Free For Your Site

Your blog doesn’t have to just sit there and look pretty. Thousands of blog and web site owners have already discovered that you can make it work for you. It’s a fair trade – post about stuff that you like and get paid for it. Many bloggers do it using an adserver like DoubleClick, and that’s fine. Only, why pay when you can get the same functionality for free?

OpenAds is exactly that: a free downloadable program that manages the ads you place on your site. Installation on your web server is easy if you have Fantastico on your account, but if not, it might be best to consult someone more computer savvy. You should also do your homework regarding online marketing and how advertising works on the net, or you might get lost in all the jargon inside. However, if you have enough patience to complete this step, you’re well on your way to becoming an Internet advertising mogul.

The ad networks most commonly used with OpenAds are Google AdSense, Commission Junction, TradeDoubler, ValueClick Media, and Casale Media. The program will allow you to roll out these different ad networks at the same time, letting you try out which are the most effective for your audience. For best results, run them in rotation and designate the percentage at which they’re shown. OpenAds gives you almost complete control as to how they’ll appear on your site – and thanks to open source development, you can count on a whole community of programmers for support.

The OpenAds software will on web servers supporting PHP version 4.3.11.

Go to OpenAds

Don’t be put off by its name. MorgueFile, despite appearances, is a wholesome and useful site that is sure to be a boon to every designer. In simplest terms, MorgueFile is an online storehouse of free high resolution stock photography.

The name was taken from a popular newspaper term used to describe a file that holds past issues flats. It is a place to keep post-production materials for reference, or an inactive job file. The goal of the site is to provide quality images for any creative pursuit, may it be corporate or private. You can use it in your ads, blogs, web sites, or print media without permission or credit from the photographer. However, give them due respect and don’t sell prints or digital copies directly, or claim that the photo is yours.

You don’t have to sign up to view their archive and download images. But if you’re planning to contribute works to their database, you will need to be a registered member. The images are still considered property of their respective owner, who agreed to grant you usage license under the MorgueFile Terms of Service.

The site design is clean and the navigation is intuitive. It also includes chat and discussion forums for users and members. It even has an online store with books, consumer electronic items, computers, and cameras among its categories. With all these features, MorgueFile is truly a resource that deserves a bookmark. It’s highly recommended for bloggers, article writers, and web designers.

Go to MorgueFile

So you’ve had a blog for some time now and you feel your content is fantastic, but you have no clue on how to reach a bigger audience. Or maybe you do have a modest following but you’re not sure how many they are or what they really like about your site. Fear no more. We’ve got just the tool so help you become an A+ blogger.

Publishing RSS feeds is one of the most effective ways to convert your visitors into a loyal audience. By giving them a heads up about your latest posts, they’ll keep coming back to enjoy your content. For a simple way to achieve this loyal readership, you can turn to FeedBurner, a Google-acquired company.

FeedBurner automatically notifies blog directories whenever you publish new content, making you known to more people. Subscribers get the added option of receiving your feeds via email for their convenience. Your feed also gets tricked out by giving subscribers an easy way to share and comment on the content you publish. FeedBurner maximizes compatibility with most RSS readers to ensure you cast the widest possible net. Lastly, you can brag about your updated circulation statistics by pasting a code anywhere on your web site.

FeedBurner can even analyze your site’s stats, as well as the effectiveness of your feed, by monitoring which posts are most popular and how widely it is circulated. And when you reach that critical mass of subscribers that you can say, “I am popular,” you can join the FeedBurner Ad Network and earn some money to reward all your efforts.

FeedBurner works especially well on Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Myspace, and podcast/video feeds.

Go to FeedBurner

Straight out of the hive is 103 Bees, an analytics tool that focuses on organic search engine traffic. This free online application delivers metrics that web masters can use to build traffic from search engines by increasing their rankings and discovering keywords. If you want to learn more about how you can optimize your site for search engines to boost traffic, then using this application will be as sweet as honey.

103 Bees lets you view the latest search terms used to find your site, along with ranking and landing page information for each term. The Related Keywords tool also displays related keywords for each search query, allowing you to broaden your keyword list. Users can also find out the search engines that deliver the most traffic to their sites. 103 Bees also contains colorful graphs that display your search engine traffic metrics visually. One graph helps you differentiate between your most popular keywords and “long tail” keywords. Another graph compares traffic from search engines with traffic from site referrals and paid advertising. All these tools are undeniably useful for SEO planning.

Users need to have minimal knowledge of HTML to paste the JavaScript code on their site. Don’t worry if you’re unsure about where to paste the code – the 103 Bees site contains a short guide on how to do this.

The 103 Bees site runs on most web browsers and their analytics service is free for sites that have less than 100,000 visitors per month.

Go to 103Bees

MyBlogLog has two important functions. It shows basic traffic statistics and lets your blog visitors interact with each other on a more personal level. The traffic statistics feature has a free 3-day trial per site, but the other MyBlogLog features are free to use

When you register for an account, you can create a profile that displays your contact info, interests, and web sites. You can control whether this information is private, public, or visible only to your contacts. MyBlogLog also features member communities for each blog. Using the MyBlogLog site and joining the many featured communities is easy for even novice bloggers.

Through MyBlogLog, you can download widgets that you can place on your site. These widgets are small programs that can track your visitors and let you communicate with them. The “Recent Readers” widget displays the list of MyBlogLog users that have recently viewed your blog. Most bloggers find this useful as a networking tool, since they can easily click on their readers’ names, communicate with them, and find out the other blogs they visit. The “Top 5 Links” widget, on the other hand, lets you know the top 5 outgoing links clicked by your users. Through these widgets, you can tell who has visited your blog and the sites they visited after yours. It’s a great way to see what types of sites interest your readers. However, pasting the widget code on your site requires a bit of HTML knowledge.

Since MyBlogLog bridges the gap between blog writer and reader, it’s much easier for bloggers to build a community with this application. Its popularity also makes it easier for bloggers to drive additional traffic to their sites.

MyBlogLog runs on most web browsers, and the code for the widgets is compatible with HTML and PHP coded blogs. This includes blogs made through WordPress, Yahoo 360, Typepad, and MySpace.

Go to MyBlogLog

Nowadays, web analytics services are getting a better share of the limelight. Site owners are discovering just how powerful these number crunching tools can be. They turn what used to be guesswork into a more scientific approach, which translates into efficient business spending and a greater return on investments.

HitTail is one such service. Like other popular analytics tools, it also requires users to paste a JavaScript code at the bottom of every page they wish to track. It gives you real-time stats about who visited your site and when, what keywords they used to reach you, and conversion tracking

However, HitTail is unique in its approach to keyword optimization. Dubbed the “Long Tail Method”, it looks at search terms that got visitors to your site but are not being used by most of your competitors. HitTail can give you suggestions as to which of these keywords to focus on. It works in the belief that if your content is better optimized for these terms, you’ll get more traffic from search engines.

The basic account is offered for free, and is suitable for small web sites that get 100,000 hits a month or less. For a small fee, you can upgrade to HitTail Plus, which lets you create sitemaps, receive keyword suggestions via RSS feed or email, keep all the data forever, view keywords trend over time, and use the tool on secure web pages. Plans for high volume web sites are also available.

With a little patience and determination, this service can be a tremendous boost to your business.

Go to Hit Tail

Google Analytics is God’s gift to mankind – or rather Google’s gift to web designers, web developers, business executives, advertisers, and virtually anyone who makes a living out of the Internet.

This free online tool gives a wealth of information which enables you to track and evaluate web site performance, and make the corresponding modifications to increase effectiveness. Best of all, it’s as easy as 1-2-3. Simply open a Google Analytics account, copy-paste a few lines of code into the pages you’d like to track, and voila, sit back and let the reports trickle in. You can also schedule these reports to be sent to you via email on a daily or weekly basis, or at any time that you please. The option to collaborate with other users makes it ideal for use in an office environment.

You can use Google Analytics to measure the efficiency of your marketing campaign strategies such as ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, search engines, and keywords. It can even give you a trend of your site’s performance over a pre-defined period of time, so that you’ll know if you’re heading towards the right direction. It’s also possible to study your visitors’ demographics like country, city, language, connection speed and other pertinent data. A map is available showing the location of your visitors, which will be helpful in fine-tuning future ad campaigns to reach your target audience.

Truly, Google Analytics is slowly but surely changing the e-commerce landscape. If you can learn to maximize its host of features, you’ll soon be converting more clicks into tangible profit.

Google Analytics is viewable on most internet browsers.

Go to Google Analytics

If blogging were a disease, then we have on our hands a pandemic – and people are happy to be part of the statistics. Eleven years after the concept was first floated, it’s estimated that there is close to 100 million blogs on the Internet today. With that big a crowd, it becomes a challenge as to how to promote your site and get people to read what you have to say.

BlogCatalog is a web log directory which can assist you in reaching out to a wider audience. It lists sites available on the Internet so that people searching for blogs on various topics can find them easier. They are all arranged neatly according to categories and tags. There’s also a search box that is helpful for those looking for a very particular topic.

Site membership is free. Just make your account and you can start taking advantage of the BlogCatalog services. An added benefit of BlogCatalog is a discussion forum where you can promote your blog, ask fellow bloggers about tips and tricks of the trade, or anything else under the sun.

Blogs have evolved from being mere online diaries into alternative newspapers, photo galleries and even video blogs. There is also a growing number of people who now make a substantial amount of money through their blogs and advertising. This booming business is here to stay, and it will continue to be competitive. BlogCatalog is just one of those tools that help you stay ahead.

Go to BlogCatalog

Do you know how many hits your site gets in a day? Do you know where those hits are coming from? If you don’t even have a rough estimate for an answer, this means that you don’t check your site statistics enough. Knowing about your site stats can help you plan your site better, and a simple program can show you all the necessary information. One such program is WebLog Expert Lite.

WebLog Expert Lite analyzes your site log, allowing you to know more about your site traffic. This application gives you a basic traffic summary, including average hits, page views, and visitors per day. It also shows in-depth information about files your site visitors accessed, bandwidth, referring URLs, web browsers, operating systems, search engines, and more. The output of WebLog Expert Lite is an easy-to-navigate HTML file with charts and graphs about your site traffic.

Using WebLog Expert Lite could be tricky for those new to web publishing, especially since you need to know where your log files are located on your web server. The presence of these files depend on your host, and you need to ask them where these files are if you can’t find them yourself. Because of this, newbie web publishers might want to stick to their hosting plan’s built-in site stats program, if they have one. More experienced publishers, however, will find WebLog Expert Lite indispensable, especially since it can analyze log information for multiple sites.

The program has three versions, Professional, Standard, and Lite. Although the Lite version is completely free, the other versions have free 30-day trials. All versions support IIS and Apache logs, and can automatically detect your log format.

WebLog Expert Lite works on a Windows platform, version 95 and above.

Go to WebLog Expert Lite

Metty is a simple tool that even novices can use to create clean meta tags for their web sites. It contains a form with several textboxes in which one enters key facts about the web page. With one click, Metty automatically generates the meta tags which can be copied and pasted onto the head of the web page. This being the case, a little know-how with HTML will go a long way.

Meta tags used to be crucial for search engine rankings. Although their significance has declined over the years, meta tags are still useful in aiding search engine spiders and directories with categorization. This is especially true when including relevant keywords in the title and description tags.

Metty actually comes in two versions – a downloadable freeware, called Metty Freeware Meta Tag Maker, and an online tool, called Metty Online Meta Tag Generator. Both have the same interface and functionality. They feature easy import of existing HTML files from your hard-drive or the web. You can also save tags as a file for use as a template, and have limited support for Dublin Core meta tags. The Freeware version can generate 33 meta tags while the Online version can generate 30.

Version 1.1 of the Online version has also been updated to be XHTML compliant. Users can observe that the code it generates now end with a terminating slash and that tags are written in lower case – all in accordance with the stricter XHTML rules.

Metty Freeware Meta Tag Maker is compatible with all Windows versions from Win95 to WinXP.

Go to Metty