So, you’re about to enter the exciting new world of blogging. Perhaps you want to learn how to make some money online.
Before you get started, you should know that blogging is a tough business. However, there are a number of blogging tools that can help you along the way.
The wonderful thing about blogging and making money online is the sheer volume of blogging tools available to you on the internet.
There are tools to help you automate your tasks, monetize your blog, writing blog posts, etc… You name it, there’s probably something out there to help you out. In this post, I’m going to go over just about every blogging tool or service to help you with all your blogging needs. You’ll find everything from hosting to affiliate networks to WordPress plugins.
Want to know some of the best places to find blog post topics? How about a site to download free royalty free (that’s a mouthful) images? Need a good plugin to integrate e-commerce into your wordpress blog?
This is the blog post for you! I review all of these topics and more in this post.
You may need several sittings to completely digest this post. I might suggest bookmarking this post so that you can come back to it later.
Get ready. Get Set. Go!
Here is my list of 90 blogging tools for all your blogging needs:
Just Starting Out
Well, if you’re just starting out, you need some platform to host your blog. I’ve gone through several different hosting platforms from free to paid. Here’s a few hosting solutions that I’ve tried and liked at one time or another:
Blogger/Blogspot: This is the free blogging platform that’s run by Google. It’s fairly simple to use and allows you to explore the world of blogging 100% free. It also has integrated monetization methods through adsense, so you can start exploring how to make money with your blog. The limitation is that you are stuck with the blogspot domain name and are limited in how much you can customize your blog. It’s a good choice if you want to go free.
WordPress.com: Not to be mistaken with the self hosted wordpress installation. I’m talking about the free blogging website. It’s similar to blogspot. It’s also free. I recommend it as it gives you a taste of how to use wordpress. It’s the most popular blogging platform in the world, so you may as well learn to use it. Again, it’s limited in the customizability as well as the domain name. When you start to learn about plugins, you’ll likely want the ability to install more plugins than the free version allows.
Livejournal, Typepad, etc… I’m going to lump these other free platforms together on this list. The pros are largely the same. They are all free, however you are limited in your personalization of the blog and the domain name. Otherwise they are largely the same as blogger and wordpress, though perhaps slightly less well known.
Squidoo: Squidoo is an interesting hybrid blogging platform. It’s not quite a full blog. It’s really just a single webpage, which they call a lens. They give you a number of customization methods. The biggest benefit to Squidoo is their built in monetization methods. You can install modules, such as Amazon, and start earning money from affiliate sales. This allows you to practice making a basic landing page for selling a product. Also, you can use your Squidoo page to link back to your main blog to build up some link juice.
Hubpages: If you are just starting out and want to make money online without a full blown blog, Hubpages is a good way to get started. You write single articles on any topic of your choice and they will share their ad revenue generated from your article. You can link your adsense account, amazon account, and even your ebay affiliate accounts to your hubpages account for extra revenue. The other thing that many bloggers will do is include a link back to their main blog for some extra link juice. Hubpages is an excellent way to make some extra income if you simply want to write some single articles on a variety of topics rather than a complete blog.
Self Hosting
At some point, you will want to move to a self hosted solution. The two main reasons for making this switch are to:
Gain complete control over the look and feel of your blog. You can install your own plugins and themes. Many of these tools are not allowed on the free platforms.
Get your own custom .com domain name. Having your own keyword filled domain name can do wonders for attracting more people to your blog.
As far as hosting solutions go, there are a variety of low cost hosts available. I found it difficult initially to choose a host because of the sheer volume of choices. I jumped around and had some bad experiences, but eventually settled on the host that I currently use and recommend.
Hostgator: The cost of their hosting is less than $10 a month depending on the package that you purchase, it can be as low as $3.96 a month. While you may be able to find hosting for less, you would be hard pressed to find a faster more reliable host at this price.
Self Hosted Blogging: Content Management Systems
Once set up your own host with your personal domain, you will need some software to operate your blog. This software in very general terms is a content management system. There are several different platforms out there. I’ll briefly go over a couple, but wordpress is by far the most popular amongst bloggers, and I’d recommend sticking with wordpress for its ease of use and the sheer volume of available plugins for customizability.
WordPress.org: Make sure you go to the right site. Wordpress.org is different from their wordpress.com site, which is their free hosting platform. On wordpress.org, you can find their free hosting software and other downloads. Just follow the instructions to install the software on your own host and you are ready to get started. There are other blogging platforms out there, such as Joomla, but wordpress is by far the most popular. For the new blogger, you will find lots of support for the software. I highly recommend going with wordpress.
Joomla: This is another content management system. While most bloggers like wordpress, if you like to be different, then Joomla is another alternative. If you want to do a little more with your website beyond blogging, Joomla has a lot of features that allow extra customization with the web design.
Drupal: Drupal fills out the big 3 popular content management systems. If you know and love coding and really want to work on the nuts and bolts of your website, then you can try our drupal.
I use and recommend wordpress on this blog. While it’s good for you to know that there are other options available, for now I recommend sticking to wordpress. Each of these platforms have their own plugins and extensions, but for the rest of this post, I will mostly be talking about tools and plugins used with wordpress blogs.
If you use some other content management system and like to recommend add ons for one of those, please feel free to add to my list of tools by leaving a comment.
Themes for WordPress
Part of the beauty of running a self hosted blog is customizing the look and feel of your blog to your own personal tastes. There are a number of free themes available on the WordPress site. However, after you try out some of those themes, you may feel the need to spread your wings a bit beyond what those basic themes offer. At this point, it’s well worth taking a look at some premium themes.
Hybrid Themes: A very good free premium theme. This is a complete theme framework with a number of available child themes. If you know some coding, you can customize these child themes even further or design your own. As far as the free options go, I think this is the best of the bunch. I personally use the Hybrid News child theme on this blog and it’s served me well.
Beyond the free options, there are a number of paid premium themes. I’ll just go over a couple of the more popular ones.
Thesis Theme: This is a powerful premium theme. It is geared towards simplicity of use as well as strong SEO features. One of the more popular premium themes. You’ll find many bloggers using this theme. My good friend, Rick, over at soliloblog uses the thesis theme. If you like the look of his movie monologue blog, you might want to try out the thesis theme.
Woo Themes: These are premium themes with excellent design elements for everyone. If you want to really spice up your blog and give it that extra unique look, then you may want to take a look at the Woo Themes Gallery.
Start Blogging: Tools for Creating Content
Now you want to get started blogging. That means creating excellent content. You’ll find that using the default rich text editor in your wordpress setup is passable, but I quickly found that it was easier to write my blog posts using some other kind of text editor and then either cutting and pasting or importing your blog post to wordpress.
Microsoft Word: You may not think of microsoft word as a blogging tool, but it’s a good word processor. You can type up your entire blog article and then copy and paste it over to your blog. I like using a word processor to do my rough drafts and editing before moving my final product over to the blog.
Textedit: As a mac user if you don’t have microsoft word, I found textedit to be a passable alternative. Even if it’s not a full featured word processor, I still prefer writing out my posts there offline.
Sniping Tools: On a mac, you can use command + shift + 4 to snip and area of your desktop and create an image. On windows you’ll have to create your own shortcut to the Microsoft snipping tool. Either way, this tool is essential to easily adding images to your posts. It’s particularly good when you are creating a tutorial post and want to add screenshots of each step you are taking.
Image editing: At some point, you are going to want to edit images or add annotation. You can use tools as simple as the built in paint in windows or preview on a mac. These tools are just essential when you want to customize your images a bit: 
Photoshop/Gimp: Beyond adding simple annotations, at some point you may want to do some more complex editing with your images. I’ve used these image editors to do everything from creating logos to making banner ads. For these kinds of edits, you’ll want an image editor with more power. You can go with the commercial Adobe Photoshop to do this, but for a free open source option, you might want to take a look at Gimp. I’ve found Gimp to meet all my imaging editing needs without having to spend a dime.
Standalone Blog Editing Software
If you are getting more comfortable with blogging, you may want to look into some programs that will help you blog when you are offline. You may have started using regular word processing programs such as word or textedit, but you’ll find that these aren’t made specifically for blogging. The best blog editing programs are those that are geared specifically for blogging.
Livewriter: If there’s one piece of software that Windows did right, it’s this one. Livewriter is completely free for windows users. It’s a standalone program for blogging. You can link your blog directly to the program and write your posts offline to your satisfaction and then publish directly to your blog. The 2011 version has the editing ribbon that microsoft word users will find familiar. It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s a wonderful program that I’d recommend for any windows user.
Marsedit: Sadly, there’s no Mac version of Live Writer. While there are several alternatives one can use if you are on a mac, the software that comes the closest to matching up with Live Writer is Marsedit. Unfortunately it’s not free. Marsedit is available from the itunes store for $39.95.
Ecto: If Marsedit is too pricey, then you may want to take a look at Ecto, which is probably the next best option. However, it’s still a paid blog editor, but is half the price of Marsedit at $19.95.
Scribefire: Scribefire is a free blog editing program that works as a plugin with your web browser. You can use it with firefox, chrome, or safari. Again this is a passable alternative to live writer if you are on a Mac.
Qumana: Another free blog editing alternative for Mac Users. Personally, as a mac user, I’m partial to Marsedit, however I understand the desire to save money and go for free. I’ve tried out several free blog editors. While I like scribefire the most, I think it comes down mostly to personal preference. Qumana is certainly a good free option as far as blog editors go.
Research Tools
Now that you’re ready to create content, you’re going to want to find some source materials. You’re going to need to study up and learn how to blog better. Depending on your niche, there are a multitude of sources for material.
Newspaper: I find that I get quite a bit of blogging materials just by reading my local newspaper. You can find current news on virtually any topic and find a way to segue it into a blog topic.
Podcasts: I like to listen to podcasts. I find this is a great way to learn about new topics and study up on my niche. The best thing about listening to podcasts is that it allows you to multi-task. I can listen to podcasts when I’m doing the dishes or driving in the car. It’s a really good way to stay abreast of the latest news in your niche.
Twitter: If you follow influential people in your niche, you’ll find that twitter is an awesome tool for getting the latest news in your niche. I find that twitter works best when you use it with some kind of link aggregating program such as flipboard on the iPad or smartr on the iPhone.
Google Trends: If you are simply looking for a popular topic, google trends will tell you which search topics are hot on the net. While you’ll often find that the best trending topics is news about celebrities, you can also find topics that fit within your niche.
Blogs: In blogging, you must make connections with other blogs within your niche. You’ll often find that other blogs within your same niche are a great source of inspiration. One caveat: Never copy another blog. That said, you can often use other blogs as source material and cite back to them. The blogger will appreciate it and may even link to you in return.
Morguefile: Nothing spices up a blog post like some good images. Morguefiles is a great place to get free images that you can use for your blog. The images on their site are completely royalty free so you can use them on your blog without worry about copyright infringement. I highly recommend taking a look at this site.
Beyond simply finding source materials for your post topics, you’ll find yourself studying up on simply how to be a better blogger. For that, there are a couple of places that I would turn.
Problogger’s 31 Days to a Better Blog: An excellent book that gives you a step by step methodology to improve your blog. Be prepared, this book actually gives you homework, but at the end of the course you will find yourself a better blogger. Click here to view more details
Smart Passive Income: An excellent blog that discusses a variety of monetization methods. This blog is geared more towards how to make money with your blog. But between this blog and problogger, you can learn quite a lot about blogging for money.
Networking Your Blog
Well, nothing exists in a vacuum. Your blog is no different. If you want to start getting traffic to your blog, you will have to network. For the most part, that means social networking.
These days blogging is more than simply throwing up your blog on the web and writing away. You have to utilize all different forms of social media. Here are some of the most popular social media blogging tools available to bloggers.
Twitter: Have you heard of this little thing called twitter? Yep, twitter is a great blogging tool. You’re going to want to set up a twitter account just for your blog and start tweeting out your blog updates. This is a great way to get some exposure for your blog as well as quickly send out updates.
Facebook: You can create a Facebook profile or fan page just for your blog. This is another good way to make some social connections.
Google+: Even though this social network is still technically in beta, it’s growing at a phenomenal rate. People are really connecting through google+. You can update others about new blog posts or even write entire blog posts right on google+. It’s a great way to connect with people.
StumbleUpon: Aside from search engines, this is my single largest source of traffic. Stumbleupon is a social bookmarking site. This means you submit your blog articles and people vote them up or down. As your articles gets voted up, they get shown to more stumblers. It’s an awesome way for blog posts to go viral. You definitely want to create an account and give people an easy way to vote on your blog posts.
Reddit: Another social bookmarking site. I must say that I haven’t had as much success with Reddit as I’ve had with StumbleUpon, but every once in a while you can have a story that takes off. I think reedit is geared more towards strong titles. That means if you can create a really unique eye-catching title for your posts, you’re more likely to get some thumbs up votes from reedit.
Digg: Another social bookmarking site. Digg has lost a lot of the clout that it used to have, but if you are writing a news style blog with good headlines, you can still get some diggs.
Technorati: Social bookmarking site just for bloggers. Submit your blog and people can vote it up or down. It’s not as popular as it was in times past, but still has the power to get your blog noticed. It’s an oldie but goodie.
Bizsugar: This is a good social bookmarking site for business style blogs. If you write about money, entrepreneurship, small business, blogging, etc… This is a good social bookmarking site for you.
Blogengage: Another good social bookmarking site for blogs. Blog engage is unique in that they have several different tiers of service. Their free service functions like the typical bookmarking site. You submit your articles and they are voted up or down. The premium services though include rss syndication and other features which makes publishing your articles easier.
Blokube: Blogging about business, blogging, and entrepreneurship is a popular topic. This is another social bookmarking site catered towards those niches.
Commentluv: Commentluv is a service that links blogs with each other. Whenever anyone in the network leaves a comment on a blog within the same network, it pulls the rss feed on the commenter and creates a link at the end of their comment to their latest post. This way it creates a back link back to your site and really encourages bloggers within their community to comment on each other’s blogs.
Blog Commenting Systems
Many people find the default wordpress commenting system sufficient, with just a little bit of tweaking. However, if you want more robust social features that include better threading as well as utilizing social media, you may want to look into some third party commenting systems to help you out. Many popular large blogs enjoy the features of third party systems. I’ll go over a few of the more popular third party commenting platforms here:
Disqus: I like the simple look of disqus. They have a strong community with quite a bit of interaction. Their system includes integrations with all the popular social media platforms. The one downside is that they use javascript to integrate with your blog, which means that the comments on Disqus are not directly indexed by search engines.
Intense Debate: I found that intense debate initially did not have as interactive a community as disqus. Also the default look of their commenting system looked a bit cluttered to me. However, recently they were acquired by WordPress, which resulted in an influx of users. Also, with some tweaking of the css, you can customize the look and feel of their commenting system to your own tastes. The other benefit of Intense debate is that they have a number of plugins available, including commentluv.
Livefyre: This is the up and comer in commenting systems. They pride themselves in forming a highly interactive commenting platform. I like the simple look and feel of their platform. Also they have their own latest post feature which links to their users latest blog posts when they leave a comment, similar to commentluv. The one downside to their platform is that they don’t have guest commenting yet. However, they have plans to implement a guest commenting system shortly. I am currently trying out this platform now, so you can give it a test run by leaving me a comment.
Tracking Your Blog
Now that you’re creating some content and networking your blog. You’re going to want to track the statistics of your blog. There are just a couple of go to tools for analyzing your blog.
Google Webmaster’s Tools: Google Webmaster’s tools is designed to give you complete information about your blog’s visibility on google’s search engine. It will tell you about the incoming links, the keywords that are getting you results, how fast your site is loading, etc…
Google Analytics: Google analytics tells you about your site’s actual performance. Here you will find statistics about what pages your visitors are visiting, how long they are staying, and what links they are clicking amongst other things.
Clicky Analytics: This is real time analytics tracking. This is the tool that fills in the information that Google Analytics glazes over. I like to use it to check on the daily statistics of my blog, while I use Google Analytics when I want a broader overview.
Speeding Up Your Blog: Content Delivery
One thing that you’ll learn is that one of the statistics that search engines analyze is how quickly your blog loads. Invariably this means that web masters are constantly on the lookout for ways to speed up their blog. I’ll discuss some wordpress plugins later on in this post, but for now, I want to tell you about content delivery networks. These are networks that cache your blog on their servers all around the world and serve up the cached content to your users while your blog is loading. This results in much faster load times for your blog’s content. Most of these services, as you can imagine, are paid. However, I’ve been using a free content delivery service for quite a while now with very good results.
Cloudflare: This is a free content delivery network. They are growing quickly, and I’ve found them to be fast and reliable. They do have some premium services as well, but for now, I’ve found their free service to be quite good. If you are using hostgator for your hosting, they are partners and hostgator has the service built in. Either way, if you are interested in utilizing content delivery, I would definitely take a look at cloud flare.
Monetizing Your Blog
There are a multitude of methods to monetize your blog. I’ll just go over a few of the more popular programs. This is far from and inclusive list. There are thousands of programs out there. However, I’ve just put together a short list of the more popular and reliable programs as a start.
Google Adsense: Easily the most popular pay per click advertising program out there. You simply sign up and install their code on your blog. It will then start displaying contextual advertisements. You will get paid some amount for each click on their ads.
Clickbank: This is a fairly popular affiliate marketing network. You can find millions of products to promote from their merchant marketplace. The big benefit of click bank is that they pay out regularly and have a low $10.00 threshold. Also, if you’ve created your own product, you can join as a vender and partner up easily with their affiliate to promote your products. The negative is that because of their open vendor policy, you’ll find many lesser known merchants in their marketplace. Also, you’ll find many of their products fall into the make money online niche.
Commission Junction: Another large affiliate marketing network. They have a number of reputable vendors. I find that there are a number of well known merchants in their network. This is a big benefit when you want to advertise more reliable programs as they are more likely to generate conversions.
Linkshare: Linkshare rivals commission junction with a number of reliable merchants such as iTunes and buy.com. In addition, they have a low payout threshold of $10.00 and also pay out regularly. I am quite fond of their affiliate network.
OIOPublisher: If you want to sell advertising space on your blog, you may want to look into a plugin to help you automate that process. OIO Publisher automates the process of purchasing an advertisement on your blog. They have a marketplace where potential advertisers can search for publishers. Their plugin also has a very robust tracking system so that you can easily present your stats for the advertisers. You set the price and everything else is automated. This is a premium paid plugin that costs $47.
Komoona: Works similarly to OIOPublisher with some differences. You manage your ads from their website rather than through the plugin. They don’t track the ads statistics, so you can’t track each ads performance. Also, they lack a marketplace, so the only place that advertisers will find you is on your site itself. On the other hand, they are free. Also, they have a conversion booster which presents a small pull out tab on the side of your website that I like and they just implemented an adsense companion that allows advertisers to swap out adsense ads with their own advertisements. If you want to see how Komoona works in action, you can take a look over at my right side bar and check it out.
Automating Your Blog: Plugins for Every Occasion
For this section, I’m going to talk about wordpress plugins. As I stated earlier, wordpress is by far the most popular blogging system. It’s also the most supported in terms of plugins. I use wordpress primarily and try to take advantage of the available plugins as much as possible. For that reason, I will stick to talking about wordpress plugins for automating some of your blogging tasks.
Akismet: Are you starting to see a lot of spam in your comments section. Akismet is a very good spam filter plugin. They basically check your incoming comments against their spam database and filter out the comments that are red flagged. The best part is that they do this all behind the scenes. You don’t have to put up captcha or weird check boxes to stop the spammers.
All in One SEO: Optimizes your blog for the search engines. This plugin does just about everything SEO related. It generates meta tags and optimizes your titles. For the beginner, it’s simply plug and play, you don’t need to do anything. This plugin just starts taking care of the SEO for you.
Antivirus: Checks your wordpress installation for viruses. It does an automatic check daily and sends you an email status report if anything is amiss. Other than that, it just runs silently in the background and does its thing.
Aksapache Crazy Cache: It does one thing really really well. It caches your blog posts. It’s not the same as the other caching plugins that cache everything else. Use this plugin in conjunction with one of the other caching plugins. You’ll notice a jump in speed.
Autolinks: Generates links for your images to their respective blog posts.
Better WordPress Security: Hides vital files from potential attackers. I try to be conscientious about my blog’s security.
Bulletproof Security: Protects your blog from a variety of injection hacking attempts. It’s a one click solution to give your blog some additional security from potential attackers.
Capability Manager: This is a particularly useful plugin if you have a multi-author blog. Sometimes the default wordpress settings for different roles need some tweaking. This allows you to fully customize the different roles of your various authors.
Clean Contact: A really simple and easy to implement contact form. You can see it in operation here.
Commentluv: This plugin enables bloggers in the commentluv community to automatically create a link to their latest post when they leave a comment on your blog. It really encourages comments when people see that your blog is commentluv enabled.
Ecwid Shopping Cart: This is a simple to use e-commerce solution for your site. You’ll need to link it up with your Ecwid account. But it’s a very good free option if you want to have some e-commerce elements to your blog. The only downside is that it does take a few seconds to load up when you first go to the page. Other than that, I really like the plugin. You can see it in action here.
Easy Favicon: The easiest way to install a custom favicon on your blog. You can see it in action up in your browser’s url bar right here on Riches Corner.
GetSocial: Thats the floating share bar that you see over to the left. There’s actually several of these plugins that I like. However, I’ve found that they all interact with my theme in a slightly different way. Get Social, for me seems to work the best.
Sharebar: Works much the same way as GetSocial. It’s mainly a matter of personal preference as well as seeing which one works best with your blog’s theme.
DiggDigg: Again, another social share bar. It has a variety of different default buttons that you can turn on and you can put it almost anywhere around your posts. Between, this, get social, and share bar, it’s really a toss up. They each interact differently with your theme, so just pick the one you like the most.
Google Plus Widget: Even though Google+ is fairly new, I’m starting to see a few plugins turn up. This one is simple with a few customization options. I’ve noticed that I have gotten more google+ followers since installing this on the blog.
Jetpack by WordPress: A plugin that provides several services from WordPress.com. I like it mainly for their stats dashboard, but I find myself using their share daddy service as well as their Gravatar Hovercards.
Linkwithin: A good related post plugin with thumbnails. I really like the look of the thumbnails across the bottom of my posts.
Login Lockdown: Restricts the number of times someone can attempt a failed login from the same ip. This is a good plugin for preventing simple brute force attacks on your blog.
Polldaddy: Plugin for simply creating polls on your blog. You can customize any poll that you want and track the stats of the votes. Good plugin if you want some interaction with your readers on your blog.
Pretty Link: This plugin allows you to redirect those long ugly affiliate links to your own domain. That way it shortens to ugly long links and makes it easy for you to brand your affiliate links. In addition, it adds tracking to each of those links so you can see how they are performing.
Relevanssi: You’ll find out pretty quick that the default wordpress search engine really sucks. If you want the look of your search bar to stay within your theme, but you want to improve the search results, then this plugin is for you. It improves the wordpress search engine dramatically.
Sabre: If you want to open up registration on your blog, you’ll need a way to stop the bots and spammers. When I first opened up registration here, I immediately started getting fake registrations from bots. I had to turn off registration and find a solution before turning it back on. This plugin really helped in putting a stop to these fake registrations.
SEO Tool Keyword Density Checker: Awesome SEO Tool. This tells you how many times a particular keyword shows up in your post. With this tool, you can really tweak the frequency a keyword shows up to better optimize your post.
SEO Friendly Images: Generates alt tags and descriptions for your images. I find this to be one of the best timesaving plugins. I no longer have to individually tag my images, this plugin does it for me.
SEO Smart Links: Automatically links keywords and phrases within your blog posts. Good for easily creating internal links within your blog.
SEO Auto Links and Related Posts: This is a good alternative to SEO Smart links if you prefer something different. It also creates internal links within your blog, but at the same time it generates a list of related posts.
Sidebar Login: Allows you to have a widget in your sidebar for users to login.
Top 10: A Popular post plugin. I like this plugin as it tracks your page views and displays your popular posts based on those views. It requires very little in the way of maintenance and has nice look to it.
Tweet Old Post: My favorite plugin to use in conjunction with twitter. This tweets out your old posts on a regular basis. You set the timeframe. The best thing about this plugin is that you can select the Stumbleupon url shortener. I highly recommend that set up as it will boost your stumbles at the same time as bringing in some twitter traffic.
W3 total Cache: Robust caching plugin for speeding up your blog. W3 total cache is probably the most robust of the different caching plugins available. It’s got a staggering amount of options, including built in support for CDNs.
Hypercache: Another caching plugin. I list it here as another option to W3 total cache. I think it’s mainly a matter of personal preference as to which plugin you use. Every once in a while, I’ll find a bug in one of the updates with my caching plugin of choice and I’ll need to alternate them. Other than that, I find the speed differences between them negligible.
Quick Cache: Another caching plugin. Quick cache is very simple to use and a viable alternative to the other two caching plugin. Like I said earlier, it’s really a matter of personal preference.
WP Greet Box: Tracks where your visitor came from and gives them a custom greeting on your blog.
WP OnlyWire Auto Poster: Automatically syndicates an excerpt of your blog posts to social bookmarking sites through onlywire.
WP Smush.it: Optimizes the images on your blog by stripping out the meta data from jpegs, optimizing jpeg compression and stripping unused colors from images.
Final Thoughts
Whew! What a list! I know this list is certainly not all inclusive. Indeed, you will probably find some things to add. However, with these blogging tools and services that I listed here, you’re well on your way to fulfilling just about all your blogging needs.
If you have a useful blogging tool or service that you want to tell us about, please feel free to add to this list in a comment below.
To Your Success!