Free Tools and Services for Bloggers Part 5

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.

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Free Tools and Services for Bloggers Part 2

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.

COMMENTS

1. DISQUS Comment System: Replaces your platform’s default commenting system. A must have for blogger users where even embedded form has popups (for captcha and user/url options).
2. Intense Debate Comment System: Another good comment system with a cool “Reply via Email” option. Only thing I found annoying is the need to confirm for comment subscription via email! Further Reading: How to Install Intense Debate on Blogger.

CONTACTS

1. Formsmarts: A free form maker. You can use pop-up link options for platforms that do not let you embed JavaScript.
2. Kontactr: A basic contact form available for embedding or as popup.
3. HideText:  Lets you create image from text. Ideal to hide your email contact address from spam bots.
4. E-Mail Scrambler: Lets you scramble e-mail address (if you still want to embed it) in a format not recognizable by bots. You have to paste some code in the theme’s head section for it to work properly.

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Free Tools and Services for Bloggers part1

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.

Advertising:

1. Blog Banner Clicks: Blog Banner Clicks lets you place your 125×125 banner on their homepage for free. Banners are ranked according to number of clicks. More clicks you get, more exposure you get.
2. EntreCard: Entrecard is a blogging network where you can buy and sell ad space for credits. Perfect for newbie bloggers as you can advertise without spending a penny.
3. AdGridWork: AdGridWork is a free targeted network for websites and blogs. You have to place your ad on your blog and after that, your ads will be served. They offer a lot of statistics for ad tracking.
4. Chitika AdPro: AdPro is a free offering from Chitika. They let you sell space on your blog directly without any fees and set up advertiser accounts so that advertisers get all info they need about ad performance. And you get 100% revenue after all this!

Let me know via your comments about this articles..

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Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog in Ease

About a decade back, nobody thought that blogs would transform from a personal diary to full-fledged money making websites. Blog monetization strategies have undergone several transitions during these years, and bloggers have tons of monetization options at their disposal. One of the options is 'Direct Advertisements'. Interestingly, large number of bloggers does not use this option for many reasons. Let's try to understand the dynamics of direct advertising and the methods to grab direct advertisement deals. 

If you own a blog with decent traffic (at least 500-1000 unique visits/day) and are planning to monetize it, direct advertising is an excellent option for you. Quality content and good traffic are two most important prerequisites before pitching for direct advertising.

 Advantages of Direct Advertising

Cuts out the middleman - Almost every blogger who has monetized his/her blog is familiar with PPC (pay-per-click) ads served by popular 3rd party advertising networks. Since they act as a middleman between the advertiser and the publisher, they take a good share of revenue. On the other hand, getting direct ads from advertisers removes the middleman and you as a publisher get full incentive for your service.

More choice on type of ads - You can offer almost any type of ad format for the advertisers. With 3rd party advertisements, you have limited choices with some predefined standard ad formats. Through direct advertising you can offer a wide array of ad formats with much more flexible ad placements. Following are some popular ad types used by bloggers.

1. Banners (Animated/Static)
2. Text Links
3. RSS Ads
4. Newsletter Ads
5. Site Reviews
6. Audio/Video Ads

When you are in complete control of your ads, advertisers gets more variety to choose from that suits his business demands.

Flexible payment options - Another advantage is acceptance of payment in multiple ways. If an advertiser is not willing to pay by one method you can opt for the second. Normally, bloggers prefer wire transfer or Paypal as the best method to get payments from advertisers. Still, if an advertiser chooses any other payment medium you can be flexible and can go ahead with that option without any chance of losing the deal.

Long-term relationships - More than often, bloggers develop long term relationships with advertisers who are satisfied with their service. This not only opens the door for consistent stream of income from these advertisers, but also increases the probability of grabbing more advertising deals through referrals of these satisfied advertisers.

Flexible pricing - Since you are in complete control of your ad inventory, you can exercise extreme flexibility while quoting price of different types of ads to grab virtually every advertising deal that comes in your way.

Builds Credibility - A blog that gets consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds it's credibility and is seen as an authority in it's niche.

Disadvantages of Direct Advertising

Difficulty in finding advertisers - Initially, a lot of effort goes in finding advertisers for your blog. Sometimes, it may take considerable time before any such deal is finalized. Once you start getting the deals, things become easier though you still have to move your legs aggressively to clinch new deals.

Time consumption - Keeping track of ad inventory, negotiating deals with advertisers, keeping track of payments and time deadlines consumes lot of precious time. If you have multiple blogs that are updated daily, things can become more difficult as considerable part of your blogging schedule is spent in maintaining your ad inventory and in finding new advertising deals.

Disputes - Sometimes, an advertiser is not satisfied with the results and may nullify the agreement from his end demanding refund of his payment. This can also lead to negative feedback to other advertisers in the pool.

Preparations For Getting Direct Advertising

Before you decide to approach advertisers, you must do some very important preparations to increase the probability of clinching your first direct advertising deal.

Create a dedicated advertising page - An advertising page concentrates all the necessary information needed to convince potential advertisers (kind of a portfolio of your blog). This page tabulates the most important statistics about your blog. In simple words, this page gives all the reasons why advertisers should choose your blog for advertising.

Following are some of the essential ingredients of a typical advertising page.

About your blog section - This section gives a brief introduction about your blog. What it's all about, it's niche, target audience and the purpose of its existence (reader's perspective).

Traffic statistics - The most important part of advertising page. Give all the important data related to your blog traffic to convince the potential advertisers. Following are some major blog statistics that are commonly used by bloggers in their advertising page.

1. Page Views (per day/ per month)
2. Unique Visits (per day/ per month)
3. Alexa/Compete and Similar Services Ranks
4. Number of Feed Subscribers
5. Demographic Data (V. Imp)

Some advertisers don't give much importance to Alexa and similar ranks but others do take them into consideration, so its better to include them in your traffic statistics section. Similarly, providing concentrated demographic data increase the chances of getting advertising deals.

Available Ad Slots - In this section the available ad inventory is showcased. This includes each ad type, their format, their exact placement and the number of such slots available for any location. To give a clearer picture you must supplement this section with appropriate snapshots of ads placed in a particular location.

Now here comes the tricky part. What about pricing of ads? Should we straightaway quote the price of each available ad slot? Well, I would strongly suggest you to keep your cards closed. Let the advertiser contact you with relevant details and then you can play your cards according to the situation. Ask for advertiser's website address when he first contacts you. This way you can visit their web site and can get fair idea about their budget and purchasing power. Through this approach, you create an opportunity for yourself to assess the situation and then create a flexible pricing plan. If you publicly display your ad prices, websites with considerably low budget may not approach you and big websites may grab it in much lesser rate then they were willing to pay earlier.

Testimonials - Great marketers use their customers feedback to promote their products. Same rule applies here. Get some testimonials from your satisfied advertisers and prominently display them on your advertising page. This builds your credibility and shows your track record of giving excellent advertising services. Apart from publishing the plain testimonial statement, you can further replenish it by including thumbnail image of the person with his/her designation.

Calculating Advertising Prices

Often newbies are in dilemma about setting the correct price for their advertisements. Sometimes, they fear that quoting a high price can result in loss of advertising deal, while quoting less will be like giving their real estate in pennies. How to overcome this situation and how to correctly calculate the prices for your ad inventory? Here are some basic guidelines to calculate ad prices.

Image Vs Text Ads - Normally image ads are always priced high than text ads. The CTR (click-through ratio) of image ads is much higher than text ads and hence this pricing difference.

Size Does Matter - Larger the size of the banner, higher the price is. If your 125x125 image banner is priced at $30/month, a 250x250 banner should be priced at 4 x 30 = $120/month.

Placement - If the advertisement appears above the fold (area visible without the need of scrolling), it is priced much higher than those ads that appear below the fold. If an ad is going to appear in the footer, it's price will be considerably low than that placed in the header of your blog.

Pricing Model - There are two popular pricing models for advertisements. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model and CPA (cost per action) model. The CPM model is the preferred way to calculate ad prices and is widely accepted model throughout blogosphere. In this model, a fixed amount is paid for every 1000 page views, simple. But how would you calculate the right price for a particular ad in this model? Here are some ways to do it.

The best way to get the correct value of an ad is to check public ad inventories and see their CPM rate. Login to your Adsense account and go to advanced reports to view the CPM rate for a particular ad. Take at least month long data to get the clear picture, though a long-range data will give much more accurate rate. Let's suppose you get a CPM rate of $1.20 from the report. Now according to your assessment of the purchasing power of the advertiser you can increase or decrease this rate. A low budget advertiser can be offered a rate of $1.00 or $0.80, while a big web site can be asked for a CPM rate of $1.50.

Let's assume that the deal is finalized with a rate of $1.50 CPM. How the monthly rate will be calculated? Suppose your blog generates 5000 page views per day. This amounts to 30 x 5000 = 150000 page views per month. So, at this rate the price of the ad will be (150000 / 1000) * 1.50 = $225/month.

Daniel Scocco has written an excellent article about calculating ad prices for your advertising space. If you are still in dilemma, you can also ask an expert to assess your blog's worth.

Finding the Advertisers

Now comes the real tough part (at least for newbies) of finding advertisers for your blog. There are many ways to do it.

Visit Marketplaces - There are several popular forums and discussion boards where advertisers and publishers meet solely for the purpose of finding and negotiating advertising deals. You can visit Digital Point - Buy, Sell or Trade Forum, SitePoint Marketplace and Webmaster World Commercial Exchange Forum to find advertisers for your blog.

Check Competitor's blogs - Visit popular blogs related to your blog's niche and see who is advertising on these blogs. This is a good source of creating a list of potential advertisers. Since they are already advertising on a blog related to your blog's niche, a chance of clinching a deal from these advertisers is more likely to happen.

Check public ad inventories - Some 3rd party advertising networks give public access to their inventory to account holders. Sign-up for these ad networks and browse their ad inventory. Again, filter out advertisers related to your blog's niche. Here not only you can get a list of potential advertisers but can also get a fair idea about how much they are willing to pay.

Write a blog post about it - This is one more way to attract advertisers. Write a blog post explicitly stating that your blog is now open for direct advertising.

Search engines - And last but not the least is search engines. Type in relevant keywords and visit the web sites. Check their contact page and create a list of potential advertisers.

How To Approach Potential Advertisers

Once you have the list of potential advertisers in your hand, its time to contact them inviting to advertise on your blog.

Write a mail giving your brief introduction. State your purpose of writing in brief. To speed up the process give your phone number and messenger id. Attach the media kit/rate card showcasing various advertising options available on your blog. It's somewhat similar to mobile version of your 'Advertise' page. However, this document must contain detailed pricing of every ad type. You must also quote discounted prices for long-term deals. One more convincing methodology is to give limited period read-only access to Google Analytics dashboard to verify your traffic claims for long-term deals (6 months or more). This offer increases the confidence of advertiser and the probability of negotiating a deal also increases.

If this is your first advertising deal, be ready to be flexible enough while negotiating pricing of your ads. Remember, your first deal will open the door for more such deals.

What Else I Have Missed?

I would like to know your experiences in maintaining independent ad inventories and your approach towards grabbing such advertising deals.

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CPALead Reward Voucher Site Script

What is CPA Lead?
CPA Lead is a performance-based, online advertising network that develops technologies to promote incentive-based advertisement. Using this service we can reward users who fill in surveys, based on a set ratio of points to $. So you determine your own profit margins!

What surveys are available?
CPA Lead automatically geotargets your users, and only show surveys/competitions available in that country. Below, you can see the gateway in action. Full psds will be provided for this, the logo, and other grapical elements of the site, such as the 3 steps.

What do I need to use/run this script?

* You will need to register at CPA Lead (yes its a refferal link, though please sign up through it as a way of saying thanks for this post, and speedy acceptance into the network regardless of site content)
* You will need a domain name
* You will need hosting with cpanel/database access
* You will need about 20 minutes to set it all up, plus any extra to modify logo/design etc
* You will need to manually send out vouchers to users via email

Is there a referral system
Yes! The referral system works by giving each member a unique id/link, which they can then give to friends etc. Once that referred friend completes a survey, you get 2 points (this can be changed).

Is there an admin area?
Yes, which shows stats and lets you retrieve user data, plus update points.

demo :

http://www.myvouchergeek.com/

Live site:   www.moneybunny.co.cc

download:

http://www.linko.0fees.net/Wd7wZ

http://uploading.com/files/c463915a/cpalead_rewardt

 

Demo: http://www.miniurl.co.nr/nHUXu
New working mirror: http://www.miniurl.co.nr/ZzQRb

New Mirror:
http://kewlshare.com/dl/4fcbb7e1092b/90434543598-nulled-scripts.net.zip.htm

http://megaupper.com/files/14VLYEFL/90434543598-nulled-scripts.net.zip

 

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SoftBiz Nulled Scripts Collection

SoftBiz Nulled Scripts Collection

Contents of Package:

1. ad-management-plus
2. auto-link-checker
3. B2B Trading Marketplace
4. Banner_Exchange_GTT
5. banner-exchange

Download:

http://files.blogsdn.com/download.php?uid=Z9CLYIEW

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