– Another reason why Bluehost is such an amazing provider is because of their amazing prices! It only cost $3.95/month to get your blog started! That’s an extremely low investment for your business that has potential to bring in thousands each month!
The Huge List of 39 Blogging Tools
Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Tools to organize your ideas
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.
Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blogposts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on shared tasks with a team, too.
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.
Tools to create well-optimized content
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.
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
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.
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.
Blog Courses
Like I said, I am NOT a blogging expert but I did learn a lot from blog experts. I would not have been able to get where I am today without these blogging courses. All of them have taught me so much and am so glad to have found them.
When I first started, I had NO IDEA what I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to start a blog. I didn’t even know what I would write about! And I most definitely did not know where to begin or how to get started.
So, if you’re really wanting to get serious about blogging and want to learn how to monetize your blog – I highly recommend you look into these courses below. I have taken every single one of these and I honestly would not have been able to do without.
Pinterest with Ell
This was the third course I enrolled in about a month after Blogging Blastoff ended. And the reason why I enrolled into another course so quickly was because I shortly learned that Pinterest was one of the social media platforms I wanted to focus on.
And… this Pinterest course was super inexpensive compared to Blogging Blastoff! Even though this course doesn’t have assignments per se, it does tell you the Do’s and Don’t’s when using Pinterest and how to grow your blog using Pinterest strategies.
It didn’t take me more than a couple of days to get through this easy course but I did see immediate impact as I was going through the course. My Pinterest views went from 19k to 75k while in the process of implementing these strategies! I now range anywhere from 250K to 320K Pinterest views with 50% of my blog traffic (pin clicks) coming from Pinterest on most days.
The awesome thing about this course also is that you gain lifetime access to any edits made to this course. I purchased this one around December and then two months later, Pinterest decided to completely change their algorithm. And you know what happened to this course? If was updated to reflect these new recommended strategies and I got access to these updates at no additional charge!
Plus, in addition to the Pinterest course, when you sign up here , you’ll also receive access to her InstaStrategy with Ell course and Boss Girl Blog Traffic Challenge! So for the price, it’s an awesome deal and I highly recommend it.
Pinterest for New Bloggers
If you’ve been blogging a while, you know that every blogger’s strategy is different. There is no one size works for all. So even though I had already taken one Pinterest course, I wanted to see whatsome other bloggers were doing.
That’s when I enrolled in Pinterest for New Bloggers, a completely free 9-day email course. And to be honest, this is the longest, most detailed, free course I have ever taken. I was shocked at how much information this free course had to offer.
Not going to lie, most of this stuff was repetitive from what I had already learned in Pinterest with Ell. However, it did have their unique twist to it and the strategy varied slightly. So if you’re on a tight budget, but are wanting to gain some Pinterest knowledge – this is definitely the course for you! It provides so much more information than other free courses will offer. Sign up here to receive your free email course.
Pinterest from P to T
I learned soooo much from the free version of Pinterest for New Bloggers that I knew investing in one of their more detailed courses would be completely worth it. That’s why I decided to invest in their advanced course, Pinterest from P to T. And I am so glad I did!
This course has a very extensive summary of everything they teach in their other two Pinterest courses, the free version and the premium version. But on top of that, they really went out of their way to cover absolutely everything else there is to know about Pinterest.
And of course, that’s not it! It took me at least three weeks to get through all the material as I would implement new strategies as I learned them. Now, more than 50% of my traffic comes from Pinterest! So yeah, I highly, highly recommend you add Pinterest from P to T to your wish list or easily sign up here.
The Huge List of 39 Blogging Tools
Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Tools to organize your ideas
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.
Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blogposts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on shared tasks with a team, too.
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.
Tools to create well-optimized content
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.
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
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.
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.
Authorship:
https://buffer.com/library/blogging-tools/
https://cheerstoblogging.com/blogging-tools-and-resources/
https://buffer.com/library/blogging-tools/