7 Essential Tools for Business Blogs

There are several ways your business can benefit from blogging short of starting your own blog, from simply identifying and monitoring the most influential blogs in your industry, to asking bloggers to write about interesting developments at your company, to guest-blogging. But once you've made the commitment to writing your own blog, here are seven essential tools—beyond the blogging platform itself (Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Moveable Type, etc.)—to help promote your business blog and make it successful.

Technorati

Like a set of power tools for bloggers, Technorati lets you claim your blog, add tags to make it easier for people to find it, monitor your blog's popularity, place an "Add this to my Technorati favorites" Web 2.0 social tagging button, install a toolbar plug-in to tag your favorite sites/blogs, and more.

Feedburner

The easiest way to produce and promote an RSS feed for your blog so your fans can add your feed to their favorite RSS newsreader, MyYahoo, NetVibes or other desktop tool.

eXTReMe Tracker

A free, easy-to-add traffic-tracking tool for your blog, that shows you traffic by day, week and month as well as where your readers are coming from.

Zimbio

Web 2.0 social tagging service where you can submit your blog, post articles, tag your favorite sites, and add a "My Zimbio" tagging button to make it easy for your readers to tag your blog posts.

Digg

Another social tagging site that provides a free "Digg It" button for your blog to let readers easily tag your posts for increased visibility. Digg is monitored by Google Alerts, which further increases your blog's exposure.

the truth laid bear

Like Technorati, TTLB lets you claim your blog and monitor its popularity, although in this case based on how many other blogs link to yours. It's also helpful for finding the most popular blogs in your subject area.

Pingoat

Each time you add a new post, use Pingoat to easily and automatically ping the most popular syndication services (including Technorati, FeedBurner, Moreover and IceRocket) to let them know you've added new content.

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Terms: Technorati, FeedBurner, Zimbio, Extreme Tracker, Digg, The Truth Laid Bear, Pingoat, IceRocket, blogger tools, Web 2.0 social tagging

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