Free Essential Tools for Blogger Blogs

Blogger has a simple and fine interface that takes care of many things for you. These are my few blog tips and tricks for your first free essential must haves for your blog.These all will not only help you make your blog better but will in time also help you make money and increase your online revenues 

1. Feedburner - It generates an smart feed compatible with all feed readers for free like my feed. It allows you to put easy subscribe buttons for XML, Add to yahoo, Add to Newsgator, Add to MSN etc. Read about how their single feed policy can benefit you.

2. Blogexplosion - helps you get confirmed traffic to your blog. The principle is simple, you visit other peoples blogs and they visit yours. For every 2 blogs you visit, one visitor comes to you. This is very good if you are new blogger and have hardly any traffic. Definitely try the Rent a Blog advertising swap service.
Drive online traffic with Blogexplosion

1. Banners - they show in the surfing interface when you surf other blogs. You can convert your credit to show 25 banners on this surfbar per credit you earn (The number keeps on changing). That does not bring you more confirmed traffic, but if your banner is good enough, your 1 credit might earn you upto 25 clicks instead of one confirmed visit.

2. Blog Lottery - add a few credits to the monthly lottery and you could win thousands of credits if you are lucky.

3. Battle of the Blogs - Challenge another blog against yours after putting some credits for wager. Voters see both sites and click the better one. Voters earn 25% credit and winner gets 75% of the total credits on the block.

4. Blog rocket - Start at the bottom of the 25 site rocket. Users see your site, earn mystery credits, as your site moves up the rocket to launch off.

5. Mystery credits - As you surf along you can get bonus credits off and on. I remember getting 10 credits as bonus once. It comes as a nice surprise.

6. Referrers - Put up blogexplosion banners on your site, whenever someone clicks on them and joins blogexplosion, you get a percentage of the credits they earn. This ensures a steady stream of credits on 5 tiers of referral.

7. Rent My Blog - Advertising Swap Program to earn website traffic by renting space on your blog in a fun and easy market-based format. Read more.
Why purchase traffic when you can get free traffic.

3. Technorati - Create and add a technorati profile. It allows you to claim your blog in this huge blogosphere. It allows you to put an excellent technorati search on your blog. The best part is that whenever someone mentions or links to any page of your blog, technorati knows and a search for your blog on technorati shows exactly how many sites link to which pages of your blog and when they were added with a small description. See why you need a technorati account.

4 - Sitemeter - Just takes 5 minutes to get a free tracker which gives you realtime site traffic statistics to check the quantity and quality of your site traffic with detailed referrer and geographic data. I have checked out several other tracking sites, but this one seems the best. Although you need to keep a counter visible (as a logo, visitor counter) and the statistics can be made private too.

StatCounter gives much more detailed statistics and the counter is totally invisible and free totally till you start getting large traffic, when you need to pay. But the disadvantage is that both of these track the last 100 visitors only, while another free service Extreme Tracking tracks them all… but you statistics cannot be made private. More options I like are Google Analytics for deep traffic statistical analysis and it is hidden too.

5. Feedblitz - It quickly allows your blog visitors to subscribe by email to your new posts. They just have to enter their email. You decide which page opens after they press Subscribe. A quick confirmatory email to them and they get 1 email daily with all your new posts. You can decide if you want to send the full post or short posts with defined number of characters. Very good to keep your subscribers informed of new posts. It allows them to unsubscribe easily also. As you can see at the top left corner i have a feedblitz embeded
Do subscribe to the blog and keep yourself updated 

6. My Blog Log - Tracks outgoing links to let you know where your traffic is going. The free limited version data is not in much detail, yet provides a good idea. You can also add a Top 5 Our Links module to your web site. Now they have a MyBlogLog community to get some extra site traffic too.  

7. Imageshack - Dont you want to fill your blog with images without hassles of registration. Imageshack provides an excellent interface to take care of your free image hosting needs. Maybe it is this the fastest way to host an image on the web. Allows lots of image format, hotlinking, transloading from other sites. Its a good idea to register to keep track of all your images in one place. It is much convenient than the proposed Hello and Picassa options…

Update: Blogger enabled hosting of images on its own webspace making it easier to host images in your posts. But you cannot manage or edit / delete your blogger images in any way 

8. Pingoat - Pinging lets dozens of blogging services know you’ve updated your site and increases traffic to your blog. Just enter your blog name and blog home page, check the blogging services you want to ping, just click ‘Submit Pings’ and in one click it pings all of them. Pingoat offers a wide variety of such services and is fast too. See many more one click pinging services.

9. Google Adsense - When you take all effort to write for a blog, why not optimize it to make some money. Let users search for good posts in your blog. And now it even helps to monetize you feeds.