Free Blog Tools

Feedjit.com offers an interesting blog add-on that adds an extra dimension for your visitors as well as providing you a quick glance at your demographics. Feedjit offers a selection of different live traffic feed verticle banners that enables your blog viewers to see the last 10 visitors to your site, their geographic location, and how they arrived at your site. Similar in size to that of the Google 600 X 160 banner, you can easily place the feed at the end of your sidebar which gives visitors a small incentive to scroll down your site.

Whos.Amung.us is another real time stats provider blog tool offering a variety of stylish buttons that allow you to examine your latest visitors, how many are currently on your website (especially applicable to the more popular websites), and where they came from.

Lijit.com gives you the ability to allow your blog readers to search your blog, bookmarks, bookmarks, photos so that readers can search your expertise and favorites. Lijit then lays out all the stats of what the readers searched for and examined so you can better tailor your blog to their interests.

FeedBurner offers a variety of blog services and widgets to maximize your blog's exposure and distribution while also providing you stats on which of your blog entries are read the most and the efficiency of your feeds. FeedBurner offers pings (pings notify other when you have produced new content), various RSS feeds and methods for subscribing, chicklets to display the feeds you are offering, and customizable buttons displaying the number of actual subscribers to your blog. RSS feeds allow anyone with a website to syndicate content from content from other blogs onto their website. The feed provides a short lead-in to the blog post and as well as a link to the blog.

Adding polls to your blog can be a great way to increase interaction with your readers. Vizu.com currently offers a sleek looking beta version of poll software for your blog and even offers to pay you for displaying certain marketing research polls on your blog.

Technorati also offers a useful blog service. Technorati allows you to see how your blog ranks - at least linkwise - against every other blog. Technorati further details as to which pages specifically are linked from other blogs and of course provides you the number of sites linking to you and which ones exactly have referenced your blog. In addition, when you join Technorati you become indexed in a searchable blog directory which other bloggers use to search and find information. This is similar to a search engine query except for the results are mostly blog posts.

RSS feeds come in different forms. FeedBlitz specializes in offering readers email feeds. The difference between FeedBlitz and FeedBurner email RSS is FeedBlitz simplifies the process. Readers only have to enter their email and they will receive one email daily with every blog entry you have posted. You have the ability how much of the post is available through email.

Why not add your own podcast to your blog? MyPodcast.com gives you the ability to host your own radio show free of unprofessional ads. Although you must create your podcast page outside of your blog, you can easily link from your site to your radio site. Integrating a podcast as well as a vlog can give your site a cutting edge feel and provide an audio, video, and type connection to blog readers.

AddThis lets readers easily share and bookmark not only your blog itself, but also individual blog entries which they find insightful or interesting. The link desired can be shared or bookmarked to any of the reader's favorite social sites including Digg, FaceBook, and del.icio.us.

Find out who is reading your blog. No really, with MyBlogLog you and your viewers can see the pictures of recent visitors to your website. This is a nifty blog tool that puts a personal touch from the outside looking in.

Snap creates another dimension to your blog by showing your visitors preview snapshots of hyperlinks or you can even stream video into your blog without actually embedding it. Snap can also put items like Google maps or stock charts directly into your site. The free Snap service does have ads, but they share some of the revenue with you.

Digg news helps keep your blog fresh with streaming news in related topics to your blog. Streaming Digg news is a viable fallback option if you can not update your blog with great frequency.

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