Stumble Upon
What is it: StumbleUpon is a site that lets you discover the web, by showing you sites that are in your categories of interest (chosen when you create your account). The sites shown to you have been given thumbs up, or recommendations, by like minded users. I have stumbled upon some strange sites (most recently, how to solve the Rubik’s cube in 56 moves) but also a lot of great ones.
Why I love it: The ability to send links to friends without having to go to my email account- I can do it directly from StumbleUpon in my web browser.
How it can help you improve your blog: Not only can you discover good sites, but, if others give a thumbs up to your site, it can bring a lot of traffic your way. Granted, a lot of the visitors will be drive-by, and not come back again, but some will. And gradually, your exposure and traffic will increase.
What you should do: Install StumbleUpon onto your computer, and add a StumbleUpon button to the bottom of each of your posts, making it easy for your readers to give you a thumbs up. You can even follow others’ stumbles: my account is AlmostFrugal.
What is it: An online bookmarking service. Instead of keeping your bookmarks in one place, on your computer, you keep them in your account online. You can share them or keep them private.
Why I love it: I like being able to share my bookmarks with the world- the ones I choose at least. And doing it this way makes my weekly roundups so much easier. I also like being able to access my bookmarks chronologically, or by tags, and of course, from different computers. You can also use it to organize information- for example if I have to write a paper on pet turtles, I can save all the pages I find on pet turtles in Delicious, and tag them with ‘turtles’. That way I don’t have to keep a thousand pages open in my browser, and I can still access the information from other areas, or even share it with study partners and the like.
How it can help you improve your blog: As I mentioned above, this is a great way to improve a weekly link love edition if you do one. Just save the links you like in Delicious, and then link to your delicious page from your blog. Mine is Almost Frugal. Not to mention that the more people that bookmark your page or site, the higher it climbs in the rankings, thus driving traffic your way.
What you should do: If you do weekly roundups, use multiple computers or need to keep track of lots of web pages, I highly recommend Delicious. Otherwise, you probably won’t get a lot of use from it.
What is it: A Firefox add-on that allows you to send links directly to Twitter, from your account, with or without commentary. No need to leave the page you’re on, nor to sign in to Twitter on another page. No cutting or pasting. And it shortens URLs automatically.
Why I love it: This makes using Twitter one of the easiest things ever. It’s almost better than chocolate truffles. Almost.
How it can help you improve your blog: One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to start using Twitter more effectively, both as a networking tool and as a blog and brand builder. There are many theories on how to do this, which I will be discussing next week, but one of them involves sending links and information to your followers. This tool makes doing so easy.
What you should do: If you are a Twitter user, and a Firefox browser user, you should get this now. If you are not a Twitter user- think long and hard before signing up for an account- there are good things and bad things about Twitter, like with everything else! (And of course, you can follow me!)
Next week, I’ll be talking about Twitter and how you can (or even if you should) use it as a blogging tool. Until then, what are your favorite tools to make blogging easier?
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I am new to all these tools (so far I have only tried Twitter) and this is one of the more helpful posts about how to use all three.
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Lucie, you should definitely try the Twitter nav bar. I find it helps me enormously in improving the quality of my tweeting.