One thing I’ve learned about putting together a blog is that there are a lot of external services and resources available to help your blog become successful. There are so many in fact that it can seem a little overwhelming. The purpose of this article is to educate you on what’s available to you as a blogger and to create a centralized location that allows you quick access to those resources. Whether you’re new to the blog world such as I am or a veteran blogger, my hope is these blog resources will be of use to you. If you know of a great resource or tool that you think should be added here, by all means please comment and I’ll be sure to update the post.

Alexa
Alexa is a web traffic ranking website and is a great resource. Alexa tracks your web site’s popularity by calculating daily visitor’s and pageviews over a 3 month period. Having a lower traffic rank number is most beneficial. It is an essential blog resource tool if you are planning on advertising with your blog. The more traffic your website receives translates to the more chance an ad has of being seen and clicked on. It is also a good way of waging how relevant your blog’s subject matter fairs with keywords and searched terms.

BuySellAds
BuySellAds or BSA as commonly known, is a great blog resource for selling advertising spots on your website. It is a tool used by blog publishers and advertisers alike. Your blog and ad spots are ranked by traffic and the number of impressions your blog has to offer. Understandably, the more impressions your site can offer and the lower your traffic rank is (see Alexa), the more you potentially can charge for ad spots on your blog. However, even if your blog is generating a lot of traffic and impressions, you’ll want to stay competitive which many bloggers do by lowering their ad spot costs to attract potential advertisers.

Facebook
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last six years, you probably already know what Facebook is; A social network website. What you might not know however is that Facebook can be a great blog resource. If you don’t already have one, start a Facebook account and use it to drive traffic to your blog. Additionally, there are many Wordpress plugins available that allows your blog to interact with Facebook.

Flickr
Flickr is by far the best website for managing and displaying photographs, artwork, and images. It allows you to organize your images into albums and galleries. This is a great feature especially if you have a photography or art blog with a large amount of different imagery. As you may know, images can use up a lot of disk space and this is where Flickr comes to the rescue. Instead of eating up chunks of disk space within your own blog, use Flickr instead and have your blog link to those images. There are many Wordpress plugins that make this task simple and easy.

GMail
GMail is an online mail client brought to you by our good friends at Google. The good thing about GMail is that you can amalgamate all of your email addresses into one location. If you plan on having multiple email addresses on your blog, this is a great one-stop email tool to keep track of them all.

Google Analytics
An absolute must for any website! This online service from Google gives you valuable stats about your website and it’s traffic. It is so in-depth that is can even tell you what screen resolution your visitors use! It’s fairly simple to set up and easy to access when you want to see who’s visiting your blog. Analytics can take up to a week or so to pull the information it needs from your blog. I’d suggest applying for an account ASAP once your blog is ready to go live.

Google Webmaster Tools
Another great resource from Google, Webmaster Tools is a diagnostic tool for  websites. It can analyze your blog and suggest ways of tweaking your HTML code, Meta Info, keywords and report on any errors such as duplication of content. Very handy for any blogger, new or old.

Gravatar
Lets face it, there are so many blogs, forums, and websites out there that require you to become a member before you can post messages and comments. Can you imagine having to fill out the forms with your information each and every time you hit a new one?! Gravatar, or “Globally Recognized Avatar”, allows to you to set up your profile / avatar once and for all. The next time you are asked to become a member or fill out a profile form, Gravatar will do it for you based on the profile you set up with Gravatar.

How does this help your blog? It can in two ways, the first  is that you setup your blog to be Gravatar friendly for your visitors; trust me, they will be grateful. Next, use it as a traffic driving tool. How? The more blogs and forums you become a member on means the more opportunity you have to leave your signature after each comment or post. In that signature, put a link back to your blog. Make sure the blog or forum you’re posting on allows for links in your signature; most do.

PayPal
If you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog you’re probably doing it in hopes of selling some ad spots and making some money. Perhaps your blog content and theme represent some type of charity and you’re counting on donations for the cause. PayPal is the most globally recognized Internet money transfer / payment service. Many e-commerce websites use it, including eBay. If you don’t already have a PayPal account, it’s a good idea to set one up. Even if you don’t use it right away, it’ll be there for that first ad sale or donation!

Social Networks
Social Networks, there’s hundreds of them. Some are extremely popular like Facebook (this is why I gave it it’s own heading above) while others are still fairly new. Every social network website has something a little different to offer. They can drastically help your blog by becoming vehicles for traffic. I’m not saying that you should sign up for every one of them because quite frankly you won’t have time to blog if you did. What I am saying is try a few of the more popular ones out and see if you can use them to promote your blog. Some of these include: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, del.icio.uis.
For a more in-depth list of the available social networks, click the social network image above or click here.

YouTube
YouTube is a hugely popular website that allows you to upload and share videos. It has given many the average Joe their 15 minutes of fame. If this is your first time hearing of it, welcome to the Internet. Seriously though, it can be a great blog resource that is readily available to you. The same idea for disk space as mentioned in the Flickr section above can be applied here. Video, as you may know, takes up even more disk space than digital images. Use YouTube to upload your videos and then have your blog link to those videos. You’ll save a ton of disk space doing this. There’s many plugins available that can assist you with embedding YouTube videos right into your blog articles.

YouTube is also a social network in a way. The video descriptions you write on YouTube could include a link to your blog. This can bring in traffic from people who’ve never heard of your blog but managed to find your video on YouTube. Lets say your an artist running a blog but have no video. No problem! You can still make a video that is just a slide show of your portfolio or other interesting pieces you’ve created. This can potentially bring visitors to your blog because they like your work.

I hope this article has and will continue to be helpful for anyone who is interested in the blog world. Just to reiterate what I said in the opening paragraph, if you know of a helpful blog resource that’s not listed here, drop a comment in and help out a fellow blogger!

Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer