Blogging gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase your skills and express your opinions. If you’re blogging for your business, it’s great for establishing your brand as an authority. The problem with blogging is that everyone is doing it, so being successful at it is requires some serious dedication. It can also be a very time consuming process and you might need a little help. So whether you are a pro blogger that’s been writing for years or a beginner who just wrote their first, here are 8 tools that can seriously boost your blogging:
- DrumUp
Before you start blogging, you have to pick topics and hot trends to write about. You can’t pick something that’s outdated a it won’t get any views. Fresh content increases your chances of being seen. DrumUp is a tool that can help you with this. The tool scours through millions of sources on a daily basis and provides the latest, most relevant content straight to your dashboard. It also sends you daily newsletters with the best stories for the day. You can use this tool to see what is trending in your niche and pick the best topics accordingly. The tool works on all platforms and provides a variety of other features such as scheduling content to your social media accounts, adding feeds from preferred sources and lots more.
- Keyword Planner/ Long Tail Pro
Once you figure out what you want to write about, it’s time to dig a little deeper and see what keywords to use. Long Tail Pro and Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the best keywords for your theme. Guessing what keywords to use is a common mistakes that businesses make – it greatly hinders visibility. Both Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro provide analytics about a specific keyword or phrase. The only difference is that Long Tail Pro is more detailed and shows you keywords that are relevant but not very popular. Using these keywords can help you avoid all the noise in your niche and emerge as trusted resource for your audience.
- Grammarly
Now that you’ve figured out what to write, it’s time to get to it. One thing that is paramount to a writer’s success is grammar. A blog with bad grammar will hold you back as users are likely to choose a better blog over yours. Grammarly makes sure that everything you type online including blogs, emails, social media posts etc are perfectly spelled. It also checks for context and can detect over 250 types of errors. Not only does it spot errors, it also suggests better words to improve clarity and meaning. You can become a better writer as it shows you details about your mistakes.
- Desk
Desk is a Mac app that helps you avoid distractions. It provides a clean, minimalistic interface that is distraction-free so all your focus in on your writing. It comes with a great editor and different writing modes to suit your needs. It has an Autosave feature, that saves files as you’re writing both locally and to the cloud. The app also lets you edit and publish posts. It can be integrated with numerous blogging platforms and has publishing formats for WordPress and Blogger. You can also preview posts before publishing, add images and captions, embed media and schedule posts for later publishing. It has a long list of other features to make creating and publishing blogs quick and hassle-free. Recently, the app was split into 3 different apps to better suit their users’ requirements.
- Death To The Stock Photo
No blog is complete without images and Death To The Stock Photo is a tool that will deliver quality images, straight to your inbox. All you have to do is sign up and you will receive monthly emails with beautiful stock photos that you can use as you please. The photo packs also come with great stories for your amusement. They also provide a premium membership option where you can get access to over 1200+ amazing photos for just a small annual fee. All the photos from this tool are royalty-free images. They have stunning photos for all kinds of niches and are definitely worth checking out. They also Writer Prompts to help you create beautiful blog posts.
- Canva
Images are not the only visual content that blogger can use. Canva is an easy to use tool that lets you create beautiful graphics effortlessly. It’s features are endless and so are the possibilities for creating stunning visuals. It offers the basic features like image straightening, cropping and filters. If you want to be more creative, you can add text in different fonts and sizes, stickers, speech bubbles, icons, photo frames and a ton of filters. If you’re in a bit of a hurry, you can pick from their amazing collection of templates and customize as you please. Canva is a very useful tool for creating your visual content in a matter of minutes.
- Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a simple calendar app that can also serve as a pretty nifty editorial calendar. The app shows you all your commitments for the day and lets you set reminders to stay on track. You can also color code your events for different purposes. You can also invite others to share events with you, this is useful for collaborations. The app also adds events straight from your Gmail. Everything you create on Google Calendar is automatically backed up and can be viewed later on.
- Be Limitless
Be Limitless is a Chrome extension that helps you stay focused on the important tasks. Once installed, it replaces your New Tab page with a screen that shows your main goal for the day along with the time you’ve spent on each website. It also comes with beautiful backgrounds to motivate you. The tool can give monthly productivity reports and suggestions to make better use of your time. You can pause the analytics whenever you want to, in case you need some privacy. You can also create To-Dos and make notes with ease. If you’re someone that gets easily distracted then Limitless is meant for you.
Anyone who blogs on a regular basis will tell you that it isn’t an easy task, especially if you’re blogging for business. These tools can give you a helping hand but the creativity and the style has to come from you. Use these tools as a sidekick to help you achieve your goals. Once you get used to these tools, you can tinker with them and maybe combine them to make your blogging more efficient.
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