photo credit: erin MC hammer

I don’t do much right here on Blog Tyrant (due to laziness) but it is clear that I do get a lot of comments. Normally its between 60 and 90 and sometimes as much as 250.

And as much as I bang on about the importance of email subscribers, the comments I get on this blog from my amazing readers is what keeps me going. It is what makes the blog appear alive and well and it is those comment-leaving angels that spread the word on social media.

In this post I want to show you some of the most engaging comment areas that you will find on a blog and talk about why they work so well. Hopefully it will inspire you to update and tweak your own comment areas in order to make them more attractive and enticing to your readers.

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Photo: The National Guard

Its true. When your Facebook, blog, email or bank accounts get hacked your life can be ruined. Some of us spend our entire existences online and such a breach can have terrible effects. You can have money stolen, personal details hijacked and, as happened to me, spam emails sent out to hundreds of high profile clients.

Just a month ago my Facebook and secondary email accounts were hacked while I was on holiday in India. It was my fault.

In this article I am going to give you some simple ways that you can boost your Facebook and email security and stop hackers from ruining your life. Please share this post around as this event was seriously traumatic, I’d like to help people prevent it.

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photo credit: brian.ch

The first few months as a blogger are hard. You have no idea what to do – self host or free hosting? This plugin or that plugin? It is a very confusing time. And the interesting thing is that even now, many years on, I still look for new things to put in my blogging arsenal. I still keep an eye out for better tools that will help me grow my network of blogs and websites.

This post is designed to be your complete blogging arsenal. I have put together all the tools, apps, plugins and websites that you will need to succeed with your blog. This post isn’t just for beginners – hopefully everyone finds something new here.

54 tools, apps, plugins and websites that every blogger must have

As always, if you see any glaring omissions please leave a comment and let us know as I am going to add to this list constantly. I will give a back link to your blog if you suggest something that makes the list.

1. Just Host – Hosting
Just Host is a very cheap hosting company. They have amazing live support and give you as many add on domains as you like. This means you can host multiple blogs from the one hosting package without any problem. The main reason I recommend Just Host for so long is the fact that they never seem to crash or have down time. Most server company’s seem to get this wrong. It is great for beginners because the support is really quite helpful in those times of crisis.

2. Google Sitemaps – Plugin
Automatically generates a sitemap of your blog and all its pages and sends it to Google for indexing. This is an essential for good SEO and could not be easier with this little plugin.

3. Head Meta Desc – Plugin
Turns the first few lines of each blog post into different meta description for indexation by Google. Very useful for turning your excerpt on Google results into something a little more catchy.

4. What Would Seth Godin Do – Plugin
A handy plugin that lets you add a message to your blog posts so that new readers see something different to old readers. For example, you might want to put something like “Hey dude, new here? Why not subscribe or check out our popular posts?” in order to make your blog more sticky.

5. Subscribe to Comments – Plugin
People leave comments but often forget to check back for replies. This plugin allows people to subscribe – an email is sent to them automatically when someone replies to their question. Visitor loyalty starts with this plugin a lot of the time.

6. Tweet Meme – Plugin
Adds the little thing up the top that shows how many people have Tweeted about your stuff. Handy if you get lots of Tweets, kinda sad if you don’t.

7. Wise Stamp – Firefox/Chrome Extension
This lets you add a custom HTML rich signature to any email account (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). All you do is compose your email, click the button down the bottom and it adds it in automatically. You can even have different signatures for different email accounts. Very handy.

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