If you blog to make money online, here are three tools you need to use straight away. If you’re not already using these tools, they can make a difference to your traffic and your earnings.  If you’re using them already and have some other tools that you find indispensable, we’d love to hear what they are!

RSS

A lot of blog templates have RSS built in. If not, you should add it. Really Simple Syndication can help you feed your blog to other places and have people subscribe to you.  In a future post, we’ll talk about some of the things you can do with your feeds!

MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog or BOTH

I’ve talked a lot about these tools here on SeanSEO and it’s because they add a level of interactivity to your blog. Using these interactive tools puts you in a directory and provides you with colourful widgets for your blog that allow you to see who’s visiting.  When you click on a widget you can be taken to blog communities, ratings pages, tag clouds and individual member lists which can help you find more followers to network with and is a great tool to use for finding places in your niche to comment and trade links with.  There are many benefits to using these services  as they’re a combination of a blog directory and social marketing tool.

Magic Traffic Formula

Now you should go ahead and follow your own magic blog traffic formula to get people to that blog post.  Do you have one yet? This kind of formula will include a handful of actions that you do after each blog post that will bring traffic to your website.  The tools mentioned above will start you off but your little formula for getting extra traffic will help you significantly.  Do you have a formula yet?  If not, stop back tomorrow and I’ll give you a few tips to help you brew up a formula for getting maximum mileage out of each blog post you write.