Best Blogging Tools-Best Blog Tools to Rule Blogging

There are many different platforms, three popular blogging platforms include Wordpress, TypePad and Blogger.

Each offer hosting for a free blog, or hosting under your own domain. My prefernce is hosting on my own domain.

1 Your own domain allows you total control over your blog. No one can suspend your account.

2 If at some time you want to sell your blog, if your don't own your blog you cannot sell it.

3 If you choose the wrong platform it can be extremely difficult to switch it over once you have an established blog.

Pinging sends out a message to other sites and search engines. Letting them know you have updated or create a new blog. When you add new content to your blog it is very important to ping.

Log into your admin area of your wordpress blog, click the settings tab, then the writting tab. Scroll down to the bottom of page to Update Services, click on the blue update services.

This will display a list of pinging services, copy and paste the addresses to the box.

Press Save, every time you write a post, this feature will let the search engines know you have new content!

Plugins are software modules that allow different functions to your blog. There are thousands of plugins availabe for anything you can think of.

Wordpress plugins are available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins, if you cannot find a plugin that does what you want just go to Google and search for what ever plugin you want.

Google Analytics Plugin created by Rich Boakes makes it very easy to test and track your blog.

Askismet, this is a very popular anti spam plugin. It effectively blocks 99% of spam, sometimes you have to check your comments as good one are blocked too.

Social networking and social bookmarking, are very powerful ways to network. You must participate in social networks to avail of the power of socializing and networking.

Blog to blog networking is a brilliant way of getting links to your blog. Read other blogs, leave a comment which will link to your blog.

Please do not spam, and leave positive feed back.
Comment, ask a question, be interested not just trying to promote your own blog.

Ask a blogger to comment on your blog or give their opinion.

There are many social networks, a few are

MySpace
Facebook
Stumbleupon
Digg
Sphinn
Twitter