I’m gonna let you know some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your blog. I will be presenting you some nice tools that you’ll find useful in blogging. This resources will help you out with your blogging career.  I will start with the basic of resources, the basic that you need and move up to wordpress customization and more, included will be small seo tips for your needs.

Lets get started.

First of all you will need a good domain name, now you can go on and seach for a domain name that you want to have and register it, but it depends on what do you want to do with your blog/site. You can head over to justdropped.com and make an account and see what domain name fits you. Note: this domains will drop soon and you can register any of them. Just search in the site and you will get a domain name for your needs. What you will want to do next is head over to ahrefs and majesticseo and check out how many backlinks does the domain have. Just enter the domain name and then press the magic button, in a few seconds you will find the backlinks number.

If the domain has plenty of backlinks, at least 500 backlinks then you can surley buy it, and also don’t forget to check the PR (PageRank) of the domain here.

Now head over to Godaddy.com and register the domain.  It’s the number 1 in domain registrations.

An alternative way is to go to Google AdWords Tools and seach for a keywords, this is what i recommend to my clients when they want to start a new business or so. Go to Google AdWords Tools, Keywords Tool and enter a keywords and see how many monthly searches it has. Now don’t forget to keep an eye open for the competition of the keywords. Aim for “low competition” with a good number of mothly searches (4.000- 15.000). Register the domain name and include at least a keyword from Google AdWords Tools.

Same here: go to Godaddy.com to register it. It will cost you about $10, but you can find coupons here, which will decrease the price.

Hosting

What you want next is hosting, and i know a couple of good hosting companies out there. Some of them are cheap and reliable.

I recommend you choose the smallest package, because at the beginning of your blogging career you will not need alot of bandwidth and HDD. So it’s recommended to choose the smallest package from the hosts below.

Here is a list of hosting companies that are reliable and good:

1. a. HostGator – the best hosting company out there. It has plenty of satisfied customers and more important, it has great support. Why support? Because when you need something or your website has been hacked or has some issues then you will go to the support center and talk to the guys. They will help you %100.

You can click on “Compare All Hosting Plans” to see the detailed offer.

1. b. BlueHost – Second most loved hosting company out there. It has some nice features and all.

WordPress

Now what you will need is a CMS (content management system) and the best one is WordPress.

WordPress is the best CMS out there, it was #1 in 2012, and it will be in 2013 also. Whats best about this CMS is the possibilty to make a website your own way, you can transform your simple blog into a tube, or business page or more, just with a simple theme. You can find them free all over the internet or you can buy them from profesional theme creators.

Now, lets go to WordPress.org and download the CMS. On the front page you will see a download link, click it and download it.

 Themes

With themes you can customize your blog in lots of ways, for example you can make a tube site with a tube theme, or make a nice magazine blog (this has the most features). You can make your blog as you want it, as you dreamed of. Themes can cost up to $50, but most of them are free. You can search for a free theme on Google: “Free WordPress Theme”.

Here are a few interesting themes:

1. MyThemeShop
2. Genesis
3. Thesis

The above themes are paid themes, but they look really professional and you can customize them as you please. Another great site from where you can buy pro themes is: ThemeForest.net

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the latest hot thing that you want to get your hands on. Basically you only have to build a list of emails from your visitors. You will have to add a newsletter plugin to your WordPress blog, and basically the visitor sees your newsletter plugin and signs up for new posts and news from your site. When you have enough subscribers you can email them news, products and more interesting stuff.

Here are a few tool that will help you out with Email Marketing:

Aweber

MailChimp

GetResponse

 

WordPress Plugins

I will be presenting you a couple of useful plugins that you will need to install them on your blog after you installed WordPress of course. With plugins you can add / remove parts of WordPress and customize it even more. Here are a few of them, most of them i use on daily basis.

1. Ad Injection – this plugin helps you add some nice ads into your post, homepage, pages and sidebars.
2.  Akismet - to stop spam from various bad users: “Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the “Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.”
3. All in One SEO Pack - Best plugin out there for seo. This will help your blog rank higher if you know how to use it. You will need to add tags, descriptions and title in the plugin
4. Google XML Sitemaps -  Add your sitemap into Google, this will help you get indexed fast.
   
5. Jetpack by WordPress.com – This one will get your stats on, if you know what i mean. It will show you stats of your website and more.
   
6. Backup Buddy – it is a paid plugin that will help you backup your files

 

SEO

Lets go to the interesting part now. Which is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but i would like to call it User Optimization, because Google told us that we should focus on user content, to bring users to our sites we should focus on what users really want. Like i said at the beginning of this post you will have to do keyword reseach with Google Adwords Tools / Keyword Tool and find a proper keyword that it is easy to rank for. “low competition” is the way to go nowadays.

Google Keyword Tool – The best keywords research tool you will find.

Market Samurai – It is a good tool to do keywords research with, but it is a paid one, but still good. It has a free trial, so if you want to try it, go ahead, it has lots of tools in it, not just keywords research.

SEO Powersuit – free tool to analyze rankings, spy on competitors, get more out of your site

Here are more tools that you may find useful:

Backlink Investigation

1. Open Site Explorer: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer: http://www.majesticseo.com/
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer: http://ahrefs.com/
4. Link Diagnosis: http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

Server Investigation

1. BuiltWith: http://builtwith.com/
2. Pingdom Full Page Test: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
3. Google PageSpeed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
4. URI Valet: http://urivalet.com/
5. SpyOnWeb: http://www.spyonweb.com/

Website Crawling & Link Checking

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
2. Xenu’s Link Sleuth: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
3. W3C Link Checker: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Content & Markup Analysis

1. SEO Browser: http://www.seo-browser.com/
2. Copyscape: http://www.copyscape.com/
3. W3C Markup Validation Service: http://validator.w3.org/

Keyword Research

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool
2. Wordtracker: https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
3. Ubersuggest: http://ubersuggest.org/
4. Latent Dirichlet Allocation Content Optimizer: http://www.virante.org/seo-tools/lda-content-optimizer

Competitive Keyword Analysis

1. SpyFu: http://www.spyfu.com/
2. SEMRush: http://www.semrush.com/

Social Discovery

1. Shared Count: http://sharedcount.com/
2. SocialMention: http://socialmention.com/
3. Follower Wonk: http://followerwonk.com/

PR & Outreach

1. HARO – Help a Reporter Out: http://www.helpareporter.com/
2. Blogger LinkUp: http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/
3. MyBlogGuest: http://myblogguest.com/
4. DoubleClick Ad Planner: https://www.google.com/adplanner/

Analytics

1. Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
2. Open Web Analytics: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/
3. Piwik: http://piwik.org/

Search Engine Guidance

1. Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/
2. Bing Webmaster Tools: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

SEO Analysis

1. WooRank: http://www.woorank.com/
2. Lipperhey: http://www.lipperhey.com/
3. Pearanalytics: http://www.pearanalytics.com/