31 Aug
But, to reap these benefits, you have to invest time and effort into your blog strategy. The good news is that at every stage, from planning to search engine optimization to promotion, there are tools available to maximize your company’s efforts.
In this post, we’ll look at some tools that help you write better, publish faster, and rank higher on search engines, so you can attract more visitors and quality leads to your blog.
Before we get started, it’s important to note that we focused on tools that work with most website-building platforms, but you should double-check that they work with your specific platform before downloading them.
What is blogging?
Blogging refers to writing. The word blog is actually a shortened form of its original name, “weblog.” These weblogs allowed early internet users to “log” the details of their day in diary-style entries. Blogs often allow readers to comment, so as they became more common, communities sprung up around popular blogs.
Like most internet-based innovations, many entrepreneurs saw marketing potential in having a blog, and the adoption of blogging among the business community helped further increase the popularity of the medium. Not only can a blog be used for marketing a business, but it can also become a home business in and of itself.
How does blogging work?
Blogging is as simple as obtaining a website and publishing original content on it. Tech-savvy bloggers can buy a domain name and build the website themselves. Those with less HTML knowledge can create an account with sites like WordPress that simplify the web design and publishing process.
Blogs are usually simple websites. Older pieces may be archived in separate sections of the site, and there may be a separate page with contact info or a bio, but the blog itself is usually just a single page that can be scrolled through—similar to the news feed on social media sites like Facebook. As with a Facebook news feed, a blog displays the newest content at the top of the page.
Another unique feature of blogging is interlinking. This occurs when a blogger links to another person’s blog within their own blog post. For example, if a music teacher maintains a blog, and they write a blog post about how to form a chord, they might link to a musician’s blog to show an example of the chords in action. A political blogger may link to another politics blog and then discuss how they agree or disagree with a post on that blog. Interlinking, along with the comment section, fosters the sense of community that makes blogs unique.
Best blogging tools
Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas
1. Quora
The crowdsourced answer website can help lead you to the types of questions that real people are asking, questions that you can answer in-depth with a blogpost. Search for your keyword, and follow topics related to your blog’s focus.
2. BuzzSumo
Enter a topic or a URL into the BuzzSumo search box, and you’ll get a wealth of information on the content that performs best for social media sharing. BuzzSumo can be super useful for fleshing out an existing idea to find the perfect angle or in taking a broad look at the content that does well (and the blogs who do it best) in your niche.
3. Quick Sprout
Enter a URL into Quick Sprout, and you get an analysis of the site’s performance and content. The “Social Media” tab shows you which posts from the site have been home runs, and you can take inspiration from the highlights on the list.
Enter a subject into the Portent tool, and you’ll get a sample blogpost title, complete with helpful and witty breakdowns of why the title might make for a good read. Refresh as many times as you’d like for new ideas.
HubSpot’s title maker works similarly to Portent’s. With the HubSpot tool, you can enter three keywords, and HubSpot will give you five titles—a week’s worth of content—to work with.
The trending topics section on your Twitter homepage can be a super spot for grabbing ideas from the latest news. You can tailor your trending topics to go uber-local (the big cities near and around you) or even receive fully tailored tweets that take into account your location and those you follow. (Click the “Change” link at the top of the Trends section on your Twitter homepage.)
Similar to Twitter’s trending topics, LinkedIn Pulse pulls content from the channels you follow on LinkedIn and the people in your LinkedIn network. For additional trending topics on social media, you can check out Facebook’s Trending section and Google’s What’s Hot page.
Tools to organize your ideas
1. Trello
We like to add all our blogpost ideas into Trello, turning each idea into a card that we can spec out with notes and move from list to list with a simple drag-and-drop
2. Evernote
For super fast idea collecting, you can drop everything into Evernote—notes, snippets, photos, webpages, and more. The tagging system in Evernote is incredibly robust, so you can keep your ideas with a simple tag in a number of cool ways—by topic, by idea stage, and more.
Calendar tools like Google Calendar can be repurposed as editorial calendars. If publishing one post per day, you can save your ideas as all-day events and move them around the calendar as needed. If you plan on scheduling multiple posts, add a calendar event to the specific publish time. Zoom in and out to see what you’ve got planned for a given day, week, or month.
4. Todoist
Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blog posts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on shared tasks with a team, too.
5. Wunderlist
Another useful to-do list tool, Wunderlist can help you keep your ideas sorted into tasks and subtasks. Even consider adding a listicle idea and creating subtasks for each of the list items you want to add.
6. Dropbox
When your ideas come with files, Dropbox is one of the best spots to store and share things like pdfs, Word Docs, design files, photos, and more.
Tools to create well-optimized content
Is your blogpost idea a popular one? You can run the topic through Google Trends to see search volume for the different keywords and phrases you’re considering using.
How do you frame your awesome idea into a far-reaching blogpost (that people can easily find)? Check for popular keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner lets you enter a series of keywords, and Google returns results on search volume and popularity as well as related keywords that might spark an idea for you.
An alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool returns up to 750 suggestions for every keyword you enter. (For yet another keyword tool alternative, take SERP Stat for a spin.)
SEO plugins can help you fine tune your idea and blogpost into a specific keyword or phrase that will help with search results and help keep your blogpost focused. With Yoast’s plugin, you can type in the keyword that you’re after, and Yoast tells you how many different spots on the page the post appears and a nice green dot for when you’re ready to go.
Tools to help you write easier and faster
1. Google Docs
Many bloggers go straight to the writing editor in their blog software (WordPress, Ghost, etc.). You can also consider writing in Google Docs for collaborating with others and tapping into the extra power of Google Docs’ spelling and grammar tools.
2. Egg Timer
A super simple timer, tell Egg Timer how long you want to work—15 minutes for research, 40 minutes to write a draft, etc.—and Egg Timer will count down the time. When time’s up, a popup appears and the timer sounds.
3. Toggl
One of the most straightforward and fun time tracking tools you’ll find, Toggl lets you add a task, push the Start/Stop button, and check back in to see a full dashboard of stats on how you spend your time. It could be really useful for bloggers who want to focus on the time they spend writing, researching, and editing.
4. Hemingway
A really interesting free marketing tool, Hemingway analyzes your text for readability, highlighting sentences that are a bit too complex or dense. The readability for the list post you’re reading now: A seventh grade reading level.
5. Grammarly
Copy and paste your article into Grammarly’s online grammar checker to how it performs against checks for spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, style, and more. The initial score is free to see. The specifics of what to change (as well as suggestions from Grammarly) come with their paid plans.
6. WordPress Distraction Free Writing
This helpful tool is baked right into the WordPress editor. To access the Distraction-Free editor, click on the four-way arrow icon in the top right corner of any WordPress post you’re writing.
7. Desk
Download the Desk app (currently Mac only) to write straight from your desktop in a clear and uncluttered editor (with markdown support), then connect directly to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, and a host of other online publishing sites. For additional desktop publishing tools, check out Zenwriter (Windows) and Ulysses App (for Mac).
Tools to create beautiful blog visuals
Every month, receive an email with links to a new collection of free, high-res lifestyle photos. The site offers a premium subscription as well to be able to access and search its full archive.
2. PhotoPin
One of the 53+ places we scour to find free images, PhotoPin lets you search millions of Creative Commons photos from Flickr.
3. Skitch
Grab screenshots and annotate with notes, arrows, and icons. Skitch connects directly to your Evernote account so you can save all the screengrabs you take.
Sometimes a simple meme says more than any other image could. Meme Generator lets you create a meme from scratch or use an existing meme character to add your own saying.
5. Canva
Probably our most-used image tool at Buffer, Canva makes image creation super easy (especially for non-designers) with their premade templates, custom image sizes for every social media channel, drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and more. Most every original image you see shared from our social accounts was made in Canva.
Other great options include PicMonkey and BeFunky.
6. Gimp
Photoshop is the king of image software. Gimp is like a free version of Photoshop. Most all major features are there, and amateur designers can get all sorts of things done with layers, masks, photo effects, and more.
Turn text from any webpage into a shareable image with the Share as Image browser extension and bookmarklet. The Pro plan ($8/month) even lets you add custom branding to the image and choose from a huge number of background photos and fonts.
Tools to distribute your content far and wide
We wrote about the topic of content distribution tools in more depth in a separate blog post as well. Click through that post for even more ideas for tools and resources to try when promoting your content.
1. Buffer
Once your blogpost is written and published, you can set up an easy sharing schedule with Buffer. Schedule your new article to go to your social channels multiple times with different headlines or images attached to each update.
Emotional Marketing Value checks for emotional words in your headline, and the analyzer tool returns a score of EMV words compared to total words in the headline.
Built by the team at CoSchedule (which also makes a helpful WordPress calendar and scheduler), this WordPress plugin makes it simple to highlight snippets of your blogpost for readers to easily share on Twitter. For sites not running WordPress, consider a tool like clicktotweet.
4. Filament
In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.
5. Digg Digg
Digg Digg was built by our Buffer engineers a couple years back, and it’s been a staple on the Buffer blog ever since. What we’ve found most helpful with Digg Digg integration is the flexibility of where you can place the share buttons: floating to the left or right of the article (see our Open blog), pinned to the top or bottom of a blog post (see this Buffer Social blog), or manually wherever you wish inside your theme.
There’s a great list of social sharing plugins reviewed here, if you’d like more options.
Signing up for webmaster tools can reveal a lot of SEO opportunities for your blogposts. For instance, see where you rank in search engine results for certain keywords, then build links to your most popular keyword posts to increase the rankings even more.
7. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the biggest and best (and free) ways to send email to your list of contacts. You can set up automated campaigns that deliver each new post that you write, or you can create campaigns from scratch. MailChimp offers free accounts for those with fewer than 2,000 contacts in their list.
8. Headlines
Run A/B tests of your headlines with this WordPress plugin from KingSumo. If the cost is a bit steep ($99 lifetime charge), you can try out the other Sumo plugin, SumoMe, which offers some handy tools for growing an email list, analyzing your blogposts, and sharing content to social media.
Pros of blogging
1. Good for SEO: Search engines love new content, and as a result, blogging is a great search engine optimization (SEO) tool. A defining feature of blogs is the frequency with which they’re updated, and that fresh content helps improve a website’s SEO performance.
2. Maintains communication with customers: Blog posts can keep your customers and clients up-to-date on what’s going on, let them know about new deals, and provide tips. The more frequently you post useful content, the more often a customer visits your blog, and the more likely they are to spend money.
3. Builds rapport with customers: Not only does a blog allow you to show off what you know building your expertise and credibility but people can also post comments and interact with you. That allows customers to get to know you, and hopefully, develop relationships that turn into purchases.
4. Generate alternative income: Successful blogs can make money themselves. Along with your product or service, blogs can generate income from alternate sources such as advertising and affiliate products. Blogging is flexible and portable, making it a great option for people who want to be a lifestyle entrepreneur.
Cons of blogging
1. Time-consuming: The success of blogging comes from having people return, and they only return when there’s new stuff to read. That means bloggers need to generate content at least several times a week to be effective at engaging readers and increasing SEO.
2. Constantly requires fresh ideas: Posting several times per week won’t be beneficial if the ideas aren’t fresh and engaging. It can be draining to constantly conceptualize and execute fresh content. The good news is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can have guest writers or hire freelancers. Another option is to curate content from others. You can buy private label right (PLR) content and modify it for your blog.
3. Payoff is delayed: One of the biggest frustrations with blogging is that it’s time-consuming with little payoff in the beginning. It takes time to build up a readership and momentum.
4. Blogging in and of itself won’t generate income: At one time, posting an article was enough to generate traffic and income. Today, a successful blog needs email marketing, additional perks such as content upgrades, and an engaged social network, such as a Facebook group.
Wrap up
Businesses can use blogs to drive customers to their website, increase SEO performance, or generate alternate streams of income. It’s important to utilize the best blogging tools from day one and to also know when you’ve progressed enough and are ready to move on to the next level of tool.
When you employ the right tools for bloggers on your website (for the stage you’re in), it can literally save you hours of time that’d be otherwise spent on much more manual work. Not only will these tools save your valuable time & effort, but they’ll also enable you to actually do things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without hiring a team.