Blog Tools

There are lots of alternatives for each of these blogging, monetizing and tracking tools. Here you’ll find a review of what I use on this blog and what I’m most satisfied with, or what I intend to use in the future. I’m not saying they are the only ones, I’m just sharing my personal experience with them, so you can take advantage of it. Some of the links are affiliate, which means that I’ll make money if you use them to sign up for those programs. Some others are simple links pointing to resources which helped me bring my blog at this level.

Web domain

Many people start with free Blogger accounts, only to realize very soon that it would have been better to buy their own domain name. If you can’t afford to spend approximately $8/year for the .com domain name, plus $3-$7/month for hosting, then you can set up your free account at blogger and start blogging in about five minutes (if you are not interesting in making money with your site, you can sign up for a free WordPress.com account – be aware they don’t accept advertising on blogs). Blogger blogs are perfectly fine, the only drawback being that you won’t be able to sell them, as they aren’t your property.

Bust a name is a site where you can play with words in order to generate domain names which suit best your blog’s niche. The tool shows you what combinations are available, and offers you the possibility to buy the discovered domains through www.GoDaddy.com

Web hosting

This blog is hosted on Dreamhost. The quality is good, I can host as many domains as I want on the same account, I have 140GB storage space, 1.4TB bandwidth, one click installs (including WordPress, with lots of themes), MYSQL, PHP, CGI, and up to 3075 e-mail accounts, all these for $7.95/month. This is not a big amount of money, taking into consideration what you get for it. If you decide to host your blogs there, I give you my special promo code: ATT2007GIFT. Use it to sign up for one of the yearly plans and you’ll get $97 discount. This is the maximum discount possible. I don’t make any money by having you sign up with this code. It is my gift to you, made possible by Dreamhost. And it comes with a .com domain name free for the first year.

Latest update: I’ve moved this blog from Dreamhost to Hostgator. Despite the fact that I had paid for a full year in advance, Dreamhost kicked me out unexpectedly claiming that I’ve crashed their server twice and that I do black hat stuff (which I wish I knew how to do, by the way). There was no prior notice, so I was not able to backup my blogs from WordPress dashboard – I had to use mysql, and I encountered problems when importing the databases on the new server. My special promo code is not working anymore. And if you want to know, the blog was loading much slower on Dreamhost’s server than it is now, on Hostgator’s.


This is an excellent webhosting plan from Hostgator which allows hosting unlimited sites for only $7.95 per month. It’s best for getting you started. Hostgator is a reliable company. I’ve been hosting some of my sites with them since 2008 and I’m happy as can be. Their customer support is fast and professional, I’ve got all issues solved quickly.

Blogging software

This site uses WordPress. I chose it because of a few considerations:

  • It is easy to install (even if you don’t have one click installs in your hosting package, installing WordPress is very easy and it does not require special programming knowledge)
  • There are a lot of free themes (layout templates) available, plus a lot of free plugins (programs which offer additional functionality features to a blog, such as displaying a list of related articles at the end of each post, or allowing readers to edit their comments, or showing a list of your top commenters, or automatically create a sitemap, or even display contextual advertising)
  • It has a user friendly administration panel

Money making sources

  • Google AdSense: 60% of my online earnings come from this contextual pay-per-click advertising program. I’ve been using AdSense since one year three years already, and I can say that they are trustful, and they pay as promised in their terms of service. You have to make at least $100 before they’d issue a payment.
  • Text Link Ads: my second money maker, accounting for 35% of my revenue. The minimum amount necessary to get paid is $25. However, if you choose to be paid by check and not PayPal, the bank would take some $10-$14 commission, so it would be better to raise the minimum amount at which you’ll be issued a check for your earnings. Upon accepting you into the program, Text Link Ads would give you a plugin which you’d install on your blog. When advertisers buy links, they will be shown as you can see in my sidebar, at Featured Sites section. You can display a maximum of 10 such links. August 2009 update: this is an outdated resource, stay away from it if you don’t want to lose your good standing with Google. Besides, payment levels are really ridiculous lately, advertisers asking for 200 word reviews for as little as $2.
  • ReviewMe: You can write paid reviews for advertisers who order them via ReviewMe. If you get accepted, you have the possibility to set your own price for the reviews, and you may reject whatever advertisers you feel like being inappropriate for your blog. The reviews you write will be clearly labeled as “paid reviews” and you don’t have to always be positive (advertisers state their requirements when placing an order, so you will be able to reject those which are not in accordance with your policy). Review Me has an affiliate program which will bring you $25 for each advertiser who subscribes via your link and orders a review. In two years, I’ve got only two reviews from them. I wonder how other people claim to be making a lot of money.

August 2009 update: this is an outdated resource, stay away from it if you don’t want to lose your good standing with Google.

  • FusionCash (Need cash? Get paid to take surveys): complete online surveys and get paid (all members get $5 bonus at sign up). Available only for USA residents, but they have an affiliate program run via Neverblue Ads, which brings you $1.50 for each new member you refer.
  • CashCrate: complete online surveys and get paid. Members from the United States and other English speaking countries will have the most offers available to them, but members from other countries are welcome as well (I’ve actually tried this one, and offers for outside US are rather scarce, but you can earn from their affiliate program 20% of first tier referrals earnings and 10% of the second tier referrals earnings).

I’ll add other money making programs to this list as soon as I’ll be happy with their performance.

Monitoring & statistics & research

Statcounter: free, real time statistics program, helping you see the number of visits, unique & returning visitors, plus detailed statistics for the last 100 visits (referring sites, referring keywords, visit length, visitors by country and many more).

Google Analytics: free, detailed program, with options of defining goals and measuring success. However, it does not show statistics in real time.

Keyword Elite: one time fee software which helps you with keyword research by putting together in the same screen all the parameters you need to evaluate in order to decide the search volume, the competition and the AdWords click cost of your keywords. August 2009 update: there is a newer version of this software going to be released pretty soon. For details and for a sneak peek, Click Here!

Google Keyword Tool External: free keyword research tool. Since none of the keyword research tools are accurate, why not use this one which doesn’t cost you money?


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