Blogging resource #2 - your Blog is online, now what?
Posted by Pat Kitano at 10/3/2006 9:10 PM 
Categories: Technology, How-To's, Cool Web Tools, Blogging
Categories: Technology, How-To's, Cool Web Tools, Blogging
I'm currently guiding several real estate acquaintances in setting up blogs this week. One has already set up her blog and I'm posting tips and hints on subscribing to some of the free blog management tools and services. I should mention we're (students collectively) quite open to additional advice/comments too.
Subscribe to these services -
Feedburner - burn your feed (using the feed url - for Wordpress, look under the Feed Stats) and Feedburner manages your RSS feeds. On the "Optimize" bar, activate all the services - they all have value. Likewise, activate the services you want on the "publicize" bar.
Technorati - claim your blog and Technorati starts tracking who is linking to your blog.
Chicklet creator - creates the chicklets that you often see on blog sidebars. Test them after they are created. (OOPS - forgot to mention Wordpress.com doesn't allow chicklets because their java script is vulnerable to hacking)
Google Analytics - free website analysis application with detailed drill down capabilities.
Hittail - free real time hit monitor that shows referral sources into your blog. Special feature is identifying search query words usable for Google Adwords campaigns that you may not have thought of (the "long tail" words).
Sitemeter - free real time hit monitor similar to Hittail with additional analytical features.
Both Google Analytics and either Hittail/Sitemeter complement each other in assessing traffic drivers and leads
Writely - it's nice to compose numerous articles on a separate web-based Word-like application. I've lost several posts by forgetting to save them within the blog platform app.
Bloglines -you'll need at least one feed aggregation reader to subscribe to all the blogs and other web sources you will track as a blogger. I started with Bloglines and I guess I'm stuck with it (it's works well). Researching blog content daily offer timely ideas for your next blog and also confirm popular topics that do not bear repeating. There are many feed aggregators to choose from. And to really overload your senses on which blogs to browse, here is the now famous list of 500 Real Estate Blogs
Blogtopsites - many of the real estate bloggers have submitted their blogs to Blogtopsites. It's interesting to see how your blog traffic stacks up with other real estate blogs. There seem to be a lot of blog submission sites , I haven't really explored these submissions or whether they add value.
Here are two online email marketing campaign management services. Since you're already writing the content, it's easy to do a weekly mailing to your contact list... I rarely get opted out, blog content is fresh, not like the canned email newsletter you normally receive.
Zookoda - a free email marketing campaign app for bloggers. I didn't have patience to figure it out, the templates seemed a bit stiff.
Intellicontact - recommended by Jim Cronin . I'll be trying it out. I was trying out ConstantContact the past month but Intellicontact has more features and is cheaper.
Finally, some handy tools -
An online photo resizing application will help fit those jpegs into the blog in proportion.
YourGMap is a personal google mapping application. Here's a quick application I built for my friends listing my favorite (mostly damn cheap and good Chinese) Asian restaurants in San Francisco's Richmond.
And for finding more tools, here is The Unofficial Web Applications List.
Technorati tags technorati feedburner zookoda intellicontact sitemeter writely blogtopsites google analytics bloglines hittail web 2.0 tools blog tools
Pat, What a helpful post. You've just started yourself and now you're equipping others. I'll have to check out that list of 500 real estate blogs.
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Bonnie, if mentoring blogging were a multi-level scheme, you would be a millionaire mentor... just the immediate experience of the learning curve makes it easy for me to review the steps I've taken for others to follow....
--pk
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Thank you for the information provided in your blog. Now I am armed with more tools that I believe will help me with my blogs. I will be back for more reading!
http://www.monthly-newsletter.net
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Hi, I would suggest a few other points in selecting a real">http://www.yourwealthylifestyle.com/">real estate investmenting coach. Make sure that they have actual experience in commercial real estate investment, sales, or lending. Hopefully they will provide you with access to experts in related fields to help you understand all aspects of the business.
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