Are you a new blogger who is struggling to find time to complete all of the tasks on your blogging to-do list? Or do you spend hours and hours writing blog posts, leaving yourself with insufficient time to promote your content? If yes, you may just need some better blogging tools. Although they are not required for blogging, these tools will help you work faster, attract more readers, and create content that stands out from the crowd.
If you’re looking for some great and time-saving blogging tools, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’re going to give you a rundown of some of the best blogging tools out there. We’ll cover everything from content planning and creation tools to marketing and analytical tools to help you get the most out of your blog. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro, there’s something here for you. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Content Planning Tools
While the majority of bloggers understand the importance of regularly updating their blogs with content, many have trouble coming up with ideas for topics to write about. Similarly, many bloggers overlook planning their content and scheduling each step of the blogging journey. Inadequate planning will eventually result in poor management and a shortage of content ideas. Here’s where content planning tools come in handy. The following are some useful tools to assist you in content planning:
1. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a content calendar that lets you plan, publish, and optimize your content. With CoSchedule, you can also organize your marketing efforts all in one place. It has a free trial, and it integrates with WordPress and other popular content management systems.
Its features include:
- Assigning tasks to your team members
- Discussion board for better coordination
- Reusable task templates to save time
- Scheduling recurring tasks and events
2. Quora
Quora can provide you with ideas and inspiration for writing as you begin to create topics that your readers will find interesting. Since this forum is free, it is used by more than 300 million people around the world. It lets you interact with people and know their interests regarding the niche you are blogging on. You can go over frequently asked questions and respond to them on your blog.
3. Todoist
Todoist is a task manager and to-do list-making tool available as an application, extension, and widget. The tool’s built-in scheduling feature is integrated with the calendar and can automatically categorize your tasks on the basis of priority.
Its features include:
- Adding tasks to your to-do list
- Breaking tasks into subtasks
- Moving tasks into projects
- Sharing projects with your team
- Organizing tasks according to priority level
- Setting up reminders
- Integrations with 30+ third-party apps
4. Trello
Trello is an AI task manager and content organizer that can be customized for every level of blogging. Whether you are an individual beginner blogger or a team of bloggers, this tool is suitable for your task planning, managing, and tracking needs. Trello’s basic features are available for free, but you can upgrade the tool later on to access more advanced content planning features.
Here’s what you can do with this tool:
- Create lists and cards
- Assign tasks to your team members
- Track the progress of your tasks
- Create timelines for the on-time completion of each task
- Experience better communication with Slack integrated with the tool
5. Airtable
Airtable is a data organization and content planning tool that you can use as a blogger. The tool allows you to import any data, regardless of its source, then arrange it, format it as you want, and share it with others. It takes care of your workflows completely while allowing you to focus on what you are good at, ‘blogging.’
The specifications of the Airtable platform are:
- Custom interfaces
- Custom scripting
- Numerous workflow templates to follow
- Multiple integrations and automation to run processes between different platforms
- Easy management of the team
In addition to these, you may use online headline and content idea generators like HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator, Headline Generator, Blog Name Generator, and Portent’s Content Idea Generator to brainstorm some ideas about your blog’s content.
Content Creation Tools
A perfect blog needs perfect content. Speaking of which, you must write reliable and error-free blog posts. You might also need some eye-catching pictures and relevant infographics to supplement your text. In fact, studies show that visuals increase blog traffic by 12%. Fortunately, there are many tools available for producing engaging infographics, images, and videos that complement your content and help with promotion. There are also some writing tools that help you generate flawlessly written forms of content. Here’s a list of some content creation tools to help you with your text and visuals:
1. Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI writing aid that’s popular for proofreading among bloggers. It is available as a free plan that includes all the features you need to make your content polished and free of errors. Grammarly is compatible with both desktop and mobile devices. It is also available as a Chrome extension, so you can enable it on Google Docs while writing.
It can help a blogger in several ways:
- Highlights spelling and grammatical mistakes
- Corrects punctuation mistakes
- Detects plagiarism
- Suggests better synonyms
- Suggests alternative sentences for clarity, engagement, and fluency
- Generates citations
2. Hemingway
The Hemingway writing tool is similar to Grammarly in that it points out errors in writing and suggests alternatives for improvement. Additionally, it allows you to know how readable your content is. It highlights hard-to-grasp sentences so you can improve their structure, flow, and grammar. You can export your text directly from the blog to the tool because it is integrated with CMSs like WordPress and Medium.
Here’s what the Hemingway app can do for you:
- Highlights lengthy and complicated sentences
- Highlights spelling and grammar mistakes
- Suggests simple alternatives for complex words
- Corrects the use of voice
3. Evernote
With the help of the online tool Evernote, you can create notes for your blog posts before you actually start writing them. The tool also lets you attach documents, clip web pages, and scan photos. While researching material for your blog post, you can use Evernote to store web pages, PDFs, and online articles and later use them to fetch the information you need.
4. Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool that assists bloggers in producing high-quality graphics. With this tool, you can create images, infographics, videos, flow charts, and doodles for your blog posts. You can also make your blog’s logo using this tool. The best part is that the free plan offers you lots of room to maneuver without going over budget.
Here are some features of this content creation tool:
- Thousands of templates to choose from
- Beginner friendly with an easy-to-use interface
- Drag and drop editor
- Multiple graphics templates for social media posts
- Customization of colors, fonts, sizes, and styles
5. Adobe Illustrator
Although Adobe Express is a free graphics designing tool, its premium version is called Adobe Illustrator. This paid tool has some extraordinary features to invest in. If you are serious about your blog’s visual content, you must try the tool’s free trial. Using it, you can design your blog’s logos as well as illustrations, infographics, and images for your blog posts. It also helps you edit pre-formed content like photos and videos.
The features of Adobe Illustrator that are worth mentioning are:
- Step-by-step tutorials for beginners
- Multiple options for customization: colors, designs, fonts, templates, and much more
- Creative Cloud libraries
- Multiple options for creating visual content: illustrations, paintings, graphics, typography, and videos
SEO Audit and Keyword Search Tools
You might need to do an SEO audit on your blog to check where you currently stand in the SERPs. Perhaps you’ve made some changes to your blog and want to ensure that everything is still properly optimized. An SEO audit tool can help you evaluate a variety of distinct ranking factors. These include the theme of your blog, its compatibility with mobile devices, the content and keyword targeting, the loading speed, your blog’s backlink profile, and much more.
Keyword strategy is an important part of every SEO campaign. If you don’t conduct keyword research and incorporate relevant, high-volume keywords into your blog posts, your website will likely rank lower than others on search engine results pages (SERPs). Although Google Keyword Planner can help you find high-volume keywords for your niche, there are other free and paid tools that can assist you in more focused searching.
Here are a few of our preferred SEO and keyword search tools:
1. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is the most popular keyword search tool among bloggers due to its affordable price. The tool offers straightforward graphs of the search percentage for each specific keyword. These graphs let you understand how your website will perform if you use that keyword in your content. In this way, you’ll have a lot of content ideas for your blog.
Its features include:
- Finding profitable keywords
- Tracking keyword rankings
- Showing CPC for each keyword
- Performing SEO audits
- Performing competitor analysis
- Creating content with the AI writer
2. Moz
Moz is an SEO tool that can improve your blog’s traffic, overall rankings, and visibility in search engine results pages. Its Keyword Explorer has more than 500 million keyword suggestions in it.
Some SEO solutions provided by Moz include:
- Technical SEO audits for blogs and websites
- Tracking rankings across 170+ search engines
- Regular local and mobile tracking
- Identifying and fetching traffic-driving keywords
- Reporting stats on difficulty scores, competitor research, and SERP analysis for each specific keyword
- Analyzing backlink profile
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that crawls your blog to identify any potential issues that may be preventing your blog from performing well in SEO. This site audit tool is trusted by thousands of bloggers and website owners across the world.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider’s free plan includes the following features:
- Finding any broken links, errors, and redirects
- Conducting regular SEO audits
- Reviewing Meta Robots and directives
- Analyzing your blog’s page titles and metadata
- Generating XML sitemaps
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another leading tool in the SEO industry. It is supported by a group of SEO specialists willing to assist you in enhancing the search engine performance of your blog. The features which the tool offers are dependent on the plan you buy, but it’s not just a one-time transaction. The recurring service of Ahrefs will always keep the SEO of your blog in good shape.
Some noteworthy features of this SEO tool are:
- Analyzing your blog’s on-page and technical SEO
- Identifying keyword rankings
- Backlink analysis
- Competitor analysis through the Domain Comparison tool
- Keyword Explorer for focused keyword research
- Regular email alerts
5. Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one tool that’s got everything you need for your blog. It’s an accomplished SEO tool that has helped big companies like Samsung and Tesla accomplish their SEO goals. Its keyword search tool is one of a kind, offering more than 22 billion keywords for different sites.
With Semrush, you can enjoy the following features:
- 50 plus SEO tools for every level of website
- Tracks the daily rankings of your blog in SERPs
- Helps you identify broken links and loading errors
- Performs technical SEO audits on your blog
Marketing Tools
SEO enables your blog’s visibility in search engine results, but it may not be enough, especially if you have a really focused niche. There’s another thing you must focus on after you’ve published your blog posts. Yes! You’ve guessed right. It’s marketing. Marketing your blog on different platforms, including social media, helps to enhance your blog’s visibility among your target audience. The following tools can help you with your marketing tasks:
1. Hubspot’s Marketing Hub
Hubspot is a CRM that provides several marketing solutions for companies of all sizes. All of your marketing resources and tools are available on a single, efficient platform at HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. It not only enables you to produce material that your audience will find beneficial, but it also makes your blog searchable and discoverable on social media and other platforms.
The Marketing Hub of Hubspot offers the following features:
- Email and social media marketing
- Automation of marketing campaigns
- Reporting of landing pages
- Custom reports
- Live chat option
- Facebook, Google & LinkedIn ads
- Retargeting ads
- Contact management
2. ClickUp
ClickUp has a marketing tool that enables you to track, analyze, and automate your marketing campaigns. The tool is integrated with over 1,000 different resources and apps to form an all-in-one marketing solution.
Some of its useful features are:
- Collaboration features for the team
- Content calendar for setting up work timelines
- Scheduling reminders
- Promotional calendars
- Multiple templates for reports
- Campaign tracking
- Graphics Designing
- SEO management
3. MailChimp
MailChimp is a popular email marketing service that helps you send newsletters, make announcements, and manage email campaigns. Unlike other marketing solutions, MailChimp provides you with individualized recommendations for promoting your blog’s content. It helps you target potential customers and automate the email campaign for your blog.
The interesting features of this email marketing tool are:
- Pre-built templates for emails
- Email automation
- AI-assisted marketing
- Suggestions backed by accurate analytics
- Forecasting audiences that are sure to turn into regular consumers
- Integration with a wide range of data resources
4. AWeber
AWeber is a marketing service that helps you automate your email marketing campaigns, build landing pages, and manage the eCommerce of your blog. It is a beginner-friendly marketing tool featuring drag-and-drop builders and fully customizable email templates.
Here’s what this marketing tool offers a blogger:
- Numerous email templates
- Integration with Canva to create and add interactive images in your emails
- Create personalized emails for each consumer in seconds
- Auto Newsletter and Email tracking features
5. GetResponse
GetResponse is a powerful and user-friendly tool for email sending, page creation, and marketing automation. Its email marketing solutions help you create and manage your email marketing campaigns in an efficient way.
The features which make it suitable for the email marketing campaign of your blog are:
- Free templates for emails and newsletters
- Easy to use, drag and drop email creators
- Proven deliverability of emails
- Automated emails
- Free stock images
- Follow-up emails with auto respondents
Analytical Tools
You may also need blog analytical tools if you want to track the performance of your blog using charts, graphs, and reports. These tools provide you with accurate statistics offering insights into the SEO performance of your website. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the two major analytical tools that new bloggers most frequently use. Anyone with a Google account can use these for no cost.
Here are some other tools you might consider using for this purpose:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool from Google. It gives you insights into your blog’s traffic and its performance in organic searches. It is the tool that is most commonly used for the analysis of a website or blog. Since the tool is already integrated with all Google products, it can be accessed on any Google service easily.
Here are the blog elements it reports about:
- Loading time
- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Number of users
- Average session duration
- Pages per session
2. Semrush
Semrush is another popular analytical tool that discloses a blog’s success in terms of accurate stats and charts. The reports usually involve statistics and graphs about:
- Indexability
- Crawlability
- Loading speed
- Keyword success
- Number of clicks
- Mobile compatibility
- User experience
3. Matomo
Matomo is a comprehensive online analytics tool that allows you complete ownership over your blog’s data. It is trusted by over 1 million website owners and bloggers in more than 190 countries. Although Matomo is a paid tool, you can have its 21-day trial for free.
The analytical features of this tool are:
- Data can be imported directly from Google Analytics
- 100% accurate data that you can rely on
- Open source platform
- No limitations on data searching and storage
- Wide range of analytics
- Customizable data-extracting tools
4. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service from Microsoft that gives you insights into your website’s traffic, keywords, and backlinks. In addition to SEO tools, Bing Webmaster Tools also include reporting and diagnostic tools for websites and blogs. These tools let you know about your blog’s visibility in the Bing search engine.
5. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg offers a Traffic Analysis tool to analyze all your traffic in one place. Using this tool, you can:
- Evaluate how various traffic sources stack up against one another.
- Check out what each campaign’s target audience did on your blog.
- Get the information you need to decide how to optimize your website more wisely.
WordPress Plugins
In addition to other blogging tools available online, WordPress also offers tons of plugins on the platform. Some of these plugins come with the WordPress plan you buy; others can be purchased afterward. The purpose of these plugins is to let you customize your blog to suit your needs. Some of these simply help your blog run smoothly. The following are a few WordPress plugins you might want to use:
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast is an SEO plugin that helps you optimize your website for Google. It’s free to use and has been the most widely used WordPress plugin ever. In the free version of Yoast SEO, everything you need to manage your SEO is included. However, the premium plugin enables you to access even more features and tools.
The features included in the Free Yoast SEO are:
- Automates SEO improvements
- Analyzes content readability
- Generates XML sitemaps
- Analyzes meta tags and canonical URLs
- Offers titles, meta descriptions, and Google previews for your blog posts
- Schema.org integration for rich results
- Faster loading times
- Cornerstone content and internal linking features
2. WPForms
WPForms is a contact form builder plugin for WordPress. With WPForms, you can quickly and easily design stunning contact forms, including:
- Feedback forms
- Subscription forms
- Payment forms,
and many more
There are pre-built templates in WPForms that any blogger can use to build his or her site’s contact forms. Moreover, the drag-and-drop builder is made to ease the process even more. It is also integrated with popular page builders like:
3. Elementor
Elementor is a website builder that is available as a WordPress plugin. The free tool from Elementor has numerous built-in widgets and functionalities that you can use to build or reshape your blog. While building your blog, you can see how it will appear on Google thanks to the tool’s live design and drag-and-drop inline editor.
Some features of this blog-building plugin are:
- Unlimited web creations
- Pixel-perfect designs
- Full website kits
- Template library
- Fully responsive and fast-loading websites regardless of the device
- Accelerated workflow
4. Jetpack
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that you can use to ensure your blog’s security, backup, speed, and growth. This all-in-one tool is designed to make WordPress blogs safe and secure.
Some security services that the tool offers are:
- Automated real-time backups
- Unlimited storage for backups
- Enables secure migration of websites to other platforms
- Debugging, maintenance, and troubleshooting
- Regular malware and security scans
- Anti-spam features (integration with Akismet)
- Monitoring site uptime and downtime
5. Akismet
Akismet is a spam protection tool that is available as a WordPress plugin. It has the most advanced anti-spam features to stop dangerous content from being published on your blog, whether it be in the form of comments or contact form submissions. Akismet compares content from any external source to its extensive database to detect and block spam.
Some useful features of this anti-spam tool are:
- Automated screening of comments
- Shows URLs to disclose any misleading links
- Discard feature to block spam
- Frees up your disc space
- Speeds up your blog
Final Thoughts
We have selected the top blogging tools for each category of content planning and creation, SEO and marketing, and blog analysis. These are just a few of the numerous blogging tools available. There are dozens of other options out there, so be sure to explore and find the ones that work best for you.
