Managing a blog all along is not a joke. You have to design your blog, plan the blog content, and write the content, which is a way long process, and the final but most important one is to market your blog.
However, if You are aware of the right tools and processes, half of your hard work will be gone.
Therefore, in this article, we’re going to explain some important blogging tools you must have to enjoy the journey of your brand new blogging business without selling your soul.
Best Blogging Tools for Beginners (and Pros)
We are categorizing these tools based on their functions for your better understanding.
There are tools for each step you will take in your blogging journey, starting from creating a blog to sharing the content on social media.
So, let’s have a look at how these tools help you increase your efficiency.
Best Blogging Tools For Blog Creation
If you’re still stuck at creating a blog, here are some suggestive tools to consider.
1. Bluehost
Whether or not you are taking blog as a business that can give you a living, Bluehost will be your friend.
With Bluehost, you can create a wordpress website without a second thought.
Just purchase the hosting plan and get a domain name of your choice for free. And then install wordpress. Done.
2. WPX Hosting
If you’re serious about your blogging business plus ready to invest, WPX hosting will be the best hosting service for your journey.
WPX Hosting is the best premium hosting that claims to give you a high-speed page loading speed and website performance. If you are stuck anywhere, they have highly knowledgeable support staff working 24/7. So, you don’t have to worry about anything.
3. Generatepress
Now when it comes to designing a blog, you might be scared of the technicalities. However, with wordpress, you can try and test the best themes for your business.
We recommend you to use Generatepress. The reason is simple. It’s the world’s lightest weight theme that enables you to improve your site speed without affecting your SEO.
You will get this theme with a single time purchase, where you can build upto 500 websites. If you want to look professional, then a small investment in a premium theme is a must.
4. Astra Theme
If you’re not satisfied with Generatepress and want an alternative, then you can consider the Astra theme.
Astra is the world’s most popular wordpress theme, which provides you with great speed along with multiple customization options. Yes, a two-in-one combo.
Now you can build your custom design with any of these themes and begin with your blogging journey today.
Best Blogging Tools for Content ideas, Keyword Research, and SEO
After building your virtual home – your blog – now you are ready to plan the wisdom you want to provide to your audience. And for easing this process, you can consider a bunch of tools.
5. Quora
If you want to know what problems your target audience face, then Quora is your #1 companion.
You need to visit quora (official site) and then search for your niche keyword.
Boom! You’ll come up with a lot of ideas in the form of questions. Take a note, and then create your headlines.
6. BuzzSumo
Which contents are popular in your niche? This is an important question to answer about. And Buzzsumo will help you with that.
A free account of the Buzzsumo tool can also help you develop some popular topics that you can cover to win some audience at a minimum time.
You can search for a keyword or an URL of your competitor to scout up the most shared topics in your niche.
Besides popularity, you can also see stats of the word counts and the type of content which are most popular in your niche.
7. SEMrush
While the first two were free, here is our #1 premium tool for content marketing. SEMrush not only helps give you the content ideas, but you can also spy on your competitors’ best keywords. You can also know the exact search volume for a topic on which you want to create content.
You can use its free trial and try its features to see if it helps in some way. After you use it once, you can’t keep yourself from purchasing the premium plan. That’s simply because of the features it provides.
You can audit a site, conduct in-depth keyword research, come up with the best content ideas in a particular niche, create a content template, analyze backlinks, and much more.
8. Kwfinder
Kwfinder is another keyword research tool that allows you to know the most accurate keyword difficulty.
It’s a premium tool that comes with numerous features like finding hidden long-tail keywords, detailed SERP and SEO matrix analysis, local and competitor’s keyword research, search volume and keyword matrices, and much more.
9. LongTailPro
Here is another powerful SEO tool that eases your content research process with its extensive features.
With long tail pro, you can find less competitive keywords, track your ranking for each keyword, measure the profitability of keywords, audit your website to remove broken links, and further analyze the SERP features.
You can try this tool for 8$ for eight days.
10. Google Trends
If you want to target the trending topics or know the trend of an idea, then google trend is the best tool for you.
Just visit the official site and search your keyword on the search bar. Now you can see a graph for the entire year which shows the trend of the topic.
Keep note, save or compare, and you are all set.
11. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
A headline is the most crucial factor when it comes to marketing your content. How many people will read, like, and share your content depends on how effective your headline is.
And if you come up with the right ideas but struggle to find the right direction for your content, then Hubspot’s blog topic generator tool will assist you.
It’s a free tool where you have to enter your keyword, and then you will come up with some great headlines or ideas for your blog.
12. Yoast SEO
Now, as you already find the right ideas with your targeted keyword lists, it’s time to do some optimization for your content.
After writing your content, you need to tick the On-page SEO checklist. And Yoast SEO will be your no.1 companion there.
Enable the Yoast SEO plugin and do some basic settings. After that, whenever you add an article to your wordpress dashboard, it will show you the on-page seo and readability factors you need to improve to make your content juicier for both your audience and search engines.
13. Google Search Console
Now Google search console is another powerful tool for your blogging business.
With the search console, you can track the performance of your website. Further, you can fix the problems that prevent you from ranking top on search engines.
Just add your site to the google search console and then see the performance of your site.
Best Blogging Tools For Task management and note-taking
As a business owner, you might struggle to manage your tasks and collect ideas. Thus, here are some tools for that purpose:
14. Evernote
Evernote is a number one note-taking app that allows you to clip notes from everywhere.
You can directly add a note with some category, tags and additional notes, or you can clip an excerpt from the web.
While browsing, if you find something interesting, you can easily take a screenshot or save the page for future reference with Evernote web clipper.
Collecting notes is a good habit for bloggers as it provides you with the right idea when you’re stuck in-between content. Try it today and take advantage.
15. Todoist
If you fail to manage your tasks lists, then Todoist will assist you with that.
It’s available both as a mobile app and a desktop site so that you can access, plan, organize, and manage your to-do list from everywhere.
You can create tasks directly from your email inbox, label them according to your priority, add tags, and set reminders or add deadlines when you need to complete the job.
16. Trello
Trello is the number one choice for organizing your tasks and time management. With Trello, you can manage your duties as a special type of board.
With a free version alone, you will get access to unlimited boards and cards to organize and manage.
Further, you can add comments, prioritize with different colours, join multiple assignees, attach files, and add the due dates.
Easily drag and drop cards and boards according to your preference.
Best Blogging Tools For Writing and Editing Your Content
Here comes the main part: writing and content publishing. This seems simple, but most bloggers are stuck with this phase, which becomes their reason for failure.
Surely, you don’t want to give that excuse. So, here I have a few writing and editing tools to make the process a bit easy.
17. Google Docs
Similar to Microsoft Office, Google Docs is a word processing software. But there are a lot of advantages.
As Google docs is a cloud-based software, it will not vanish if you ever forget to save your content. This way, you can protect your handwork.
You can send a link to your team easily and anytime for joining your project. Further, you can send the content for review and get feedback as comments from your peeps.
With a lot of add-ons, you can ease the process without a second thought.
18. Grammarly
If you’re poor at grammar or English is your second language, then Grammarly is your #1 choice. It helps writers to correct common grammatical errors that save a ton of time and effort.
Along with grammar, it assists users with tone, style, sentence structure, word usage, and much more. You can further check plagiarism with Grammarly.
19. ProWritingAid
A good alternative to Grammarly is Prowriting aid. You can use it on your google docs as an add-on to get the benefits directly on your document.
Besides editing your document for grammar and structure errors, it further assists users to check the readability and suggest improvements accordingly.
You can use both Grammarly and ProwritingAid for free but with limited functionalities.
20. Hemingway App
According to a recent study, people’s attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.
That means you need to capture the attention of your readers before they push the back button.
And that can be possible with good readability (easy to read and grasp). If you want to improve your content for your audience and increase the user experience, then the Hemingway app is your best companion.
Just copy and paste your text into the Hemingway app website, and soon you’ll know where you can improve your content for a better readability level.
Best Blogging Tools For Finding and Editing The Stock Pictures
Visual contents are more popular than any other type of content nowadays. That is because people can relate to such types of contents.
For bloggers adding visual content such as videos, stock photos, screenshots, illustrations, and other graphics is an added advantage.
And it’s another way to capture the attention of your web visitors and google. So, let’s know how to find the best stock images and edit them for your blog posts.
21. Pixabay
In order to protect your contents from copyright strikes, you need to use royalty-free images, graphics and videos in your content. Here Pixabay is your number one go-to.
With Pixabay, you can find the perfect suited image for your content from a library of 2.3 million+ elements. It’s completely free, and you will get high-quality materials from this site.
22. Death to the Stock Photo
Let’s face it. Free images are used by most of our peers, and to stand out from the crowd, we need to look unique.
And here, you have an option to subscribe for unique photographs from death to the stock photo.
They have artists working especially to provide you with extraordinary materials, and you can’t be disappointed by them.
23. Canva
If you can’t afford to take the premium stock photo services, we have a special option for you. Edit your stock photos and give them a special shape.
No, I’m not talking about any professional photo editing skills. Just own a Canva account (a free account is okay).
With Canva, you can design any visual content, from blog banners to social media content, without hassle, simply with pre-made, customizable templates.
Best Blogging Tools For Social Share
The quick social sharing option is an important factor in your content for grabbing more referral traffic. And to make it easy for you, we have a few social share tools to add to your dashboard:
24. Social Snap
Social snap is a popular wordpress plugin that allows users to capture more shares and engagements through its extensive features.
With a social snap, you can embed the share option within your content, show the no. of social shares to your web visitors, post automatically to your social channels and analyze the engagements.
25. Tailwind
If you know the value of Instagram and Pinterest marketing, then Tailwind will help you with that.
Through it’s simple yet powerful features, it helps the users to grow faster in a small-time by assisting you with designs, finding the right hashtags and scheduling content according to your preference.
Best Blogging Tools For Marketing
Now marketing is the step that can bring you a lot of money with less time if done right.
And as a business owner, you need to be strategic while marketing your blog to save your time and efforts. So, here are some tools to assist you to be efficient at your work;
Email Marketing:
26. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the popular email marketing tools with some extensive features to manage multiple business functions in a single place.
With this tool, you can start building your email list and grow it without hassle, create an ecommerce store without extra time, build a website easily and share your content on social media with no extra effort.
27. MailChimp
MailChimp is another most popular marketing tool that allows you to build your brand, increase authority and sell products all on one platform.
You can start for free and upgrade as your list starts to grow, where you’ll receive some extra benefits like email templates, multi-step journeys, custom branding, A/B testing, send-time optimization, comparative reporting, and much more.
28. Aweber
With Aweber, you can leverage your content marketing journey to an optimal level.
Sign up for their service and then build your email list with their easy drag and drop features.
Furthermore, you can create stunning, customizable designs with no extra time and effort, and add a web push notification option to inform your audience about your latest content.
Lead Generation:
29. Leadpages
Lead pages is a leading lead generation tool that wins the attention of more than 40,000 small businesses.
With lead pages, you can easily design stunning landing pages, collect quality leads, get more sales through selling your products and services, check and optimize your performance and grow at no time.
30. PushEngage
PushEngage, a push notification software, allows you to send targeted push messages to your customers swiftly.
Whether you want to announce your new blog posts or about your new product launch, PushEngage will be your better half at doing this.
Best Blogging Tools For Site Speed
Site speed is an important factor when it comes to blogging. Your audience will bounce back to your competitor’s web page if your site speed sucks.
So, here are two tools for improving your site speed with matrices.
31. GtMetrix
GtMetrix is a solid site speed checking tool, which you can use from anywhere.
You need to search your site URL in the search bar, and soon you will get a quick scan report with a grade.
Check the loading time and the room for improvement to accelerate your blog speed.
32. Google Pagespeed Insights
Sometimes, a single tool doesn’t provide completely accurate information. So, if you want to cross-check your site speed, then google page speed insights is your best friend.
Like Gtmetrix, you will get a quick scan report with the issues you can fix to improve your site speed and enjoy your traffic without selling a dime.
Conclusion
These are some of the best tools we recommend if you want to make blogging more enjoyable and less chore.
Some tools are free, and some are paid. Some come with limited free features. It’s your personal preference which one you want to use and which you will consider in future.
Now, along with these tools and a little effort, you can celebrate the success of your blog with confidence.
So, without wasting time, jump into your endeavour.
