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I have learned a lot about blogging, and free blog marketing tools generally are my best teachers. I have been setting up WordPress blogs on various subjects as an internet marketer, and I am usually pleasantly delighted at all of the free plugins that bring me traffic, help me to optimize my blog, and allow me to market my blog with each post. Here are some of my favorite blogging tools, along with the reasons I really like them.

All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin This is generally the first plugin that I install after I create my WordPress blog. It optimizes your blog for the main search engines, and it’s because you can add the title, excerpt, and keywords to each post so that the search engines can pick up your post quickly. It’s an excellent traffic generator.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator This WordPress plugin is a must to create a sitemap easily for your WordPress blog. They can get you indexed quickly by major search engines. Sitemaps are useful for the search engine indexes, as sitemaps automatically list your new content so that the search engines can crawl it.

Onlywire Social Bookmarking Plugin I have been using Onlywire for several months, because it is free, fast, and you will get a lot of traffic and backlinks using this plugin. It is so much easier to install the WordPress plugin than having to add your content each time.

These free blog marketing tools help me to automate a lot of my daily tasks as an online marketer. I really like the freedom of being able to create and market my content online for free. Grab these plugins and test them out, I guarantee you that you will like them too.

You may want a website for your business or just to share with your friends, but no matter what the reason is, you’ll need to learn how to make a website before you can build one. Either that, or you’ll have to pay someone to make it for you.

When you’re preparing to make your first website, you first need to decide what type of website you want to make. A good way to start is with a blog. These sites are easy to set up and you can update them and add new content quickly and easily. You can also set up a blog to look like a typical HTML website if you really want to.

Blogs are easy because there is a platform already set up so that you don’t have to do any coding to get started. You can start a blog on a blogging website such as Blogger or Wordpress, or you can get your own hosting and set up a Wordpress blog on your own domain. Just make sure the hosting package you subscribe to offers installation of Wordpress through Fantastico. That makes things a lot easier.

For a more traditional type of website, you can get an HTML editor that uses a WYSIWYG interface to design your site. The WYSIWYG editor will allow you to see exactly what your webpage will look like right in the editing program. That way, you can tweak it to get it just right before you publish your website to the Internet. Download a few WYSIWYG editors and test them before deciding which one to use for your site. Some are much easier to use than others.

You don’t even need an editor at all to build a website, but you are really making things difficult on yourself if you try to write the code by hand without the benefit of a preview window to see what things will look like. However, it can be done. Just write your HTML code in a text editor and save as an HTML file. Upload it to your host to see what it looks like.

You can find a free HTML editor by searching for it online. There are quite a few available. Of course, some are better than others. You can try a couple of different programs to see which one you like best. You might also want to check and see if your hosting package includes any website templates. These can save you a lot of time. If you really want to be geeky, you can try writing your code in Notepad and saving it as an HTML file to upload to your host. That might be overdoing it a bit though.

If you’re new to designing websites, I really recommend that you start out by setting up a blog. That is by far the easiest way to go. Your second choice should be using a good WYSIWYG editor to design an HTML site using templates from your web host. Better yet, unless you want to seriously pursue website design or blogging as a hobby, you’ll probably get the best possible results by hiring a professional web designer. Many of them are quite affordable, and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.

WordPress Plugins

also known as extensions, are used to extend WordPress functionality and give your site more oomph. In this article, I will list a few basic plugins that will improve your WordPress in, well, basic ways.

First up is the Bad Behaviour plug-in by Michael Hampton, which blocks automated spam. It is at heart an anti-spam program that uses a different way of tackling the problem, which is to scrutinise the messenger and delivery way of a message, instead of looking at the message itself. Interestingly, almost all comment spam are delivered by automated bots; so if you use this plug-in, you would be virtually free from comment spam!

Have you ever gotten frustrated that the search capability of your WP is limited to the boundaries of your articles? Download the Search Everything plugin! Dan Cameron and other contributors have come up with a plugin that extends WP’ search capability to pages, tags, excerpts, comments, etc. Best of all, you can adjust the defaults and get a tailored search, just by clicking a few check boxes.

Do you have a lot of pictures on your site? Shutter Reloaded is a plugin that uses the Lightbox effect – a script that is used to overlay images (pictures, etc) on the existing page – for your images and picture galleries. Shutter is unique because it doesn’t use an external JavaScript framework (MooTools, Prototype), and therefore is very light – read: fast!

Imagine if you’re at a certain page, say a page on gardening and would like to read other similar pages. Instead of having to exit that page and Google ‘gardening’, you could actually use Similar Posts, a plugin by Rob Marsh, SJ, which is a list that displays similar posts and/or pages. ‘How?’ you may ask. Answer: It calculates similarity based on a page’s content, title and tags.

Subscribe To Comments is a plugin by Mark Jaquith that allows your commenters to decide if they would like to be notified of new comments on your Wordpress page. When you install this plugin, commenters will see a check box that they can tick if they wish to be notified via email of new comments on the page. Do it; your commenters would be pleased!

Last but not least, backing up your database is extremely important, if a bit of a hassle. WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko, is an automated and on-demand backup program that saves you the hassle of doing it manually all the time, as it’ll send copies of your database to your inbox at regular intervals. However, it must be noted that Database Backup does not save files (images, videos, etc), only database (posts, written comments, etc).

These basic plugins will make a lot of difference to your Wordpress page, convenience and safety-wise. All of them are plug-and-play, work well with Wordpress 2.7, and most importantly are licensed under the GNU GPL. Oh, and they’re free! What are you waiting for?

There are many reasons you might want a website, whether it is for your business or personal use. Whatever your purpose, unless you plan to have someone else do the work for you, the first thing you’ll need to learn is how to make a website.

Before you decide how you will go about building your website, you should look at the various options available. If you want to go the easy route, try starting a blog. That’s a special type of website that is usually used by people who want to post information frequently, but that doesn’t mean you have to. You can set up a blog to work like a regular website pretty easily.

The reason blogs are the easiest way to create a website is because the software does most of the work for you. You don’t have to worry about learning how to write code. You can either set up your blog on Wordpress or Blogger, or you can set it up using your own domain through a web hosting company. If you get your own hosting, make sure they offer Fantastico and check to make sure that Wordpress can be installed through it. It’s much easier to do it that way than install it manually.

Another way you can set up a website is by using an HTML editor. If you are unfamiliar with HTML, try to find an editing program that uses a WYSIWYG interface. That means ‘what you see is what you get.’ In other words, the graphics, text and other elements that you use in the editing program will appear the same way in your browser as they do on the screen. Look for a program that allows you to drag and drop elements where you want them. You need something that is user-friendly and allows you to design a website completely without looking at the code.

On the other hand, if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty and do the coding yourself, you can do that too. Most WYSIWYG editors also have a tab you can click on to view and edit the HTML code. Using one of these editing programs allows you to switch back and forth to see what the page looks like as you make changes to the code.

You can find a free HTML editor by searching for it online. There are quite a few available. Of course, some are better than others. You can try a couple of different programs to see which one you like best. You might also want to check and see if your hosting package includes any website templates. These can save you a lot of time. If you really want to be geeky, you can try writing your code in Notepad and saving it as an HTML file to upload to your host. That might be overdoing it a bit though.

When it comes down to making the final decision, I urge you to go with a blog if this is your first time making a website. Blogs are just so easy to use that it doesn’t make sense to waste your time learning another way of building a website. In fact, many experienced website designers prefer to use a blogging platform to build their sites instead of an HTML editor. Another option, of course, is to hire someone to build your website for you. This is probably the best choice of all if you don’t plan on having more than one site. You can find someone who will set up your site for a reasonable price while you spend your time doing something more enjoyable.