Blogging as any other activity requires time, effort, and most importantly, tools that will enhance your blog. A person can only know so much, thus online and offline tools help in filling some of the gaps of knowledge of a blogger making his life more straightforward.
For a blogger to engage with the audience, his blog must be impressive, and up to the mark, therefore, blogging tools provide an edge to the blog.
A person in his day-to-day life uses many tools in several walks of life for the betterment, similarly, in the blogging field, tools also prove to be useful for a blogger.
The process of blogging is a lengthy one, it starts from first finding a topic, searching keywords, researching the topic, writing the content, checking the content, then publishing the same. Several factors make it possible to write a blog that attracts traffic. If one is not aware of what one is doing one may find oneself lost and confused.
Let us look at the different free tools which will help you and will make you a better blogger!
Writing Tools
The most important part of blogging is writing. So, firstly we will look at the tools that can improve your writing flow and make your time and efforts more effective.
Let’s have a look!
Blog Title Generator
Blog Title Generator is a handy tool when you are out of ideas for titles. The tool helps you generate some titles with blanks. You can fill these blanks and come up with an interesting title for your blog.
The tool can also be used to make sub-categories for your blog as it keeps showing you queries that are genuinely useful from the perspective of a reader.
Linkbait Title Generator
When you start a blog, you must be very critical about your title. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts potential readers.
Have you ever come across those flashy titles which you have to physically resist to click on? These titles have a style to them, and most people want to know what the content actually is.
This is exactly what you will focus on your blog title. So, comes in the Link Bait Title Generator which helps you in bringing out irresistible titles of any topic.
Your niche may not be flashy and trendy, but with this tool, you will come to realize that any topic can be interesting and trending if put in a different light for the readers through the help of titles.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a spell and grammar check tool which is very popular among bloggers. It has a premium version that adds the feature of proofreading, plagiarism checker and many other types of grammar checks and word suggestions, but for simpler use, Grammarly’s free version is enough to get the job done.
The free version comes with spelling, grammar, and punctuation checker. You can just copy-paste the content or import a file in the Grammarly app. Then you can export the file after the checking is complete.
It shows a score of the content you are checking based on the readability, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. When you add content, you are asked to describe the content like the tone, type, purpose of the content. You can choose whether your content is formal or informal or describing or explaining or friendly, etc. in nature.
If you are starting to work on your blog you must have this tool at your disposal as it will only help you get good feedback from your audience otherwise no one will be able to understand what you have written.
Google Docs
Google Docs is a free word document tool that helps you write and save any content and access that content globally.
You need a Google account to operate on this tool, and as this is a Google app, it uses cloud storage and thus your work is saved every time you make changes to your document.
You can start working on it by clicking the “blank” option. A new file will open, and you can start writing. You can also select a template, as per your requirement, from the “Template Gallery” shown on the top right part of the page.
Resume, Newsletter, Business Letter, Brochure, Report, Recipe, etc. are some of the template names which you can choose from.
Google Docs is easy to use with a lot of freedom given to writers. You can easily format your text and select the font, font size, font color, styles, etc. You can align your text and perform every possible formatting to your document.
Moreover, you can easily insert images to your document with various methods like uploading from a computer, searching the web, getting the image from Google Drive, Google Photos, from a URL of the image or even directly from a camera.
In the same way, you can insert tables, charts to your document to represent the data in a reader-friendly manner.
More on Google Docs
You can work together with others by sharing the document. They can see what you are working on and can even suggest you on the same on a Real-Time basis. This feature is a must when multiple people are involved, and you want to know the progress of the project.
To share the document, simply click on the “Share” button on the top right corner and type the name or email address of the person you want to share the document with.
When you are done exploring and utilizing all the features of the docs, you could go to the add-on tab and search more features to use in your doc file. The flexibility to writers while using this tool is amazing.
Keyword Planner Tools
Keywords play a very important role in ranking and making a spot for your blog post on Google search results. Keywords communicate to the search engine crawlers and tell them what is the keyphrase that the author is focusing on. You can use these keywords on your blog posts but first, you need keywords.
For this, we take the help of planner tools. Let’s have a look!
Keywords Everywhere
Keyword Everywhere is a Chrome and Firefox extension that helps in keyword research and optimizing your website. It can be easily installed and after installation requires an API key which will be sent to your email, use that API key on settings of the extension.
The competition is hard when keywords are taken into consideration, with the help of Keywords Everywhere, you can easily jump onto the right keywords for the topic.
Analyze page tool helps you to find any website’s keywords and other valuable information to take the competition head-on.
The results show where the keywords are placed, the density of keywords to the whole article, how many times it has occurred, how much traffic these keywords generate in a month, CPC or Cost Per Click showing how much advertisers are ready to pay for that keyword, and a number showing how competitive that keyword is in the market.
You can easily download the full list to your system for use anytime. You can hand-pick the keywords which you feel are best suited for your content with the help of the extra info of CPC, competitiveness, etc.
Filtering the keywords are recommended as there could be numerous keywords, and no one can and should invest more time than needed on keyword researching.
Search Engine Tools
Google Trends
Google Trends is an amazing tool which shows you how often the word is searched by people all over the world over the total number of searches of the site over a given period.
This is a comparative keyword research tool that can be beneficial when one wants to look at the trending words which spike the charts of the search results.
The amazing feature also shows the volume of searches in a geographical manner, which is very helpful for anyone who has an interest in knowing the popularity of a keyword in specific geographical locations.
When visiting the site, you are prompted with “Explore what the world is searching” with a search bar. When you scroll down, you see “latest stories” and “recently trending.” Then a year-wise search result can be seen where you can know what were the trending keywords in previous years.
Just type a word which you want to know about then you will be taken to a page with all the information. You can select the country which you want to know the search results for, the duration from and to the point of time the data you need, the categories in which you want to see that word’s reach, the type of search you would like to see the topic in like web search, image search, news search, Youtube search, etc.
More on Google Trends
Here you can see how the country is shown, and each state’s search result is also displayed.
Related topics are the topics that people have searched along with the term “bitcoin,” your research may require you to go into these topics as well, or your content may need inclusion of these topics.
Queries are the user’s questions on the topics like here you can see that people were interested to know how to buy, get, mine bitcoins.
There is an option to compare multiple keywords on Google Trends. This way, you can see which word was more popular than the other.
All the comparisons are shown side-to-side with the geographical bifurcation and queries shown along with it.
This is an amazing free tool for a blogger to know what people are searching for, and when it was a peak. Some festivals or vacation months bring in some unique results which a blogger can exploit in his/her favor.
You can know what your audience is looking for and which ads will be more desired by the people on your blog post.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free feature that allows the user to analyze the statistics of the user’s website. This tool is a must as it helps in giving insights into various aspects of running and maintaining a website. If you are using many keywords, it will show you which one to give preference to so that traffic is generated efficiently with correct keywords selection.
This can help in fixing index problems, crawl errors, it can send email notifications to you when a new error is noticed, it can help to fix problems of mobile usability.
First, you must create an account on Google Search Console, then you will see the “Add new property” button, click on it and write down the name of your website. Make sure that the website name is correct with ‘HTTP’ or ‘https’ and it is written with ‘www’ as well as without it.
Your website can be mysite.com, but you must also include www.mysite, com as from a technical view these domains are different and you must decide to which domain the user is taken to from any of those links.
You can check performance like total clicks, total impressions, average CTR, etc.
Impressions are the number of times the link is shown in search results. Click is the number of clicks on a link on a google search result. CTR stands for click-through rate, which is the percent of clicks by Impressions.
Google analytics
Google Analytics is an amazing tool that helps you track the traffic and other metrics of your website. The tool helps you answer many questions like:
- How many people visit your website?
- Which page is the most popular?
- What is slowing down your website and how to make it faster?
- Is your website mobile friendly?
- What geographical location are your visitors from?
You can change your strategy and methods after understanding the data provided by google analytics.
The tools do comes with a learning angle and can take a day or two to understand but once you get a hold on to the metrics and data you can get from the website, you will be able to decide what is working for your blog and what is not.
You need to set up Google Analytics with your website and it is pretty straightforward to do so. Just look up for some guides on Google and you will have your website sending metrics to Google Analytics in no time.
If you want to grow your website, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for any blogger/website owner.
Yoast SEO plugin
SEO is a major factor in maintaining and growing a website. Making google, bing recognizes your website is a task that requires a lot of effort and finance.
Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps you to maintain your website effortlessly. The WordPress plugin is free and a premium version is also available.
Download and install Yoast SEO plugin then you can see the SEO tab in the WordPress dashboard. You will see “First-time SEO configuration,” click on it and it will start a configuration wizard. Fill correct info in each step, and you are done with your installation.
The free version of Yoast SEO comes with these services:
- One keyword optimization
- Helps in showing what your website contains to google
- It makes sure your content is up-to-date
- Google preview of your site is available
- It checks that the content is easily readable to visitors
- Keeps a check on Google’s algorithms for you
The best thing about Yoast SEO is that you don’t need to know anything technical about SEO, it will do all the work for you.
Designing and Media Tools
Blog Designer Plugin
Blog designing is one of the most dreaded tasks for any blogger. Working around code, designing the website and customizing it to make it work like the way you want is something which can be a challenge for any blogger.
For this, you can use the Blog Designer Plugin which will help you in setting up your WordPress blog easily and without touching a single line of code. You can customize the design and functionality of your blog from the easy toggle options available from the settings of the blog designer plugin.
There is a pro version of the plugin as well where you get more than 50 unique blog design templates which you can alter further. There are many unique features of the lite version as well. Click here to know more about the lite version of Blog Designer.
Unsplash
Blogging is not just about written content it has grown to become a collection of every type of content, may it be an image, video, or audio. A blog with nothing visually appealing is bland, so images make it possible in a wide variety of ways.
One more thing while getting images from the internet is that the images must be royalty-free. This is crucial as you might just download an image and the owner of that image may ask you to pay him a fee or make you take down the image from your website.
This is very frustrating, so be aware from the get-go.
Unsplash helps you get royalty-free images on any topic. The images are always high quality, so you can be sure that the images you use will match your blog’s aesthetics.
This will help to show your audience that your website is visually appealing and filled with helpful content so they will be easily attracted to your site multiple times.
If you are unaware of what image to put, you can easily look up the already pinned titles on top and find an image that fits your needs.
Be sure to leave a message to thank the contributor of the image. It helps them out and motivates them to provide you with amazing images for free.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a very popular royalty-free image, vector graphic, and video provider website.
The website is amazing at what it helps creators with as it has a huge library of images, videos, and vectors. You may sometimes need a small video to present your content in a better way, or you may simply need your blog to speak to your readers. Pixabay is a website to fill all your needs with just a simple search.
On the right of the search bar, you can choose what media you want among the three options from the drop-down menu.
It has a filter option from which you can choose the orientation (Horizontal, vertical), category (Education, Social, Sports, etc.), size, and color of the images, videos, and graphics.
All the media content are of high quality, so you can rest easy about the quality of each piece.
Canva
What better option than to make your own design or image to support your content? The online images just might not do it for you, and you may feel restricted, so a better tool is to use Canva.
It comes with a pro account with more templates and designs, but for usual and general use the free account is much more helpful as you are creating images and graphics occasionally for your blog and not as a full-time graphic designer.
There are numerous templates of designs, graphs to represent what you want to show to your readers. Just sign up to the website and start using the features right away.
You can work on logo design, posters, flyers, resume, infographics, business cards, and many more to suit your needs.
Time Management and Organizing Tools
One of the biggest challenges for any blogger is Time Time Management and effective blogging. You need tools that can help you keep a tab on how a typical day in your schedule goes by and how you can make it more productive.
Let’s have a look at some of the time management tools:
Trello
Trello is a free tool to manage basically everything in your daily life as well as your blogging life. It has a dynamic user interface that lets you make and see the full overview of any event, party, trip, exam schedule, etc. It has Business Class and Enterprise versions, but the basic package includes everything you need like Unlimited boards, lists, cards, and a 10MB space for each file attachment.
You may have a blog idea to organize, and you need a whiteboard to pen down all the things you must take care of, don’t worry here is when trello helps you out.
The interface has a board, each board is a subject you want to make notes about. You can create lists in this board like subtitles, which areas to cover, researched topics, etc. In each list you can have cards, each card holds the small bits and details of what you are going to take care of, like a blog on “Best Universities for freshers” will have cards of the tuition fee.
Cards can have comments, check-lists, due-dates, file attachments, and you can drag-drop any card to any list and make your experience dynamic and easy. You can add images, gifs, videos, and any other media content to make it more engaging for you and others who are members of the board.
Trello will be like a mind palace for your ideas, projects, or lifestyle.
You can use trello in your daily routine as several others are doing. The way many experts use this tool to manage their work is remarkable.
Collaboration with anyone is also simple with the help of trello just add members in your board, drag and drop them in tasks, set due-dates, make check-list, and enjoy the sweet taste of organized work.
Evernote
Evernote is a popular note-taking app tool that helps you write content and save it. This is just a simple explanation of this massively popular tool, but the way it handles data and your content is amazing.
This is the best tool to organize your thoughts, ideas, content, and any data which might be useful in your blogging journey.
Evernote can save images, audio, video, files, and any types of data that you may require while working on your blog.
It does have a premium and business package which lets you store more data and comes with other small features, but the free version is more than enough. So to start using it, download it for your device and make an account on it.
The easy-to-use GUI will make you want to start writing everything that is in your mind.
Evernote stores your data securely, and you can access it anywhere you want. You can snap webpage content through the browser extension of the software. You can make a check-list for the things you are supposed to do. All this with the feature to share your recipes, plans, thoughts, ideas, and work with anyone, and they don’t even have to use Evernote to see it.
If you are facing problems in handling content and data of any type, this is the tool for you. You will feel like the organized professional who has everything figured out.
Toggl
You must be very careful about how you manage your time. Many bloggers have a job, and they manage their blog after their work, so it becomes very important to keep track of everything.
Toggl Basic version is a free tool to record your activities, and it helps you track where you lack behind. You can analyze yourself with the help of this blogging tool and change your style so that you can be more efficient.
My Hours
“My hours” is another time management tool that can track your Real-time activities which you can then reflect afterward. You can also use it to track your daily progress or your progress in a project.
Invoice home
When your work is done, you are left with receiving payments, and thus, invoice home helps you generate invoices. There are over a hundred invoice templates available.
You can easily get the created invoice in your email. This will help in making your work look professional. When you create the basic invoice, you can see different types of invoices or cache memos, like tax invoice, sales receipt, purchase order, etc.
You can even add your business’s or your website’s logo in an advanced form. You can select a shipping address, purchase order number, due date, and even any type of tax in your invoice.
Concluding it!
These are some of the tools which will help you in time-management, SEO optimization, coming up with a catchy title, analyzing your website, organizing your thoughts and project, plus much more.
Let me know which tool you are currently using and which tool you would add to your list of tool next!
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