed article tells you how to install and use this powerful plugin.
#1: Install the Facebook Plugin on Your Blog
From inside your WordPress admin dashboard, go to the Plugin section and search for “Facebook.” The Facebook plugin for WordPress should appear at the top of the search results.
Search for the word "Facebook" and the right plugin will be the first to appear in the search results.
13 Tools to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing
Are you looking for tools to simplify your social media activities?
Many businesses feel overwhelmed when implementing their social media marketing.
Sometimes the solution is to focus on the right social media tools for your business.
We asked social media experts for their most valuable tool for small businesses using social media. Here are 13 tools to help you execute your social media strategy effectively.
#1: Crowdbooster
Amy Porterfield @amyporterfield
Crowdbooster is my tool of choice to manage social media activities on Facebook and Twitter.
This tool does many things to help me save time and streamline activities.
For example, it auto-posts on both my Facebook page and Twitter, tracks my new fans and followers, and gives me stats on how many times my content has been shared and retweeted.
26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts
Do you blog? Feel like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel time and again?
Looking for some ideas to simplify your content creation process?
What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, to help you create optimal blog posts every time you sit down to write.
#1: Anatomically Correct
A blog post contains several areas that require our attention and care. Pamela Seiple refers to six parts of the anatomy of a lead-generating blog post:
- Eye-catching title
- In-text links to landing pages
- Sidebar/banner calls to action
- Social sharing buttons
- Call to action at the bottom
- Relevancy—making sure the post is relevant from top to bottom
