Starting a Blog: Tools
All startup companies need one and if you are thinking about setting up a blog or want to develop any site further, here are some of the tools I’ve been using while starting this blog and have found useful so far.
Blogging platform
I looked into a few blogging solutions and Wordpress seemed the best one for me. I wanted a simple install that can be hosted anywhere, but I also wanted flexibility and possibility to modify the look and features endlessly without superior technical knowledge. So far I’ve been happy with Wordpress and I’m going to post my thoughts on it in a longer post sortly.
What does Google see?
Google Webmaster Tools helps you monitor your site and let’s you submit a sitemap file so that Google will better know to include your site in their index. I hadn’t used this before but after I started Using it it has really taught me a lot how Google’s indexing and ranking work, what keywords Googlebot sees and how the crawling process works.. Yahoo has a similar tool, Yahoo Site Explorer, which it isn’t as comprehensive, but gives you a better view on who’s linking to your blog.
Is anybody reading your blog? Web Analytics
As I’m very much interested and my day job involves web analytics, so Google Analytics was the first tool I started using with this blog. It’s a great free too and is great for different needs. It gives you a fast overview on the traffic your site is getting but the thing I love about it is the fact that you can really dig into the data and see who your users are and what they are doing on your site. I use it a lot and it works great for a site of any size.
Monetizing the site
I wanted to learn more about monetizing a blog, so I decide to run Google AdSense to deliver ads on my blog. It’s a bit hard to tell how much, if any, revenue it’ll generate, but at least installing and using this tool has been quite simple.
Sharing and tracking your feeds
I honestly have not had much subscribers to my feed so the jury’s still out on Feedburner (also surprisingly owned by Google) too. I assume that this will become useful tool later on.
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