Bloggers who have been around for a while probably are familiar with some online tools that can be useful with regards to blogging such as Hubspot Marketing Grader (if you aren’t familiar with that, get familiar) or Hootsuite.
Here are 3 Online Tools for Bloggers you might not know about.
Blog Social Analyzer
You can use the Blog Social Analyzer to check your own blog or someone else’s to see a few key facts such as Alexa, Mozrank and Domain Authority but also to see how much social media sharing is going on. Use it to evaluate yourself or to see if shares are common on a blog you are thinking of guest posting on.
NameChk
NameChk is used when you are planning a new website/blog to see if the name you are thinking of is taken on any social media or not. You will want to brand your site and to do so, you will want your brand’s name on your social media accounts. It checks 158 social media sites although by default it just shows the most popular ones. Just type in your ideal username to see what’s taken. It also suggests some available domain names.
Dark Room
Dark room is pretty much what it sounds like. It calls up a dark room so you can concentrate on your writing without all the distractions. It’s a minimalist text editor that by default is green text on black. You can set it to auto save and then type away to your heart’s content. Focus on adjusting the layout of it and adding images after when you copy and paste it into your usual editor. You can edit the preference to your liking including colour, font and size. the only downside I see is when you install it, it tries to install extras like toolbars and such. So don’t just click install on every window that comes up. Read what it says and choose decline for all of those. When it talks about toolbars, choose advanced setup and unselect the toolbar options to JUST install Dark Room.
Jagan
Saturday 3rd of May 2014
All these are lovely tools to improve yourself and check your competitiveness.Great content.Thanks. My recent post Amazing Android Apps:Must Have on Your Smartphone
Karl Thew
Monday 14th of April 2014
A great way to use social blog analyzer is in coming up with article ideas. You can look at authority blogs in your market and find the content that got the most social shares. Once you know what kind of content people are sharing you can generate similar ideas with a unique spin on it.
Kathleen Garber
Sunday 20th of April 2014
That's a great tip! Thanks.
Brooke Bumgardner
Saturday 25th of May 2013
Great tools...thanks so much for this post. I learned about 3 new tools to use!
Journeysof TheZoo
Wednesday 10th of April 2013
I hadn't heard about Blog Social Analyzer before. Thanks for sharing. Any idea how to increase the Google+ and/or LinkedIn numbers?
Besos, Sarah Blogger at Journeys of The Zoo
Kathleen Garber
Saturday 13th of April 2013
Well the first thing that comes to mind is making sure you have share buttons for +1 and Linkedin as well on each post. Since Linkedin is a business site, I don't expect much sharing of any of my non business related posts since that's not what it's for. I would focus on the +1 mostly. I think those will go up as more people start using Google+ and understand how it works.