Let’s face it: if your blog is your business, you need to treat it that way. You need to have the right tools to make sure your blog grows and makes money. But how do you know what those tools are? It’s simple. You don’t have to. We’ve tried them all, and we are here to tell you what works.
1. WordPress
Once you get set up with a great web host, you need a blog publishing engine, or rather a Content Management System (CMS) that your site will run on. You have a lot of options, some paid and some free. Google’s Blogger is free, but there’s no support. Joomla is ok but something that we won’t get into here. Then there’s TypePad, a paid option. Let’s just say we started on TypePad, and left as soon as we could.
WordPress is really your only viable choice, plus it’s free. It’s very powerful and customizable, and easy to optimize for a busy site, which is crucial. It’s the best CMS tool out there, and it comes in 2 flavors, both free: installed on your website or hosted on their servers.
2. Google Analytics
Knowledge is power. You need to know about the traffic on your site. Where is it coming from? Where are they going on your site? How long are they staying there? Is your traffic up? Or down? This is information you need. Big time.
Google Analytics has all this. Yes, there are other products out there that cover the same territory, but this is the best one. And it’s free. Have we mentioned that free is good? Because it is. Get it, use it, learn it.
3. Chartbeat
Chartbeat very similar to Google Analytics. In fact someone once called Chartbeat “Google Analytics on crack”. It offers you much of the same data, but it does so in REAL TIME. You can see traffic stats unfold right before your very eyes. It shows you who’s on your site right now, what they’re looking at, where they came from, etc.
Chartbeat has many valuable features, but chief among them is the ability to tell you how long it takes real users around the world to download pages on your site. Google knows that and won’t send visitors to a slow-loading website.
4. Pingdom
Is your website up? Or is it down? You hope it’s up, you thinks its up, but is it really? Is it up all the time? Does it go down at the four in the morning on the third Tuesday of the month? Is your web host flaky, meaning having lots of tiny outages that you wouldn’t normally notice?
The truth is that without a great site uptime monitor like Pingdom, you simply don’t know. It offers you uptime reports, error analysis response time reports and will notify you by email, text or twitter if something happens. Pingdom does cost money, but it is an extremely valuable and necessary item for anyone who is in the business of blogging and/or making money online. You simply can’t live without it. Think about it: if you walk by a store and the sign says “closed” are you really going in? You can’t. It’s closed. Your website is the same way.
5. Google Ad Manager (now DoubleClick For Publishers)
Google Ad Manager is the best ad management tool on the market, bar none. And it’s free. It is simple, robust and relatively easy to use, once you get the hang of it. Yes, you’ll need to play with it a bit because it’s very powerful, but it’s time well spent.
So what’s an ad manager? It’s a way for you to post ads on your site and make money. It allows you to create “ad units” on your website and then to display (and test) all kinds of different ads through those ad units. And then it allows you to figure out which ads get clicked best, convert best, etc. It’s something you must have if you’re going to make money online.
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