Free Tools and Services for Bloggers Part 5

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Bloggers do not just write articles! They have to do a lot of things to manage and promote their blogs. These activities range from commenting to finding useful design and software tools. Often such tools are life savers, allowing more time for the business of writing and keeping readers happy. But at the same time, finding perfect tool for a task is difficult and time consuming. So, we searched internet for best free blogging tools and services for bloggers and summed them up in this post.

Monetization:

1. Google Ad Manager: Google Ad Manager is a hosted solution for ad management. You can sell you ad space easily with it and also place other HTML ads. We are using it to manage our ads.
2. OpenX: OpenX is an open source ad management platform that is available as hosted or downloadable solution. Recommended for beginners.
3. Web Valuer: Tells you value of your website in dollars.
4. How Much is My Blog Worth?: Tells you value of blog based on Technorati Authority. You can also copy the given code for a little show off!
5. Dollar$hower ProdFinder: Lets you find a good ad network for monetizing your blog.
6. PayPal: Online transaction service. You can use it to accept payments from advertisers, donations and payments from ad networks. Creating an account is free. Only fees involved are during transactions(usually 2.5 to 3.5 % of transaction)

Offline Blog Editors:

1. Windows Live Writer: Windows live writer is a free offline blog editor from Microsoft. It supports most of the popular blogging platforms.
2. BlogDesk: BlogDesk is also a good feature rich offline editor. However, it does not support Blogspot.
3. ScribeFire: Available as an extension of Firefox, it is a good multi platform editor.
4. ByteScout Post2Blog: Another good editor which can automatically embed your pictures and other multimedia files. However, it can not add tags for Blogspot platform.

SEO:

1. Website Grader: Provides a score for things like website traffic, SEO, popularity, etc., giving some basic advice on improving your blog from a marketing perspective.
2. Review my Web: A report that compares you to competitors in your niche.
3. SEOmoz.org: A suite of tools such as rank and link checkers, and crawl test which reports how accessible your site is to search engines, highlighting  potential  issues.
4. Fast SERP: Lets you check your rank on major search engines for any keyword.
5. Google Preview: Firefox addon for more information in your search results – inserts preview images (thumbnails) and popularity ranks of sites listed.

Stats:

1. 99 Counters: Create customized counters for your blog to show off number of visitors.
2. Google Analytics: The best free analytics suite available online. Tracks lot of data ranging from unique visits to number of clicks.
3. Statcounter: Another free real time analytics suite.
4. Sitemeter: Real time website tracking and counter service.
5. PageRank Alert: Set up e-mail alerts for Page rank updates for any page.
6. Dataopedia: Lets you check almost all statistics (except Page Rank) of any website.
7. Compete: Compares websites based on reach and daily traffic in USA.
8. Alexa: Alexa ranks websites based on their traffic. You can use it to compare your blog with competition based on worldwide or country specific traffic.
9. Site-Perf: Best Site Loading time analysis tool available. You can choose any of the three servers for a world-wide estimate. They even let you adjust number of connections, connection speed and browser!
10. PollDaddy: Lets you create good looking polls and keeps archive of results. You can embed poll as javascript or flash into posts. If you have self hosted wordpress blog, the plugin lets you create polls from there for free.
11. Chart Tools: Lets you create flexible and good looking charts online and share them.
12. Page Rank Widget for Opera: Simple widget that lets you check Page Rank of any page.
13. Alexa Info Widget for Opera: Displays Alexa info for any domain.
14. Linkscape: Analyzes backlinks to URL from over 36 billion URLs.
15. PostRank: A free RSS analyzing service that lets you rank posts from any blog. Also offers a Popular Posts widget. Diggs, Comments, Twets and more than 10 other matrices are used to determine the rank.
16. SearchStatus: A Firefox extension to display Google PageRank, Alexa rank, and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank,  backward/related links, Alexa info and more in your browser.
17. FoxClocks: Keep an eye on the time around the world along with your local time using small clocks in your status bar. Useful for international teams (we are a good example).
18. TimeTracker: Keep track of how much you browse with TimeTracker.
19. QuarkBase: Analyzes full information about a website from platform, framework to host and various ranks.
20. Link Diagnosis: Analyzes complete information about links to a website.

And finally, our 101.5^th Tool:

The Lazy Blogger’s Post Generator: We do not have much to say about it, so we are leaving you with this sample that we generated with it:

“Oh My Gosh! I just woke up to the fact I have not updated this since petrol was cheaper than a bottle of Grange!… You would not believe that I’d been abducted by aliens. Unbelievable.
I am caught inside with an awfully big adventure, personal projects, just generally being a nuisance to the bodyguards of the blogger I am stalking, my day goes from 8am to whenever. I am beyond drunk most of the time. but who cares.
I totally promise I will write something that makes sense soon. Honestly! I mean it!”

These are 101(.5) free tools and services we found for bloggers. Do you have anything to add? Which one is your favorite? Do tell us through comments.

For Further Reading,

Ad Management, Blogger, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Blogspot Tips, Download, Downloads, Web Design, Webmaster Tips, Wordpress Theme