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Stat Tracking Tools

The following tools will allow you to keep up-to-date statistics about your blog including the number of RSS subscribers, website visitors, other blogs linking to you, and even tracking where your visitors are clicking. I recommend you sign up for the following services.

• Feedburner - Your feed count (total number of RSS subscribers) is the foundation of your blog’s authority and credibility. By tracking your feed count using Feedburner, you monitor the popularity of your blog over time. This is one tool that every blogger should employ on their blogs. Besides, if you don’t know how many subscribers you have, you don’t know the true health of your blog.

• Technorati - Technorati is the leading blog directory. Technorati tracks over 80 million blogs and keeps up to date information on all of them, including how many other bloggers link to them, the topics they write about, and the frequency of their posting. Your Technorati “authority” is determined by how many unique blogs have linked to you within the past six months.

• Google Analytics - Analyze your traffic with Google’s analytic tool. Stay up to date with all of your traffic statistics and sources. Everyone needs to have Google Analytics installed to their site.

• CrazyEgg - Crazy Egg is an incredible heat-map testing toul that will allow you to see and analyze all of the clicks that are occurring on your site or blog. Not only can you see how many clicks are occurring on your blog, but you can also see where they are coming from, and if from a search engine, what they searched with to find your blog!

Photo Sharing

One way to dramatically improve your blog is to find and attach appropriate photos to your blog posts. Adding a unique photo to a blog post is a great way to make your blog stand out.

• Stockxchange - Stockxchange provides a great cullection of stock photos for you to use, and not to mention, it’s FREE. You can find all kinds of photos for just about anything and you won’t have to worry about spending a dime or infringing on a copyright. I highly recommend this site to everyone.

• Flickr - Flickr is one of top photo sharing sites on the Internet. Why is Flickr so popular? One reason is that you can store a up to 200 photos with a basic account. Add to that, they provide numerous ways to syndicate your photos, such as displaying as a gallery on your blog or sharing them with your friends.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is something that all bloggers should keep in mind when it comes to marketing their blogs and increasing their readerships. I recommend the following social media websites.

• Digg - The Digg Effect… You may have heard of this site, and for good reason. Many sites and blogs have “spiked” their traffic from the massive audience that can be reached by simply being voted to the top of the site’s stories. If you make it to the front page, you may find yourself with so much traffic that your server crashes…

• MyBlogLog - MyBlogLog is a social networking site for bloggers. If you’ve ever seen a “Recent Readers” area on a blog with a bunch of faces, you are most likely looking at a tool that updates every time a member of mybloglog visits that particular blog. I highly recommend that you join this community because it is one of the fastest ways to get your blog out there for everyone to see.

• StumbleUpon- StumbleUpon is one of the better social media marketing tools. With over 4 million active Stumblers, it has become very easy to see a surge in traffic thanks to StumbleUpon. They have also built some great social networking tools in StumbleUpon, so it is easy to keep up to date on your friend’s Stumble activities.

• Del.icio.us- Del.icio.us is perhaps the most popular social bookmarking website. Users “post” their favorite stories to Del.icio.us and their friends can see what articles and other websites they bookmarked. Not only that, but if enough people bookmark your link, it will go to the Del.icio.us Popular page, bringing you tons of traffic!

• Entrecard - Entrecard is your Internet business card. An Entrecard is a 125×125 block advertisement for your blog. Through the Entrecard network, you can display your Entrcard on other blogs in your niche. You do this by earning and spending credits on other blogs. I recommend every blogger check out Entrecard to increase the amount of traffic they receive from other blogs within their niche.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around since the beginning of the web, but it is something we are seeing more and more bloggers start to practice. Email marketing is simply sending out a monthly newsletter promoting your blog or your company’s products and services. When it comes to email marketing, there is only one company I recommend.

• Aweber - Aweber could possibly be the easiest to use email marketing program. Creating web forms and auto responder messages could be the missing link to your online success. Aweber is the online leader in email marketing.