Best Free Tools for Bloggers & Online Content Writers

As a Hubber, Blogger, Content Writer it is great challenge to find out interesting content that content consumers want to read online. You will also want to write on the right platforms like HubPages so your content gets great exposure and reaches huge audience. Online Content Writer need to constantly learn and adapt to the challenge and changes they face every day from the Search Engine. It is all about getting your content on the Top 10 list of Google search and yahoo, ask and msn searches.

This hub lists online free tools that they can use to simply their research. Some of them might go a long way in helping you in your research. These tools will not only help you in HubPages but even in your blog or other content platforms.

Not writing in HubPages? You should; find out why?

SIGN UP NOW

The list:
Google Insight and Trends: This has been beaten to death in N numbers of hubs. If you still ask me what they are, here are some searches to get you started,

http://hubpages.com/search/Google+Insight
http://hubpages.com/search/Google+Trends

Google, Insight will give you an idea of what are the hot searches and what words people are using to search for them. You can also find out from which geographic region these terms are searched most. Google, Trends does the same thing the only difference being it actually tries to predict the traffic into future.

Google Ad Planner: I bet not many of you have heard about this one. To put it in simple terms, you have access to Google’s data gold mine. Google has billions of records of useful information about online content consumers and this is a tool for you to analyze all that information in minute detail.

Google Insight and Trends give you a very broad analysis and is a starting point. These two tools will tell you the search traffic but how about what age group is searching for "Cell phones". What Gender searches for the "Twilight merchandise"? What sites people visit for a specific search term.

This is a tool meant for the Advertisers/Marketers - to research audiences and design their ad campaign based on that. But who says we can't use it? It gives you immense insight into audience who come to a site. We can drill down to find out by Gender, Age, Household Income, Education or special groups like Active Internet User, Affluent 100K+, Auto Buyers, etc on any site. The data you can get is mind boggling. If you go nuts over data like me, you will probably spend weeks pondering over this tool. This single tool might be worth your time spent on this hub.

I started writing about Google Ad Planner with so much excitement and ended up writing so much, I had to move it to another Hub. That Hub will show you what Google Ad Planner can do.

Just-Ping.com
This helps you to find out if your website or blog is accessible around the world. Enter the url and the tool will ping it from 37 different check points located in different geographic areas around the world. This helps to ping your new web page aka make it visible to web search crawlers around the world. This will also tell you if your blog or website has been blocked in some parts of the world like China due to inappropriate content.

YouGetSignal.com
It lets you know about other websites that are hosted on the same web server as your site/blog. It is very important since one bad site and Google will be angry with you for being in the bad neighborhood. You can then ask your web hosting company to move your site to another server.
It even pinpoints exactly where your server is located. They also have a host of other network tool that you might want to take a look.

SocialMeter.com This is another great tool to find out if your post or web page has been bookmarked in any of the top book marking sites. You can now find out how popular your webpage or post is. The social websites checked against are Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google Links, Reddit, Sphere, Spurl, Technorati Links, Yahoo My Web.

Popuri.us Another tool like the SocialMeter.com that helps find the popularity of a site, with respect to page rank, inbound links, etc. This along with SocialMeter.com will help you find out the web popularity of your website or blog.

Statbrain.com, compete.com, quantcast.com
All three of them are site statistics tools. Statbrain.com is very basic and gives you some visitor count, traffic rank, etc. Compete.com and Quantcast.com are more detailed.

My favorite is Quantcast.com. It is completely free and the UI is absolutely easy to use. You can also filter data based on Age group, Gender, Demography etc. It also shows you “People-Who-Liked-This-Might-Also-Like” section.

DataOPedia.com
Oh boy, this is one got be one of the best. It combines many of the tools discussed above into one. It gives traffic rank, popularity, technical information, multimedia, company information, offices etc in one page!

Attentionmeter.com
Similar to DataoPedia. It combines the results from several traffic monitoring & social sites and displays them in one page. You can compare different site on several basic criteria.You can compare upto 5 sites.

Google Page Rank Report
A nice Google page rank tool, which can compare page ranks of 10 sites. Save you the trouble of installing the Google tool bar (for page rank) on your browser.

Hope these tools are useful for you. I have added very little information about each tool. You might find a wealth of information if you explore them in detail.

Warning: Don't blame me if you spend weeks using these tools and waste your time. :)

Please add a comment if you found them useful. If you know more tools that are very helpful for online content writers please let me know so that I can add them here. Happy writing!

Google Ad Planner Quick Start Guide
My Experiments with HubPages
Best Free Online Software