Are you a novice or intermediate #blogger? If so read on for free information that's not "common sense". (even if you're an advanced blogger you might benefit from reading all of this.) This little article will mostly be about FREE resources online to help make it easier and increase your success.



I'll sum up what a lot of people would call a "no brainer" in one small paragraph before I move on. To be a successful blogger you've got to truly add value (help people out or entertain them), not be too promotional (whether it be products on your blog or giving the link to your blog too often), and the design on your blog should be good and memorable. Think objectively about this... would you read your blog if you weren't you? Use cool photos to spice things up, and get right to the point since people don't like reading very much on computers. Different multimedia like videos and podcasts or music is likely to make your blog more successful.



Google Alerts http://google.com/alerts

What topics did you choose to blog about? Get results about inside of your inbox daily or weekly!



Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

What are people searching for right now? If you see anything that relates to your topic of choice you can write a blog post of your opinion on it, comparing different viewpoints and facts on whats going on, etc.



Free Digital Photos http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

Find royalty free images online. All you need to do is credit the source to the author and you can put it right on your site / blog for free. You can credit the other in the "title" or "alt" attribute, above or below the image in small text - just as long as you do it.



http://www.twibes.com/

How about a listing of groups for Twitter users to join and communicate with each other on? Twitter and blogs often times go hand in hand because this is a common place for people to promote their blog on. I click on links to news stories and blogs on twitter all of the time. As I'm typing this, Twibes most active group right now is Art Art (2037 members).



http://www.eblogtemplates.com/

This site features both free and premium themes and templates for bloggers. If it was only for stuff you'd pay for, I wouldn't bother mentioning it on this list.



http://www.pyzam.com/layouts

As the site says:

"Our high quality MySpace Layouts, Hi5 Layouts, Friendster Layouts and Blogger Layouts are always free, and are easy to find and use! We have the most custom

premade free Layouts on the internet! Try our Hott Layouts, Cute Layouts, and many more. We add tons of new layouts each week!" Also check out the graphics, homepages, funny pictures section, etc. They also have a free page for link exchange, "We'll send you at least 1 visitor for every visitor you send us! Add your site to this list".



http://www.gallup.com/ and http://pewresearch.org/

Do you want to find facts, trends, and statistics to put on your blog from reliable sources which don't distort the facts? Pew Research and Gallup would be a couple of excellent choices. (If you have any evidence that these sites do distort the facts, or if you know of any more reliable sites than these two for fact finding, I'd like to hear from you).



http://www.icerocket.com/

Ice Rocket is a blog search engine which lets you find the latest blog posts on whatever you want, trends, news stories and conversations on any topic, most popular movies, and more. As far as I know this is the ultimate blog search engine, and Google's http://www.google.com/blogsearch could use an honorable mention.





Where did I find out most of this information? From a book called Blogging For Dummies:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118151941/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1118151941&linkCode=as2&tag=seatac-20



Many more resources are covered there, with the author's opinion on them instead of mine. Read what others have to say about this book on Amazon, and you can also try looking for it at your local library.



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