Doing well as a blogger requires more than just great writing skills, a niche and an audience. It also takes the right tools to make managing your ideas and getting feedback easier. There are a number of tools that can help.

WordPress

My own favorite blogging platform. It’s free and the sheer number of plugins and widgets available to improve a Wordpress blog make it even better. It comes ready for you to choose the right permalink structure, block comment spam with Akismet, and more.

blogging

But of course you can add a lot to it. There are plugins to help you manage ads, syndicate your feeds, manage comments and do more to make your blog friendly to you and your users.

One of my favorite plugins is Subscribe to Comments. I like allowing visitors to subscribe to a post so that when more comments are made, they know about it. It’s a good way to make it easier to follow the blog conversation.

Tabbed Browsing

I remember hating tabs at first. Looking back, I have no idea why. It’s wonderful to not need to open new windows constantly, and I find it much easier to flip through the various tabs when I’m researching a topic for a blog post or just reading for fun.

Analytics

Any analytics program is better than none. I’ve used Google Analytics, Stat Counter’s free version, and 103 Bees. They each report just a little differently, and you can get great data from any of them.

Syndication

Like many bloggers, I use FeedBurner to syndicate most of my feeds. It’s pretty useful and an easy way to track.

Spam Blocking

It doesn’t matter if your blog is new and pretty much unknown or established and popular. You probably have to deal with a lot of comment spam.

Akismet is installed in Wordpress by default. It’s easy to use and catches a lot of spam. Like any other spam blocker, it will give some false positives and false negatives, so you cannot expect it to substitute for reviewing your comments yourself.

There are newer solutions such as Defensio. I haven’t tried that one yet myself, but I’ve seen some pretty good buzz about it.

Image Resources

Free is good when it comes to images, and you can find royalty free images pretty easily online. My own two favorite sources are Stock.xchng and Flickr, using the Creative Commons sort to find images that can be used for just a photo credit.

Despite what some people say, do not assume that images you find using Google Image Search are royalty free. There is nothing to indicate they are, and many are not.

I resize my images using Fireworks. It’s pretty easy to use, and the program I’m used to. I’ve used Adobe at times as well. Resizing the images on my computer makes good sense since smaller images use less bandwidth and I can control them more easily.

Peace and Quiet

Yeah, right. I work at home with two small children in the house.

Seriously, if I can get peace and quiet I can be far more productive than when there are constant demands or questions being asked. It’s kind of an obvious one.

So how do I get it?

My favorite tactic is to blog when the kids are sleeping. No guilt, no questions asked. But if I want to work and they aren’t sleeping, sending them outside to play works. This depends on the weather, but my kids will play outside for longer periods and with fewer questions outside than if I were to plunk them in front of the television. Electronic babysitter indeed!

No, peace and quiet isn’t a blogging tool as such , but you try working without it!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,