Creating and maintaining a blog can be hard work, as it takes a lot of trial-and-error and can cause many headaches and frustrations. If you truly want your blog to succeed, you have to treat it as a business; this often involves putting in long hours of research, tweaking, optimizing, and much more. While those who are new to blogging often don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into, they quickly learn that blogging is not for everyone. If you’re not willing to put in the work and effort, then you

FanMix describes itself as “one inbox to rule them all”. The tool allows you to manage all of your social conversations from across the Web. While they currently only support three social sites, you’ll soon be able to manage your blog comments as well as various other sources. It’s meant to be a “dead-simple inbox, just like email”. So if you’re still suffering from social overload or just looking to make your life easier, FanMix is worth giving a try. It will help you keep up with all mentions of you or

Do you prefer visual results over text? If you do, then you’ll love these visual search engines, which display images and website snapshots as opposed to text snippets. There’s not much to say about these search engines. You simply enter your query, press enter (or click on search), and view your results. So let’s take a look at 5 amazing visual search engine results. Watch the cube fill up as your results fall into place. You can use the arrow keys to flip the cube, shift+mouse to drag

Do you hate looking at your inbox? Is checking your email becoming more of a chore that never seems to be completed? Well, it’s a new year, so why not start by taking control of your email inbox once and for all? If your inbox is out of control and you don’t know where to start, or if you just want to start the new year off productively, here are 3 free tools that can help. If your your inbox is totally out of control and can’t keep your priorities straight, you really need ActiveInbox. This plugin for

If you’re a blogger, journalist, student, teacher, or other kind of writer that does a lot of research on the Web, you’ll love Shelfster. In a nutshell, Shelfster is ”the easiest way to gather information and write a paper, article or book, with the stuff you’ve collected at your fingertips”. Shelfster is free and extremely useful because it allows you to have all of your researched and clipped content in a single location. Shelfster is easy to use and includes a project-based

Can you believe that 2012 is just hours away? In some time zones, it may even be minutes away. As a special thank you to all of our faithful readers here at BloggingTips.com, we present to you a list of the top 20 posts for 2011. These posts have been listed in order of popularity — based on the number of comments, in descending order. This is your chance to look back at our top posts, catch any that you may have missed, or refresh your memory of those that you may have forgotten. These posts include tips

Spool is an easy and stylish way of saving, reading, sharing, and syncing your favorite Web content such as images, videos, web pages, and articles. It’s a tool much like Read it Later, Instapaper, and Readability with the addition of direct sharing with friends and the ability to save videos (a feature some similar services do not offer). Spool is much like Read it Later and Instapaper because it lets you save items to view later or even offline via your mobile device. It is also like the

There are various tools available that let you manage all of your contacts in one place (ie. Gist and Sprout Social), yet some have limitations and others require a paid subscription. Flup is a new service that lets you manage all of your contacts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google from a single location. It may not be as advanced as others (it’s in early beta), but it gets the job done and even adds in a few extra freebies.

If you’re a member of numerous social sites, you know how much of a pain it is to manage all of your files from these various services. You’re required to sign into each site individually, which takes time and can be frustrating. With SocialFolders, you won’t have to log into separate sites anymore because it lets you handle all of these things right from your desktop – which is really convenient. What attracted me to SocialFolders was the ability to access and share your social content online from a