Useful Resources for Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Comprehensive resource collection for bloggers and Internet marketers. To this page I have collected the best resources and tools, most of which I use personally as well. Make sure you bookmark the page, so you can come back here when needed.

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Resource List Table of Contents (T.O.C)

Get back here with links like this:

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Forums


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Blogging Forums


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Internet Marketing Forums


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Domain Registrations

Register your domains on a reliable domain registrar. You do not have to register domains with the same service provider you get hosting from, and I actually recommend for you to get domains from separate domain registrar. This will make possible selling of the domain and/or blog much easier, which you should prepare even if you have no plans to sell when you start. Think of it as “not putting all eggs in the same basket”, if you will.

Here are some domain registration services to consider:

I have personally registered my domains on my hosting provider (convenient, but not necessary the smartest thing), which is DreamHost, which is a great host, but domain registrations cost a bit more than from above registrars.

If you’re looking to register multiple domains, e.g. for niche sites, I suggest you take advantage of the cheaper domains by doing a Go Daddy bulk domain registration.

Note that some of these domain registrars offer hosting as well, but I DO NOT recommend you get hosting from them. You can if you want, but please check below for good and reliable hosting services (for example, Go Daddy is an excellent domain registrar, but their hosting has some limitations compared to the better ones).


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Hosting

DreamHost is the host I use and I’ve been very happy with it. For Host Gator or Hostmonster, I have no personal experience, but many others have recommended these and especially Host Gator has received a lot of good reviews. Because of these reasons, these three are the hosts I’m recommending.

As an affiliate for these hosting providers, I have set special promotions just for my readers, giving you great hosting with great price. See below for details, you’ll get these discounts only using my hosting coupons and links.

DreamHost

Here’s an exclusive DreamHost coupon only for my readers (saving over 50% for the first year):

  • Use the promo code: ZEMALF when signing up
    • First year = $4,85 / month (saving over $60 total from the normal $9,95/month)

In addition to my special discount, by default, DreamHost gives you

  • 97-day money-back guarantee
  • 1 free domain registration (with free WHOIS privacy!)
  • unlimited number of domains, unlimited email accounts
  • unlimited bandwidth, and highly reliable host for your sites

HostGator

  • HostGator is reliable hosting that has won many awards over the years and often receives high rankings from its users
  • HostGator hosting plans start from $4.95 per month ($7.95 for more than 1 domain)

Hostmonster

  • HostMonster gives great hosting for $6.95 $5.95 per month (discount for my readers and clients)
  • Free domain and free WHOIS privacy with all hosting plans
  • Host unlimited domains, with unlimited space, and
  • Have up to 100 SQL databases (great for building niche blogs with WordPress)


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eBooks and Coaching

Here are some eBooks (or eCourses, where materials are delivered via email) that have tremendously helped me to improve my blog and blogging skills, in addition to learning about marketing and Internet business. I think the free eBooks are excellent resources for any bloggers and Internet business owner, so I recommend you read them as you will learn a lot.

Most of the free eBooks have been released to promote a coaching course or another product by the authors. You can get the free information and you don’t have to pay or buy anything unless you so choose to. However, if after reading the free information you feel like you could benefit learning more, the coaching courses are great, I’ve taken a couple of them…

I have personally been a student in Become a Blogger, Blog Mastermind and Blog Masters Club, and my blog wouldn’t be the same as it is now if I hadn’t had the chance to learn from the experts like Yaro Starak, Gideon Shalwick and David Risley. Because of that, I am proud to recommend their courses to you (and use my affiliate link).

You can find more great (free) eBooks here:

You should also check out the Blogger’s Bible, comprehensive blogging course by Caroline Middlebrook. The catch? Blogger’s Bible is free, and it’s delivered once a week to your inbox. There is a paid / premium option, which gets you all the materials and more right away, but at least subscribe to the free version and start reading and archiving those lessons!


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Free WordPress Themes

There are thousands of free WordPress themes, available at WordPress.org, which is a great starting point for you and your blog. Or you can take a look at these free themes not available on the WordPress.org:


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Premium WordPress Themes

If you want more unique and more customizable design, take a look at these premium WordPress themes:

WooThemes

  • WooThemes are quality themes that look great and make visitors go “Woo”, thus the name :)
  • New themes are published every month, so there’s plenty to choose from
  • They also have a theme club, which gives an access to all their themes

Thesis Theme

  • Thesis is possibly the most popular premium theme on WordPress
  • It’s more of a theme framework than just a theme, making it one of the most customizable themes around.
  • This means a lot of customizable options, which makes Thesis great in the long run
    • but you need to do more initial work to get it look like you want,
    • you do need to learn to tweak the theme, or
    • hire someone to do it for you
  • There are ready made customizations available for Thesis as well,

StudioPress WordPress Themes

  • StudioPress has loads of well designed and optimized themes for you to choose from.

Unique Blog Designs

  • Unique Blog Designs does, as it name states, unique blog designs on hire.
  • They also offer a free guide and free theme on signup (at least check that out)
  • UDB also has a site called Theme Wars, where two theme designs battle out and the winner is put on sale.

UBD also sells out-of-the-box themes, specifically designed for Internet marketing, Squeeze Theme and Affiliate Theme. These themes have spesific purpose, help you set up landing pages, sales pages and product pages. They are not so good for normal blogging, so I wouldn’t go buying these if you’re new to blogging and looking for your first theme.

Squeeze Theme

  • Squeeze Theme is a theme designed to make opt-in pages
  • Squeeze pages are used most commonly to grow an email list
    • “squeezing” email addresses from the visitors.
  • For this purpose Squeeze Theme is perfect, but not suitable for normal blogging.

Affiliate Theme

  • If you’re running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns and need to quickly set up sites, this might be for you.
  • Affiliate Theme is spesifically designed for affiliate marketing and setting up sales pages and product pages
  • Most usable for PPC purposes.

Elegant Themes

  • ElegantThemes offers a subscription for $19.95 which gives you unlimited access all the themes there.

Press75

  • Professional WP themes for any purpose, e.g. photo blog, news, video site, small business blog, etc.
  • Packages and access to all the themes also available.


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WordPress Plugins

Most of the WordPress plugins are free, available through WordPress Plugins Directory.

Quick and easy install directly from WordPress Dashboard: Plugins –> Add New.

Here are the 8 must-have plugins for WordPress I use:

  • Akismet
    • Default, spam filter
  • All in One SEO Pack
    • Search engine optimization
    • Even if you have SEO-friendly theme, this will help you maintain the settings
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Google XML Sitemaps
    • Generates and submits XML sitemap for search engines
  • W3 Total Cache
    • The ultimate caching solution for WordPress
    • Yes, forget WP Super-Cache, this is way better.
    • Bit technical and difficult to get running, but once you do, this one
      • caches the pages
      • caches the database connection
      • minifies and caches javascript and CSS
      • automatically manages the media library with content delivery network (CDN), like Amazon S3
  • WP-DBManager
    • Backing and optimizing the WordPress database
    • Automatic scheduling
    • Can be used to send Db backups to mail for offsite storage
  • Robots Meta
    • Micromanage how search engine robots index your site
    • Easily set nofollow links on front page
    • Edit and handle the .htaccess rules and robotx.txt from WP Dashboard
  • WP Smush.it
    • Automatically optimize the images you upload for web
    • Install once and you don’t have to do anything afterwards,
    • this one compresses and optimizes the images while you upload as normal

On larger blogs, especially if I need to change permalinks and/or URLs, I also use:

  • Redirection
    • Manage 301 redirects.
    • Automatically monitor changing post URLs and set 301 redirects
    • Manually set 301’s for easy affiliate link management and tracking
    • Monitors and logs 404 errors

The ones above are are what I install to each and every WP blog I run. I also use Contact Form 7, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), WP-Pagenavi, WP Greetbox and Sketch Bookmarks.

When free options are not enough, some highly specialized plugins that are worth the payment if you need the features they offer. Here are some premium plugins that people are using on their WordPress blogs:


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Tools

Useful tools for blogging and Internet business activities.

  • Micro Niche Finder (Keyword and market research tool)
  • MailChimp (email list system, free up to 500 subscribers)
  • AWeber (mailing list service provider, $1 trial for a month)


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RSS Feed Distribution Services

  1. FeedFury
  2. FeedBomb
  3. Plazoo
  4. RSS Micro (Doesn’t accept large RSS Feeds)
  5. 2RSS
  6. RSS Feeds
  7. Feeds4all
  8. Postami
  9. Feedest
  10. DaytimeNews
  11. MySpace RSS (coutry-based redirection kept me off this one)
  12. RSS Feeds Submission Directory
  13. MillionRSS (ToDo: Get 468×60 banner done before submitting to this one)
  14. Yahoo RSS (ToDo: Look into “add to my Yahoo” button)
  15. Feed Base
  16. RSS Motron
  17. Blog Digger
  18. Feed 24 (Unavailable service 2009-July-01)
  19. Feed Boy RSS Directory
  20. Chordata
  21. Golden Feed
  22. Read A Blog
  23. Newgie (Bad Request (Invalid Hostname) 2009-July-01)
  24. Jordo Media RSS
  25. RSS Network (Was up, but gave errors. Try it, might work for you)
  26. Ice Rocket
  27. Blog Pulse
  28. Feed Shark
  29. Feed Plex
  30. Blog Burst

References:

http://susansuarez.com/36-rss-feed-distributions-to-promote-yourself/


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Directories of Web Directories


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Blog and Website Directories

Special

PR 9

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Directory Submission Services


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The Automatic Ping List for Blogs

Consider installing MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer -plugin (plugin is free, but requires a registration.) to

  • make pinging as efficient as possible and
  • to ensure that your blog is not labeled for spamming the pings

Copy and paste this list to the

  • Settings >> Writing — Update Services -field
  • or in the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer settings

The Short and Optimized Ping List

This is the ping list I use and recommend you use too. It contains the most essential ping services, nothing more, nothing less.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Reference: Vladimir’s WordPress Ping List

The Massive Ping List

If you want to make sure you ping each and every service out there, you might want to use this list instead.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc..php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Reference: XML-RPC Ping Services (for English Blogs) at WordPress Codex


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Multipinging Services

..remember that WordPress does this automatically, and you can set service like FeedBurner to do this too (if you are burning your RSS feed there as you should). Just check the “PingShot” inside the FeedBurner control area.

http://pingomatic.com/?oldpinger

http://www.pingoat.com/

http://www.ipings.com/

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