Blogging tools, if you have the right ones, can make the difference between struggling to run a successful blog, and running one with ease.
If you’ve been a reader for awhile, you know that I don’t normally send out emails recommending blogging tools, and that I’m quite content to just display the ones I use here in the sidebar or on the recommendations page, and let curiosity do its thing. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
But now that BizChickBlogs has transitioned into the new site, I’m not going to take as many opportunities to write about blogging as I did last year. This is one of the few times I’ll do this. There really are some fantastic, can’t-live-without-em blogging resources out there that I have spent money on and highly recommend.
This isn’t fluff, and there are no 24 hour sales here. 
The reality is that there are some costs associated with running a business efficiently, and if your business is blogging, you should have the tools to make it successful.
Anyway, without further ado, here are some things that I would recommend you get your hands on (or feet into) and rock your blog in 2011. These 5 cover all the main bases, too: hosting, theme, SEO, strategy, and monetization. Please note: Links to recommended products/services are indeed affiliate links.
Blogging Tools – 5 That Are Worth the Money
Recommended Resource #1: Scribe SEO
Why I Can’t Live Without It: Because it’s just that good. Not only does it teach you best practices, so that over time you actually start to compose optimized posts naturally, but it goes beyond just analyzing posts to helping you with Keyword research and link building ideas. It really is a top-notch application. I use it on multiple blogs, articles, guest posts, and regular website content.
5 great big gigantic golden stars.
If your blog doesn’t have any readers, and you have very little following in your social networks, SEO is your friend. Utilize it. If you can’t find your own blog doing some keyword searches, no one else can, either. You don’t have to be a link building whiz in order to get search engine traffic. But you really need optimized content if you want any chance of search traffic without a great deal of link building.
This is for serious writers who face tough, competitive SEO positions and who want to experience the long-term benefits associated with excellent on-site optimization.
Recommended Resource #2: MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate
Why I Can’t Live Without It: Because it’s “set it and forget it” monetization and internal linking for your blog. It’s a MUST if you have a multi-author blog or have a lot of guest posts. You set up affiliate links, or target URLs (such as your own internal links, or links to your Facebook or Twitter accounts), and then you associate keywords with them. Then, whenever that keyword is displayed, whether in a post or in someone’s comment, Ninja links the keyword to your affiliate link or target URL. Presto. So simple. AND, these kinds of links get published with your feed, so when you syndicate content, your affiliate links are syndicated too (it’s really brilliant).
Also 5 great big gigantic golden stars.
Recommended Resource #3: Thesis Theme for WordPress
Why I Can’t Live Without It: Even though the new BizChickBlogs is actually based on Studiopress’s News child theme for Genesis, Thesis theme has come in handy for me time and time again. The developer’s license is gold. I’m serial blog-starter so I can’t tell you how many mini-sites I’ve launched and used Thesis to get them up and running quickly. And the new Thesis got rid of the biggest headache of them all – customizing the header easily.
Not to mention, all of my website clients in 2010 (just a handful this year) purchased Thesis and I used it to build their sites. Every single one of them.
Big fat important note: Do NOT purchase Thesis if you are completely technologically challenged. Get your feet wet by just using a well-designed, free WordPress theme from the gallery. I wouldn’t even recommend Studiopress for beginners (you have NO idea how much customization went into the current bizchickblogs.com theme). I’ve been in website development long enough to tell you the truth. So, if no one else will be honest with you, I will, because I’m the one getting calls for help throughout the day from people who are struggling with their themes!
So, if you’re ready to customize your own theme, Thesis is for you and there are some excellent Thesis Skins, which take about 90% of the work out of customization, which you can buy to make your life easier. Otherwise, hire someone or try a beautiful free theme.
Recommended Resource #4: HostGator
Why I Can’t Live Without It: Because when Bluehost decided to have major issues with (1) going down every week all of a sudden and (2) out of control SPAM neighborhood issues, Hostgator was there for me. The transition was relatively painless (except for human errors on my part), and I cannot say enough good things about Hostgator customer service. I really think they are salt of the earth when it comes to web hosts.
You chat with Bluehost, and they point you to the Knowledge Base, which is of course written in Latin (or may as well be). That’s bad service. You chat with Hostgator, and they actually try to help you, even if it’s your mistake. That’s good service! The affiliate money with Bluehost was awesome but it got to the point where my clients were so bummed about having selected Bluehost that I was embarrassed. And when a vendor embarrasses me in front of my clients, that’s a bridge burned. Just say no to Bluehost and yes to Hostgator.
Note: If you use the discount code BIZCHICKBLOGS you will get $9.94 off the price of your hosting.
Recommended Resource #5: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog
Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?
Why I Can’t Live Without It: Because without that ebook, BizChickBlogs wouldn’t be what it is today. I don’t know if I can say that with any more sincerity. It’s just good, common sense laid out in easy to follow steps that actually work if you will do them all, or at least a portion of them. If you’ve not read the book and you think your blog is pretty cool, read the book and then see how much better it will turn out to be.
Questions/Disagreements/Something to Add?
I haven’t tried the gamut of resources available to bloggers out there. If you can recommend another blogging tool that is truly “can’t live without,” feel free to suggest it!
Thanks!
An alternate to scribe seo is seopressor and a free alternative to it is Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger which is a Firefox plugin and does quite the same task that Scribe does.
Another thing that I noticed Tia is that you’re saying that you cant live without Thesis and you yourself have migrated to Genesis which proves that Genesis is also one of the best frameworks. Right?
Thanks.
I use thesis theme and its rocks.
Thanks
Hey Tia,
Thanks so much for the info. Have been considering Scribe for a bit but have been unable to commit but you have just sealed the deal for me
Also am taking a new and much needed approach to my blog so am going to take your advice and undertake the 31 Day Blog challenge, open to the opportunities and benefits that it will bring.
Thanks again for the tips. Will let you know how it goes.
Hey Deidre,
You’re welcome. You’ll be happy with Scribe. At first, it will just be amazing to discover all that’s involved with optimizing a post! Unless you’ve already been doing a great job. And then there are times when I’m like, groan, I don’t care about optimizing this post!
If you undertake the 31 DBBB challenge, let me know. I may pull a forum together of people who are doing it. We can support each other’s blogs as we go along (I’ve done it before but would like to do it in a team for a 2nd time).
Cheers,
Tia
Yes Tia,
Started the challenge today so would love to join the forum, quite an awesome idea. Keep me posted.
Thesis and Scribe are solid tools thats for sure, I use Thesis daily… multiple times
Thank you for sharing.
You’re welcome, John! I love Scribe.
Hi Tia,
This is great stuff! I too purchased Thesis and I wished a million times that I could have did more research, because I am technically challenged. Oh, well it’s all good. I do like Thesis though, but I’m not a techie person, therefore, I can’t use it.
I appreciate your sharing this information about Thesis and Studio Press. I was looking at Studio Press, only looking. Thanks for sharing!
These days, I can’t live without Headway Themes. Its really good for those of us who don’t know anything about coding. I really like it!
HostGator is awesome!
Take care,
Evelyn
I’ve heard really good things about Headway! Thanks for sharing about it. You might find StudioPress more intuitive than Thesis, but because they are complete themes, in order to really customize the look of them, you’d still be required to know a thing or two. Then again, sometimes, complete customization is overrated.
Thanks for your comment!
Tia
Hi Tia,
You are right every business has it’s costs and the products your recommend are definitely a must and although I don’t use all of them, I must say that I don’t know how I would have done without them.
Hostgator is definitely worth it’s money and it helps you with their low prices f you just started.
Like you said Thesis always is a very well design frameowork that will practically builds the site by itself.
This are all great tools!
I’m too cheap to pay for themes or plugins. The ones I use that cost money were bought for me as birthday/Christmas presents. Better than a DVD, socks or a gift voucher.
Hi Tia:
Awesome post and great writing style. I like how you have clearly mentioned that Thesis is not easy for technically challenged. All five tool tips are great. I like all of them.
Scrib seems to be my first choice, once I want to use these. However, information for all five was worth knowing, makes everyone more Internet savvy.
fran A
You know, I never really paid for stuff before when I started out wordpressing. Then, I realized that spending a little bit of money really paid off, and not just financially. Just in the way things are done in general to make life easier and accomplishing with what you want to do.
I am glad you have thesis in there, for me it would have been #1, but your choices are awesome. Thesis for me was just something a friend recommended at first, then I started really getting into it and sprung for the paid version.
Definitely worth it. But yeah, exactly as you said, if you are technologically challenged, it can be really frustrating trying to figure out what “hooks” are all about. Even for myself, who is somewhat familiar with html and css, found myself completely lost when I tried to set some things up in thesis.
Still, now I am totally comfortable with it, and anyone who wants to dive in, #3 on your list is simply.. awesome.
I must admit that I haven’t used four of these, but my experience with one of them was worth enough to comment on it. I’ve been using HostGator for a couple of years now and they are hands down the best host around. I’ve gone through my share, but they’re easy to deal with and when you have an issue, live tech support is always available and solves the problem without treating you like a novice (have you tried Ctrl-Alt-Del etc.). Would recommend them to anyone.
Now, might have to look into these other four. Thesis has been on my radar for a while…
I really like Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. It is such a helpful step by step guide to start getting your blogging legs. In fact, I usually run through the 31 days of exercises at least once a year on my site.
Hi Fred,
Wow that is a fantastic idea! I love it. I need to go through those 31 exercises again.
Thanks for dropping by.
Cheers,
Tia
Hey Fred!
So good to see you over yonder.
It’s so important to continually apply the resources we get the
most from. We forget all the good stuff that we learn the first
time around and we always pick up more the second.
Great suggestion!
I use hostgator personally for some sites and also recommend the hosting company to my clients because of the easyness to create multiple domains on the same account and wordpress installations.
Hi Andreas,
I agree! Hostgator is by far the best.
Fat Cow works well, too, I’ve gotta say. It’s not well-known and very inexpensive, and green. So I’m considering using them on a couple of sites and promoting them, too.
I really like Hostgator, but my favorite web hosting company is BlueHost. I really think their customer service is excellent.
Hostgator is truly affordable!
Using plugins powered by wordpress is one of the good strategy in link building. Dofollow blogs gives more good links.
Hey Tia, I thought this list would have Thesis but the other 4 products are great as well (so I hear).
I haven’t tried any of those but I do plan to get Scribe SEO and Ninja in the following months.
I don’t monetize my blog and it wasn’t planned for it to be my main blog but the way it is developing now it looks like it will take another route. That means I will need all those tools.
I heard about Thesis a while back from Lisa Irby and she has some great tutorials on it so Thesis is probably going to be the first thing to buy once I start monetizing my blogs.
Or I might even start with the book you recommend. Obviously it is a great read since your blog is great
Hey Brankica,
Like your last point, I’d say that before the others, get the book and go through it from start to finish (even the boring parts, really). And then I think through the exercises, the other things become clearer! You never know if you could save yourself money or headache by learning from ProBlogger first.
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