5 Helpful Tools And Advice Sites For Bloggers

I’ve been blogging for over six years, and I’m still always looking to find new or better tools and blogs to make me a better blogger. So I wanted to share some of the tools and blogs that I’ve found very useful.

1. Google Webmasters If you want your blog to be successful, you must play by Google’s rules. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Google has these rules so that search will work the way it should and website owners won’t be able to game the system. And they are more than happy to help. On this site you will learn more than you ever thought possible about Webmaster tools, Google Search, SEO, and more. There are three sections to  the Google Webmaster site:

• Webmaster Tools – Have you added your blog to Google Webmaster Tools yet? Anyone with a website or blog needs to have it there. Google will let you know of any critical issues on your site (that would affect your search rankings). And Webmaster tools offers you many resources to help improve your blog.

• Webmaster Education – There are two parts to the Education section. Webmaster Academy, a full free online course, which you take in modules in your own time, on Google Search and Google Webmaster Tools. And the second part is a page of helpful Webmaster Resources.

• Webmaster Tools Help Center – I would actually start with this section before the other two. The help center explains everything you will come across on the rest of the Google Webmasters website.

2. Copyblogger

This is one of my favorite blogs for blogging advice. One of the reasons why is because I love to read it. I realized that many of the advice blogs I used to read, gave good advice, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy the blog experience. Copyblogger practices what he preaches.

3. SlideShare

A great tool to use to upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars online. It is perfect for uploading PowerPoint presentations so that you can have them online. And they don’t only live in SlideShare. You can embed them on your blogs and social media.   Once you make an account in SlideShare, you can follow others and you will get alerted when they add new slideshows.

You don’t have to create a slideshow to have an account. You can learn a great deal from just browsing others.  You can see a slideshow I created and embedded into my blog.

4. Buffer

By using Buffer you can schedule social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus to later time or date.

5. Kikolani

Another one of my favorite blogging advice blogs, written by Kristi Hines, one of the top women in the field. This blog can sometimes be a bit more technical than Copyblogger, but is worth checking out.

Do you have any blogging tools or blogging advice websites that you love and would like to share? Please do so in the comment section below.

Jennifer is also the Family Technology Guide at About.com.