Tag Archives: Darren Rowse

Best Least Known Blogging Tool

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Darren Rowse poses an interesting question in asking What are Your Favorite 10 Blogging Tools? It clearly also is a topic that will generate a great deal of comment and discussion given the popularity of his Problogger blog.

It’s time for a little discussion – lets talk blogging tools. Over in the ProBlogger.com forum there’s been a lot of talk about different tools, applications, platforms and plugins that helps to improve blogs. I’m loving the different opinions and experiences and thought it’d be a good question to open up to the wider community – what are your favourite 10 blogging tools? I suspect most of us will probably include our blogging platform (Blogspot, WordPress, TypePad etc) in the list somewhere but other than that anything goes. Perhaps it’s a comments tool, perhaps a desktop editor, perhaps a plugin or widget – anything goes!

I am sure the resulting blog post with all its comments will be very search engine visible and many others will link to it.

However I am not sure that these lists of 10 that are so search-engine friendly are necessarily the most useful to readers. In this case, I can suggest a more user-friendly topic, which will undoubtedly be much less search-engine visible. I hope many will choose to comment since this could collect a host of revelations and new finds for our readers. The question we are asking is:

What is your favorite blogging tool that you believe few others may have found?

I could have nominated Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is software to create text by dictation, and which is a real productivity help:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking gives small business and advanced PC users the power to create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type — with up to 99% accuracy. Most people speak over 120 words per minute, but type less than 40 words a minute. That means you can create documents and emails about three times faster with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon never makes a spelling mistake, and it actually gets smarter the more you use it!

DNS does of course cost money, so my nomination for the best, least known blogging tool is to use Mind Maps to organize your thoughts before you expand on your ideas. A great free tool to use, which I highly recommend is FreeMind, which is free mind mapping software.

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.

If you have some blogging tool that you are using that you think is not well enough known, why not add a mention in the comments. I’m sure others will appreciate your effort.

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Getting Links With Twitter Hashtags

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We have suggested elsewhere that Google should adopt a Weakest Link approach in its search algorithms.  There are far too many people spending far too much time amassing more and more links to their websites.  They do this with the mistaken understanding that this may help their websites be more visible when people do Google keyword searches.  If only Google would rely only on links with more authority, this time wasting and irritating activity could cease.  Unfortunately it has not happened yet.

The only links worth having are links that do command some authority. That is true now and will continue to be true however the keyword search algorithms may change.   Darren Rowse of Problogger as usual provides some excellent advice in his post on 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger.  Here are his 11 items of advice:

  1. Write something worth linking to
  2. Suggest a Link to a post not your site
  3. Develop a Relationship
  4. Demonstrate Knowledge of the Blog and Blogger
  5. Research
  6. Add Value
  7. Stay on topic
  8. Be selective in what you promote
  9. Reciprocate
  10. Build on the Experience
  11. Be Link Worthy

Most of these are almost self explanatory.  However his article is a good one if any of them are unclear to you.

Another way of trying to get on a blogger’s radar screen is to follow them on Twitter.  Most bloggers do tweet their Twitter followers to let them know when they have written a new blog post.  If you happen to spot such a tweet, then by retweeting their blog post tweet, you may well find they will start following you and the relationship begins.  I think this is sufficiently valuable, that it might usefully have been included in Darren Rowse’s list, if he had wished to extend it  to 12 ways.

Of course only your followers see your tweets.  Only if the blogger does a Twitter search, will s/he see what you have retweeted.  To increase the chances it may be seen, you could always try using a hashtag.  If for example, your post is about TGIF then in your retweet add the #tgif hashtag. Others who find that of interest may spot it and retweet it and perhaps word will get back to the original blogger.

If you have found hashtags useful in making connections and gaining links, why not add your experience in the comments here.  Non-spamming comments are welcome and do get a link in consequence, which should be worth having.

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