Blogging Tips

One aspect to success online is staying a step ahead of the trends, and a great way to do that is to see what’s just about to get hot. Killer Startups is a site that states its mission is to discover the next YouTube. They do that by allowing visitors to submit sites, which they review and visitors vote on the most promising startups.

The cool thing about this site is simply the ability to scour the new startups (about 30 posted daily) for new methods of promoting your blog and getting incoming links. Just a brief scan of yesterday’s “killer startups” revealed a few promising tools for blog promotion. In fact, most of the startups reviewed have some level of Web 2.0 to them, with categories like social networking to user-generated content.

Just yesterday’s list of startups included a few sites to use now or keep an eye on. Keep in mind, of course, that these are startups that might need a little community beta testing before things work smoothly. In one day, I saw:

• SeoQuake- I downloaded this great SEO toolbar and tested it out. It’s a really nice little tool. The downside is you must use Firefox (but you should be anyway, and it’s free). The browser toolbar immediately generates great details about a page, from Google PageRank to Alexa ranking to Deli.cio.us indexes, the whois information, and the keyword density for the page. You can also get a line through any nofollow and noindex tags.
• Social Marker – This is a handy tool if you use social bookmarking to promote your blog. Just copy and paste the blurb from the page, then click the bookmark button you’ve dragged onto your browser. You still have to manually do things like enter your login names and passwords (and it asks for tags, but didn’t seem to insert them), but just click next to go to the next social bookmarking site. Each time, the forms are prepopulated with the URL, title and blurb for the page you’re bookmarking. I just tested it and, frankly, couldn’t find the patience to get through every social bookmarking site (but I have a short attention span). It is definitely easy to use and handy.
• BlogRush – This one, I see, already has garnered some buzz, and not all of it’s good. As it’s mentioned in an earlier post here, BlogRush was rushed. It’s really important that basic pages of your site present well when you’re live. But I do see some real potential here. With BlogRush, I found it pretty simple to sign up and generate code to insert a widget. Having a parenting site, I always get a bit concerned about anything that automatically generates external links, but so far they look very on-target. I certainly like the idea behind BlogRush of helping bloggers push traffic to their sites. Time will tell if it really works. I’ll see how my test run goes.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Killer Startups, too, if for no other reason than to get good ideas and have some fun and interesting time surfing. But I like the potential of finding some great self-promotion and SEO tools in just one day’s list.