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Get More Done: 7 Must-Have Tools for Blogging Efficiency

September 20, 2011

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Blogging Efficiency

This is a guest post by Adam on improving blogging efficiency. You can check out the guidelines for guest posting on our write for us page.

You can’t escape it.

No matter how passionate you are about your blog, if you’re looking to drive traffic and actually make money from the process, there will be things that feel like “work”.

Probably because it is.

But fear not, because you’re about to discover seven tools which free up your time to do what you love: create more quality content and thus improve overall blogging efficiency.

Ready? Then let’s roll…

Link Assistant

Link Assistant is a God-send. It lets you quickly compile a list of authoritative sites in your market. Then, you can send an email to each website (Link Assistant automatically stores contact info). It even tracks responses, and lets you track your status with each.

Which sites responded? Who is interested in your offer? Who requires followup? Link Assistant lets you know all these detail in its simple interface.

I routinely use Link Assistant for blogger outreach, hiring contractors (developers, designers, writers, etc.) and offering strategic alliances. In other words, I use Link Assistant for everything but link prospecting (which it’s designed for).

Here’s an example: let’s say you’ve created a DYNAMITE eBook for your subscribers. Using Link Assistant, you can contact authoritative websites in your market and let them give it away to their subscribers, too. This helps build your brand, and will drive tons of free traffic to your site.

And speaking of traffic…

Rank Tracker

Sure, Google Analytics will show you what keywords are sending you traffic. But what about keywords which could send you traffic – and lots of it – if your site moved from page 3 to page 1 in Google?

Enter Rank Tracker. Simply enter keywords into the program, and it routinely checks the search engines to see where your site appears. It even graphs your progress over time.

And if you’re not certain about which keywords to enter, go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter your website URL. It then spits out 300 (or more) keywords related to your site. Then download them into Excel and paste them into Rank Tracker. Boom. Instant overview of your site’s performance in the search engines.

The next step is to build links to those pages that already appear high in the search engines, but not quite high enough.

SENuke

SENuke is an incredibly powerful, misunderstood and abused piece of software. Powerful, because it automates many link building tasks; misunderstood and abused because people use it to spam the Internet.

Here’s how it works: you write a piece of content. Then, using SENuke, you can quickly distribute it to dozens of article directories and social network sites like Blogger and Hubpages. It even submits videos to 30+ video sharing sites like YouTube.

But that’s just the beginning. Because once that content is distributed, SENuke lets you bookmark each of those pages, then take the RSS feeds from each bookmark and submit those to over 30 RSS feed directories.

Whew. That’s a lot of links!

Now you can see why people use it to create spam. But here’s the thing: used properly , it’s a very powerful tool. The key is to create valuable content, and use SENuke as a launchpad for getting it noticed.
Used this way, you can quickly build your site’s authority.

My Blog Guest – Unique Blogging Efficiency tool

MyBlogGuest is a brilliant idea for bloggers. Basically, you upload a post, and website owners request exclusive rights to publish it on their site. It’s a win-win: they get free, unique content, and you get links and traffic to your site.

But how do you decide which website to give your content to? For that, you need the…

SEOMoz Toolbar

The SEOMoz Toolbar lets you tell at a glance how authoritative a website is based on a scale of 1 – 100. It’s logarithmic, which means going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 70 to 80.

Authority counts for a lot in SEO. Higher authority links will increase your own authority, which in turn increases your rankings for keywords.

Aweber

Aweber is an autoresponder. It lets you capture visitors email address, and send them unlimited follow up messages at pre-determined intervals. For example, you could create a 7 day training course, where subscribers receive one lesson each day for seven days.

There’s another feature called “broadcasting”, which allows you to send an email to everyone on your list, no matter when they signed up. This is usually reserved for product launches or special time-sensitive announcements (e.g. 48 hour discounts, live events, webinars, etc.)

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is my favorite analytics tool. It records people visiting your site, then displays their interaction via heatmaps.

This is essential for optimizing your website’s use experience, sales funnel and other conversion factors.

For example, how many people even see your opt-in form? Crazy Egg shows you where people are focused on your site, which lets you put premium content, ads or buy now buttons right in front of them.

If you use WordPress, this heat map plugin is a cheaper, limited alternative (but still worth it; I own this plugin myself).

So there you have it: seven simple tools to improve blogging efficiency and make your blogging life easier. Now get to work!

About the author 

Guest Blogger  -  

These posts are submitted by our Guest Bloggers. We accept guest posts on topics that are relevant to our blog like blogging, internet entrepreneurship tutorials, affiliate marketing, social media etc. You can read more about how to submit guest posts by visiting our write-for-us page.

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members. Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

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