If you run a blog, you may want to hear back from your readers and fans. The most traditional and effective way to let readers get in touch with you is to create a contact form.

The contact form has a few important advantages over simply making your email address public. Two of the most essential of them are:

• That’s a spam-free contact method (if you choose a good plugin for that);
• It gives you some more advanced options to analyze and organize your contacts.

The second advantage is just what I’d like to look further into. There are three WordPress plugins that give some great options for learning more about people who contact you.

1. See the (original) referral of the contact

Enhanced WP-ContactForm includes the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referer. While the plugin doesn’t offer any stats (you can compile the stats yourself by throwing the referrals into an Excel file), this plugin will help you:

• Better understand the person’s intentions (if he, for example, Googled your name to land on your site – this gives you a reason to think that he has heard about you and has been looking specifically for you);
• Better understand the person’s reasons (you can also see which page of your blog might have encouraged the reader to contact you).

Here’s how it looks when you receive an email via the form:

2. Organize Your Contacts Effectively

WordPress-to-Lead plugin is a great way to keep track of your contacts and organize them effectively (I am testing it myself now). It makes it easier to:

• Track all conversations and interactions
• Organize your contacts and tasks in a single spot
• Easily synchronize with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, and more

It does need Salesforce account but if you get plenty of important emails from your blog contact form, you should consider taking this advanced approach for managing them. After all, your contacts are what accounts (or will account) for your success.

Besides, it has a wealth of handy options and settings that allow to configure the look and feel:

What’s more, it has a sidebar widget allowing to add a tiny contact form blog-wide:

3. Track form submissions

Contact form 7 is a very customizable and usable contact form plugin. It has a wide variety of options and is very easy to configure and install.

Besides that, it can be easily connected to your Google Analytics account to track form submissions. Here’s a very detailed tutorial on how to do that.

Learn More about People Who Contact You (WordPress) is a post from: Blog Godown

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Blogging has now become so easy that everyone can do it, and you might think it couldn’t be more simple. Well, it can! If you would rather not use Drupal’s editor, which can be slow and more difficult to use, you could use one of these top ten desktop blogging clients. These are programs you install on your computer which sit on your desktop. You prepare your post through the client, and then submit it to the blog from your desktop to the remote server. Simple!

1. Blogjet

Blogjet includes all the features provided by most blogging platforms, so you’ll hardly notice the difference between blogging on this and directly through Drupal. Features include a WYSIWYG editor, easy image editing, Flickr and YouTube support, a spellchecker, Auto Replace, post management and search tools, blog statistics, and a customizable interface. Prices start at $39.95 for single users.

2. Ecto

Ecto is a slick editor for Mac users. It brings users a whole host of features such as drafting, spell checker, creating links and attachments, categories, text formatting, comment options, syntax colouring in the HTML editor and many more. It comes with a 21 day free trial so you can test it out before laying out any money, and the cost is low at $19.95.

3. Bleezer

The major advantage of Bleezer is that it’s free, so if you want to try out a desktop client, this would be a good place to start. It runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, so it is refreshingly versatile. Features include WYSIWYG editing, image uploading, category support, tags (from multiple tag services), custom markup, spell checker, and advertising support with any service such as Ping Technorati, weblogs.com, or ping-o-matic.

4. Drivel Journal Editor

Drivel Journal Editor places emphasis on elegant design, but also has some great features, including spell checker, HTML syntax highlighting, offline composition and editing, automatic recovery and journal system extensions. The system runs on GNU and Linux, and it’s free to download.

5. ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an extension of Mozilla Firefox, and it’s free to download. It integrates with your Firefox browser. Great features include dragging and dropping formatted text from pages on your browser into the editor, taking notes, uploading images and posting to multiple blogs easily.

6. MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a great desktop blogging tool for Mac users. It’s features include a no-frills, easy-to-user interface, Flickr support, easy uploads and a media catalogue, previews, a re-blogging button for your browser, and a customizable editor. The tool is priced at $29.95 and upgrades are $9.95.

7. Thingamablog

Thingamablog runs on Windows and Linux. What makes it stand out from other desktop blogging tools is that it doesn’t require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. You only need FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server. Aside from this, it has some great features, including publishing to multiple blogs, blog entry management, one-click publishing, email publishing, customizable templates, category support, custom template tags, and ping services. All of this, and it’s free to download.

8. w.Bloggar

w.Bloggar is free to download, and boasts of a host of features. Running off Microsoft, the tool includes features that let you import text files, add links and images, format text, publish to multiple blogs, use category and title fields, upload images, import and export, and use colour highlighted HTML code. Added to this, w.Bloggar is now available in a portable version that you can unzip to your USB device.

9. RocketPost 2

RocketPost2 has a lot of the standard features of desktop blogging tools, but a few that make it stand out, such as quote tracking, one-click Technorati, Flicker and Del.icio.us tags, and automatic links to related posts, as well as the ability to schedule posts for future publishing. Prices for home users start at $29.00.

10. Blogdesk

Blogdesk is free to download. Its handy features include image upload, publishing to multiple blogs, a blog wizard, easy linking and automatic links to local files such as MP3s and editing of posts already published.

With features like these, especially on free tools, there’s no reason to delay. Try using one of these tools and see if your blogging productivity increases!

This article is a part of the guest blogging contest. If you like this article, then help supporting this author by retweeting, sharing and commenting on it, which will enable the author to win this contest. By the way, you can be a part of the contest, it is still not too late

10 Best Drupal Blogging Clients is a post from: Blog Godown

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1. Top 5 Drupal Secrets
2. 5 steps to building a power blog
3. Points to Consider Before Starting to Publish on a Blog

Firefox has been a very popular browser among internet users because of it’s customizability, features and handy add-ons. These Add ons though slow down the browsing a bit, but add a lot of functionality to the browser. Today I am presenting a list of 25 super firefox addons especially for bloggers, which will increase productivity and speed.

1. Measure It

Measure It is a really helpful tool, for designers as well as bloggers. It works like a ruler and measures the height and width of the area selected in pixels.  This tool helps in determining the size of header logo and makes this task really easy.

2. Colorzilla

Colorzilla is an amazing firefox tool. The eye dropper feature can find out the color code of your selection (even if you are clicking on an image). Other than this it has features to choose colors from color picker. You can also zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes

3.  Search Status

It is a must have firefox addon if you are addicted to stats. It shows all the major rankings such as Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank. Along with this it has fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting which helps in finding dofollow blogs, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.

4. SeoQuake

An important task for every webmaster is search engine optimization. After all it is the source of all the organic traffic. SeoQuake is one such tool which helps in SEO and SERPs. It helps you find out that how effective is your SEO. It has a bar which is similar to that of SearchStatus plugin which shows the various rankings (Page Rank, Alexa Rank). Other than the SEObar it shows additional in search engine results such as page ranks and inbound links, which help in estimating the importance of web pages.

5. Feedly

A part of being a blogger is to be updated with all the latest happenings that are related to your niche. For that you need to subscribe to important websites. When there are only 2-3 subscriptions then any feed reader can suffice, but when there are more than 50 sites to follow, then it becomes a tedious task to follow each and every thing. Feedly solves this problem by providing a full RSS feed reader with a magazine like interface. It syncs with google reader and makes it easy to share articles on twitter, tumblr, delicious and facebook.

6. Google Reader Watcher

Another useful tool. If you are a google reader fan, then this add on is for you. This add on will check your Google Reader for unread feeds and if you have, the plugin will display them on your browser’s statusbar.

7. FireBug

Firebug is the most powerful tool that firefox could have. It is really useful for blogger as well as designers. It comes with development tools, which help in changing styles. It also breaks up the source code of the page into Html, CSS and scripts, which can be easily edited and used for webdesigning.

8. GreaseMonkey

Greasemonkey is for those coding junkies. Through this add on, one can change the display of each web page by using simple scripts.

9. Reminder Fox

It is but natural to forget. To prevent you from forgetting important dates, reminder fox helps you remind of important dates and tasks via easy-to-use lists, alerts, and alarm notifications.

10. Fastest Fox

Fastest Fox speeds up your firefox and increases productivity. It has features like parallelized downloads, auto-loading of next pages, improved searching and many more.

11. Google Analytics Watcher

For all the bloggers who are constantly checking out their statistics, this is a real time saver.

12. Fire.fm

Music improves productivity and fire.fm makes it possible to listen to music from the firefox browser. It gives you access to the extensive music library on Last.fm.

13. Zemanta

Zemanta enhances your blog dashboard with content recommendations like relevant images, videos, links and also affiliate links. It has features such as re-blogging, image addition. It can link to your older posts and save a lot of time in blogging. Zemanta supports WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Ning, Drupal, LiveJournal, Tumblr and email platforms like Google Mail and Yahoo!Mail.

14. ScribeFire

Blogging right from firefox!. It is a full-featured Blog Editor and make posting really easy . You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs. Super easy to add photos or graphics from you places like Photobucket, Flicker or from your own computer. It supports a host of services like WordPress, Xanga, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Myspace, b2evolution and splinder and many blogging platforms including Blogger, Drupal and Movable Type.

15. DashBlog

Another good blogging plugin and lets you quickly collect videos, images, text/quotes, songs and screen-captures from any web page and publish them to your blog (word press, blogger/blogspot, tumblr) and/or twitter. With DashBlog you can do a screen capture and then draw, comment, crop and post all with one simple click.

16. Easy Comment

If you are power commentator, then this firefox add-on is for you. Easy Comment makes commenting on Disqus, IntenseDebate, WordPress, Movable Type, etc really simple. It saves you time to fill out forms, by creating commenting profiles, which can be added by a single click of mouse.

Snapshot Tools

17. Aviary Screen Capture Tool

This snazzy tool makes taking snapshot a piece of cake. You can crop and edit pictures in the browser and download it on the Desktop. It also includes advanced image editors such as Image editor, markup editor, vector editor, color palette editor & effects editor.

18. Pixlr Grabber

Much like Aviary, Pixlr Grabber is a snapshot tool. It saves the time to first save the images to your computer and then cut, annotate or edit them. It does all of these in the browser itself.

19. FireShot

This snapshot tool is unique in its own way. You can upload the images to free screenshot hosting, or save it in various formats (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), print, copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it.

Social Media Add-ons

20. Delicious Bookmarks

The most popular plugin. It is the simplest way to organize your bookmarks online with tags. It makes it easy to import your existing firefox bookmarks. Also it makes searching through your favorites easier. One can also see the reviews made on a specific page through the info button.

21. Stumbleupon

This is a very handy tool for all stumbleupon users. You can easily stumble through your friend’s shares. If you are viewing a page and you like it, then there is no need to submit it through the stumbleupon page, just click on the Like it option in the toolbar and its done.

22. Digg Toolbar

This is a really a time saver for diggers. When you’re browsing the web, the toolbar will let you know if a story has already been submitted to Digg and if it has, the it will show the Digg count and the number of comments made and also a link to Digg the page. You can also see the latest submissions and comments made by your friends. Though it does not show all the diggs by your friends.

23. AddThis

AddThis is a tool to making sharing on social bookmarking sites really simple. It supports more than 150 services and sharing is just a click away. The content can also be shared via email.

24. ShareThis

Another Social Bookmarking plugin which makes submission to multiple sites super easy and you can store your shares for later to reshare with the ShareThis ShareBox. It has support to more than 45 services.

25. TwitterBar

A simple yet very useful plugin. Tweeting made easy. Just tweet from your address bar.

25 Super Firefox Addons For Bloggers is a post from: Blog Godown

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It is always important to hold your readers to your websites and make them good engagers to your blog, This can be done by Facebook Fan Pages, Google Friend Connect and Wibiya Widget.

Today I am going to review a really new and unique idea to build a blog community and that too in a 10 minutes.
Conduit has launched a new feature of creating browser(Firefox, Internet Explorer) Toolbars for your Blog Communities. This feature will increase reader engagement and generate more traffic.

Community Toolbar for Blogs/Websites

The best thing of this toolbar is that you can easily edit and create a feature rich toolbar for your community using the simple Toolbar creator in a few minutes. And features are quite comparable to that found in popular toolbars like Google and Yahoo.

The Feature list:

1. Basic Components

• Your Logo – Add a logo and link to your website.
• Link Button – Add links to specific pages.
• Menu Button – Add Drop Down Menus
• News Ticker – A News Ticker as shown in Tv News Channels.
• Link in Main Menu – These links show up in the main configuration menu next to the Logo.
• Separator – It is used to separate sections of the toolbar.
• Label – Add Tags and Labels

Browser Toolbars for Blog communities is a post from: Blog Godown

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2. Points to Consider Before Starting to Publish on a Blog
3. Why you should convert your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress