Google is receiving a lot of negative publicity in the blogosphere recently, mostly relating to the god-like status which it holds in the search market, and in particular for its hypocritical attitude towards paid links. I agree that much of this criticism is justified, but I also feel that Google make some great applications that are well worth using. Here are all of the Google tools which are useful to bloggers:
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Google RSS Reader is a very good tool for following the feeds of your favorite blogs. It’s fast, and because feeds are cached on Google servers you can assess the content even if the a blog’s server is down. It does take a while for content to appear on Google reader after it is posted for smaller blogs, but overall it is a great app for organizing your feeds.
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Google Analytics is a tool for tracking statistics on your blog. How many unique visitors, what they are looking at, what browser are they using, how long do they stay on your site. All of this and much more can be tracked using Google Analytics.
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Gmail is an email application by Google. It provides many advantages for receiving large amounts of email, which make it a very useful tool for bloggers. It groups email messages by subject, so comment notifications emails for your latest post will all be organized into one threaded easily readable message. It also allows you to filter and organize messages so you can label notification messages, and archive them. Gmail is fast, and it’s a time saver.
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Google Webmaster Tools allows you to upload a site map, making it more efficient for Google to crawl your site content. You can also: view any errors that have occurred while your site was crawled, define your www preference, remove dead links in Google records, and much more. A useful tool for any serious web master or blogger.
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Google Trends allows you to research keywords, and view current trends in your niche. A very useful tool for the serious blogger.
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Google Apps allows you to brand some of Google services with a domain. You can get domain specific email addresses using the Gmail interface. It also comes will tools for organizing a small team if you have more than one poster on your blog, which include sharing docs and a shared calendar.
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Google Adsense is an advertising scheme which you can use to make money from your blog. It allows you to place text and image ads which relate to the content of your site. Adsense pays you for each click made on an advertisement displayed on your site.
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Feedburner, is now owned by Google, so I am calling it a Google tool. Feedburner is used to manage subscribers to your blog’s RSS feed. It can be used to track activity on a feed, and make it much easier for users to subscribe to your feed.
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Google Blog Search is a useful blog search engine for researching articles, and finding new blogs to read.
The Google logo used in the this article is property of Google. This site is in no way affiliated with Google.
5 Responses to “What Google Tools Can You Use To Manage Your Blog?”
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I use most of these. FeedBurner is a must in my opinion, and I think Analytics and Google Reader are better than other options.
Google indeed has all these services. But something you need to become careful about, as long as everyone else, is how much information Google has access to.
It’s beginning to scare me how much I let Google know about me. My social, my credit cards, my shopping trends, my searching trends, my email, my business revenue, everything! It’s becoming freaky how dependent I am on Google.
I’ve been using all of Google’s tools from the start. All , except the last one, blog search, but there is time to use it too now that WP 2.3 includes google’s blog search instead of technorati.
@ Gadgets: I am not liking having google blog search links in my wp dash, they are all old links, and it doesn’t seem to change when I get new ones. It’s rubbish. I find myself actually visiting Technorati now.
There is a work around it. You just need to hack a little around wordpress. Google for it and you will find a way to put technorati back on it.
Man … even when I give some small advice , I still have to refer to google. Damn.