Blogging Tools That I Use

To help one build traffic there are lots of FREE tools available to help. I am amazed at what is provided for bloggers to use. Here are the tools I use.

Google Analytics - This provides the ability to find out how many readers are coming to your site, from where, how often they are coming and which articles there are reading. This is a great tool to find out who is your audience. Other services such as Sitemeter, Feedburner and Crazy Egg provide similar services. For perspective, I started with Google Analytics and have not used the other applications.

FeedBurner - This provide your readers an easy way to get feeds from your blog, via what ever feed reader they would like to use. I use Feedburner and highly recommend using this tool.

Technorati - This tool lets you know which blogs are linking to to yours. It helps you find who is interested in your content. It will also help you find out if a blog is copying your content. I have not registered in Technocrati yet.

Alexa - Helps you find out your traffic rank in the worldwide Internet. Not surprisingly Yahoo!, MSN and Google are the top 3. My Wealth Builder is currently 626,012 after 6 1/2 months, as of February 25, 2007.

Google Page Rank - This let's you find out how Google ranks your blog for search. Check Page Rank is the tool I use to track page rank. Page Rank ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). My Wealth Builder has a page rank of 3 as fo February 25, 2007.

These are the main tools I use for getting data on blog traffic. The best part is that they are currently available to everyone for free.

My Sources of Information on Getting Started in Blogging

As I was getting started, I checked out a few reference sites to understand more about blogging. For your use and enjoyment, here are the sites I found most useful.

ProBlogger - Darren Rowse's blog provides comprehensive, relevant and timely information about blogging and monetizing one's blog. I found A-Z of Professional Blogging to be one of the more useful posts. Also, the Adsense Tips for Bloggers series was helpful.

Steve-Olsen.com - How This Blog Attracted 100,000 Visitors in the First 30 Days is a great post on what Steve did and also provides a list of his references for more tips.

Steve Pavlina.com - How to Make Money From Your Blog provides a detailed guide on how to monetize your blog and grown your revenue.

SEO Elite - Creating Your Own Blog For Search Engine Optimizations provided a good set of tips on how to get started.

There, you have it. The four primary references I used when starting My Wealth Builder. I hope others find these four blogs as useful as I did.

My Reasons For Blogging

There are many good reasons to blog: to share information, to build a social network; to keep a journal on one's experiences, and to make money.

I started blogging because I wanted to learn about personal publishing and experiment with making money through it. I chose personal finance as the topic area because of my interest and experience in the field. (For reference, I am not, nor have I ever been, a professional in the area of personal finance.)

Blogging was one good way to learn if my personal finance knowledge and experiences were of value. Value to others would initially be measured by readership. Value to me would be first measured by readership and then by monetization. Readership would let me know if I had relevant useful content. Monetization would let me know I had valuable content.

Building readership would be done through:

1. Creating content with excellent quality and relevance.


2. Creating awareness by enabling people to easily find my blog.

Monetization would be done through advertising:

1. Google Adsense contextual advertising would my initial monetization approach. Contextual advertising uses algorithms that evaluate one's site and places relevant advertising on the site. Google is the major contextual advertiser and generates over $9 billion through advertising revenue.


2. Direct sponsorships would be solicited once the blog became established

I soon learned building readership and monetizing my blog would take more time than I had expected:-)