Once you start blogging, you can tap into all sorts of online support tools to make the job easier. Here are a few.
Technorati is a widely used blog search engine and link tracker. Among many other things, Technorati tells you how many blogs link to yours, the ranking (popularity) of those linking blogs, and how your blog ranks in terms of links. Over time, these statistics help you gauge the growth of your audience.
BlogRolling automates the job of building a blogroll. On many blog platforms, the task requires cutting and pasting URL's into HTML code, a rather tedious and time-consuming affair. With BlogRolling, you can add a site to your blogroll with one click. BlogRolling also shows you the number of times your blogroll has been viewed, providing a quick handle on your traffic.
Feedburner is a feed management provider that you can use on your blog to process subscriptions. A nice Feedburner option is the ability to offer site feeds via email, which is more intuitive and convenient than news aggregators for many subscribers. Feedburner also offers a variety of tools for tracking and measuring subscription traffic and monetizing your blog.
Bloglines, in their own words, "is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content." Instead of surfing your favorite blogs for new content, use Bloglines to see them all in one place. With Bloglines, it becomes easy to keep track of hundreds of blogs (or traditional Web sites that offer feeds). Although many sites aggregate subscriptions, this one is the most intuitive and versatile.
PubSub tracks new blog posts that match keyword phrases you enter into a "subscription stack." Marketers use PubSub to keep tabs on what people are saying about their company, new products, and the competition.
IceRocket, the powerful and popular blog search engine, is another great way to get time-critical information. IceRocket works like a normal search engine, but search matches are listed in order of how recently they were posted. If you want to know what's happening in the blogosphere now, IceRocket is the place to find out.
del.icio.us is a bookmarking site that allows you to tag, save, and share URL's of your favorite blog posts and Web pages. With user-defined tags, del.icio.us allows you to categorize URL's any way you want--advantageous if you're saving information for research, reporting, or sharing with colleagues.
Please let us know about other helpful blogging sites!
