6 Outstanding blogging tools — Current favorites
To all the passionate bloggers out there, this post is especially for you.
As bloggers, our roles are not just limited to writing a satisfying piece of content packed with words. There are so many other elements attached for a blog to reach its climax. If you run a website of your own or work for a corporate, a freelancer, or just a keen blogger whose love for writing has beautifully harmonized with a favorite pastime/hobby, then this post is totally worth reading ahead.
Oh! I almost forgot. If you are just kickstarting as a blogger this would be all the more meaningful and useful to you as you would be discovering tools that can prettify your content.
Is your interest perfectly in sync with what I am trying to address through this post?
Yeah?
Well, go ahead.
PS: These tools have been my personal favorites and it all worked so well for me. I have tried to cover all possible tools that one may need at every step of blogging.
Top 6 blogging tools that are worth checking out.
- Where to go for content inspiration?
Believe me or not, content inspired as a spark from what happened around you, your deep feeling put in words and your take on something that has caught the attention of the world are all so engaging and easy to write about.
Oh, wait! Did I say easy? Well, not exactly. Putting aside all you sweat and toil; what I actually intend to say is, for these type of content you do not almost always spend your time staring at the blinking cursor on your document and your thoughts, opinions, views, and emotions just flow like river making.
On the whole other side of it is these blog ideas that are solely created for its performance on the analytics front. To build traffic to your site or be the first to give out a post on the most trending topic and to strategically push content for it to cut through the clutter and present it in front of the intended audience.
Buzzsumo it is.
Buzzsumo is one of my “the most favorite” tools that comes as a rescue to a drained brain running out of potential content ideas.
Now, this tool will help you figure out what’s working out there; in the sense what is really hitting off with the audience. You can, in fact, look back in time to find out what the influencers have shared, what’s trending on the social network.
So, it makes it easy for you to identify top-performing content and begin to write in good confidence that your content will get the virality it absolutely deserves.
The tool is vast, and I am leaving the rest of the mystery for you to figure out. Trust me, it gets much interesting that way.
FREE OR PAID?
This tool can help you with the basic research for free. But, you may have to spend some dollars if you want to try the pro version in case you want to set-up content alerts, run analytics reports, export data, and filter results.
Apart from buzzsumo, I like setting up Google alerts on topic I’d like to stay updated about and do some social media stalking for inspiration.
2. How to worry less about the title?
No! It is not what you think. This does not just magically give out the perfect title that just seamlessly complements your blog. Well, no tool can do that. Who are we kidding, if automation was perfection we writers would probably have to look out for something else to do.
So, basically, title generator gives you some automated exhaustive list of titles for you to customize from. These work for me because I like to customize and work on a well-thought title that closely fits my content and also this makes your job all the more easier, isn’t it?
Also, the title being such a crucial section of the content that determines whether or not the reader would go ahead, it only makes sense to use title generators as an option to look out for ideas rather than fixating on them.
Cutting to the chase.
My favorite title generator is fatjoe apart from Hubspot and seopressor.
I like fatjoe for the vast title options that are all so well phrased. However, titles also have SEO elements attached to them and this would work only if you’d like these tools to accompany you for the BRAINSTORM-TITLE-SESSION.
FREE OR PAID?
You can go up to 10 titles for free and beyond that you may want to subscribe.
3. How to kill it with the feature image?
If your writing is rhetoric, a top-notch piece that is worth the virality it would still not be
Getting the attention it deserves without an eyeball capturing title and a featured image. Just words everywhere will make the post look boring and will not attract readers. You have got to be apprehensive of the image that lays on display as it has a role in determining visitors.
You have got some tools that give free images to help you with.
Unsplash gives you a lot of high-resolution, attention-grabbing stock images that makes readers pause for a moment. Apart from this pexels is also worth checking out. These tools offer free photos for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Freepik and Shutterstock are good websites to pick some cool images.
While freepik allows a free download of its collection it has a premium version and shutterstock needs you to pay to license the images. However, if you use a lot of images in your post in the form of images for every pointer, social media promotions, infographics then these are worth investing in.
Also, if you want to make your blogs a the more fun you can add some exciting gifs. Check out giphy!
Whether you use a stock or a vector or any other style in your featured image, there is a need to customize it. Say, you’d like to add some texts or your brand logo and such things you may want to check out canva which is up for a detailed discussion in the section to follow.
4. Inspire with infographics
You really don’t have to be a designer or outsource infographics. It all can be done super-efficiently with professional standards using canva. This is an ultimate and the most favorite tool that tops the list.
If you have already not checked this out, you may want to right away! All you need to do is set-up a canva login and welcome the designer in you.
Sprinkle some graphics in your content for aesthetic appeal and to contribute to your marketing efforts. Canva can help you create infographics/charts/posters/presentations and a whole lot more! It is user-friendly and has got loads of customizable templates.
It is super-easy to work on as it allows you to add icons, texts or any customization you would like to do. Canva in itself has a huge collection of icons to pick from but some of it needs to be unlocked as it is a paid feature.
You may want to check out iconfinder and flaticon from which you can download some of the free icons and upload it on canva and use them.
PAID OR FREE?
Canva is free and has a lot of templates that are all available at zero cost. SOme features like icons (not all) are available at a cost.
5. An eye on grammar
All of us make grammar mistakes. They can be so minute that we wouldn’t realize it unless pointed out.
Grammarly.
It is a free tool that can also be a plugin on your browser that helps you spot errors whenever you write. Export your content onto grammarly and it spots the errors for you. You can read how grammarly substantiates for identifying something as a grammar mistake and take a call on whether or not you want to incorporate.
It spots spellings, punctuations, poor sentence construction — basically anything that goes wrong with your content on the language front.
PAID OR FREE?
Grammarly is free, however, some of the advanced language issues can be sorted only through a premium version.
6. Measure your blog performance
Once you’ve distributed your content either through email campaigns or social media promotions, through influencer marketing or any other channel you need to measure the performance.
Begin by signing up with google analytics.
Content creation and promotion is a lot of effort. It is inevitable to measure performance. Google analytics is a popular tool to track content performance. This is a super-advanced tool with a lot of scope to carry out analytics. I use this tool in figuring out the visitors (who comes to the blog), how it was found (channel) and the engagement (what they do with it).
This works for me.
But if you are looking for a deeper understanding, there is just more than general analytics to explore.
Wrapping up
So that was my list of favorite tools for blogging that I cannot live without. If you’d like to add some cool tools that are supportive of the content feel free to share them in the comments.
There are loads of other marketing tools out there and as I am just starting out, I am still exploring. I will soon come up with some fresh tools serving different needs in my future post. Until then, try these out and happy writing!
