Blogging Tools: 31 Best Tools To Grow Your Blog

 

31 Best Tools to Grow Your Blog

 

Choosing the best tools for your blog is always a challenge, isn’t it?

Here’s a wonderful quote on tools by Steve Jobs:

“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”

Exactly!

Using the right tools for your blog will always help you save time, energy, and money.

On the other hand, if you choose the wrong tools, you’ll end up wasting the valuable time, energy, and money you put into making your blog successful.

In this article, we’ll be discussing the 31 best and most popular blogging tools that will help you enhance the quality of your blog.

To help you find the most relevant tools easily, I’ve grouped them into the following categories:

  • Blogging Platforms
  • Brainstorming the blogging ideas
  • Keyword Research
  • Organize your ideas
  • Writing tools
  • Images and Graphics
  • Creating well-optimized content
  • Email marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Analytics

 

So, let’s just get started.

 

Blogging Platforms

 

#1. WordPress

 

To start a blog you need a blogging platform. There are many platforms you can start blogging with. For example,

  • WordPress
  • Squarespace
  • Joomla
  • Wix
  • Weebly
  • Drupal

But as far as customization of your website is concerned, WordPress could be the best choice. You can design your blog/website the way you want. It has so many free themes and plugins.

You don’t need to be well-versed in coding.

Around 75 million websites are powered by WordPress.

 

WordPress.org

 

Related Article: 8 Best blogging platforms.

Official Website: https://wordpress.org/

 

Brainstorming Blogging Ideas

 

#2. BuzzSumo

 

BuzzSumo

 

It helps in finding information about the content that has been highly shared on social media.

Just enter a keyword or phrase and you will get a list of blog posts that generated the most shares and backlinks.

And by entering the domain names of your competitors, you can look at their most popular content.

This will help you get an idea about why their content is doing well.

Buzz Sumo also helps you identify who the major influencers are for your niche to promote your content.

In short, with Buzz Sumo, you can develop smarter content strategies to create engaging content and grow your readership.

Official Website: https://buzzsumo.com/

 

#3. Portent

 

You need to enter the subject you want to write about. It will give you a sample blog post title.

The most important thing:

Every time you refresh, it generates new blog post ideas. And you can refresh as many times as you like. You come up with so many ideas out of which you can choose the best one.

Portent

Official Website: https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

 

#4. Hub Spot’s Blog Topic Generator

 

HubSpot blog ideas generator

Enter up to five nouns for topics of your blog you want to write about. In a matter of seconds, it will generate for you a week’s worth of blog ideas.

Hub spot's blog topic generator

Official Website: https://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

#5. EMV Headline Analyzer

 

This tool analyzes your headline to determine its emotional marketing value.

The higher the EMV score of your headline is, the greater will be its chance of reaching prospects.

This will also help in getting more and more shares on social media platforms.

EMV Headline Analyzer

Official Website: https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

 

Keyword Research

 

#6. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

 

Before you start creating your blog posts, you need to do keyword research.

Google Keyword Planner helps you find the exact keywords or phrases people use while making their searches.

It allows you to enter a series of keywords and you can get average monthly searches, keyword trends, competition, and bidding for individual keywords.

It’s a free tool by Google Ads.

Official Website: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

 

#7. Moz Keyword Explorer

 

This tool allows you to discover and prioritize the best keywords to target. You can identify the keywords your site could outrank your competitors and also get suggestions.

Moz Keyword Explorer

 

Moz Keyword Explorer

Official Website: https://moz.com/explorer

 

#8. Keyword Tool.io

 

It claims to be the best Google Keyword Planner alternative. It’s a free tool and you don’t need to create an account to use it.

For any search term, it generates 750+ long-tail keywords and that’s for free.

What more?

It allows you to find the best keywords on YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, PlayStore, Instagram, and Twitter.

Blogging tools- Keywordtool.io

Official Website: https://keywordtool.io/

 

#9. Ahrefs

 

Following are the tools you get with Ahrefs:

  • Competitive Analysis
  • Keyword Research
  • Backlink Research
  • Content Research
  • Rank Tracking
  • Web Monitoring

And they keep adding new tools and features regularly.

This is a must-have tool for all serious digital marketers and SEO bloggers. It provides you with reliable and fresh data, intuitive design, and innovative features.

Though this isn’t a free tool, it offers a 7-day trial for $7.

Blogging tools: Ahrefs

Official Website: https://ahrefs.com/

 

Organize Your Ideas

 

#10. Evernote

 

blogging tools: Evernote

It’s a very powerful tool to organize information. You can capture and prioritize ideas and to-do lists.

Using this tool, you can capture the essential notes, images, contacts, voice notes, webpages, snippets, etc.

You can create separate notebooks for every project and save all types of content in these notebooks.

Use its powerful search to find everything you need.

And the best part?

You can access your notes even when you’re offline.

This means you can stay organized wherever you are and any device you’re using.

Official Website: https://evernote.com/

 

#11. Trello

 

Blogging Tools: Trello

You can use Trello’s boards, lists, and cards to organize and prioritize your ideas.

And you can go from idea to action within seconds.

If you work in a team, it’s a fantastic tool to collaborate with your team. And you can collaborate with them anywhere as it stays in sync across all your devices.

Just create a board for the project you want to assign to your team. Then add lists to create steps in a workflow that suits you. Now you can create cards for tasks you want your team to complete or information you want them to organize.

You can also add details, due dates, checklists, or comments just by clicking on a card.

To show progress in your project, you can drag and drop the cards across the lists.

Official Website: https://trello.com/

 

#12. CoSchedule

 

This tool offers you almost everything you need to organize your marketing efforts in one place.

This lets you plan for next week, next month, and even next quarter.

To make sure that your team is working productively, you can create weekly schedules for them.

There’s a 14-day free trial.

The paid plan starts from $80 per month if billed annually and $89 if billed monthly.

You can also check out the following tools to organize your ideas:

Official Website: https://coschedule.com/

Writing Tools

 

#13. Grammarly

 

A must-have tool for all serious bloggers, especially non-native English speakers.

It’s a free Chrome extension.

For advanced features, you need to upgrade to its pro version.

Here are its main features:

  • Checks spelling errors
  • Suggests proper punctuation
  • Checks sentence structures and style
  • Suggests alternative words

It also corrects your grammatical errors on some other sites like Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Facebook, etc.

You can either write directly into the Grammarly app or copy the content and paste it into Grammarly’s online grammar checker.

And, if you have installed its browser extension, you can type the content of your blog post in WordPress content manager. It will highlight all the grammatical errors you’re making and give suggestions to correct them.

Blogging Tools: Grammarly

Official Website: https://www.grammarly.com/

 

#14. Hemingway App

 

Unlike Grammarly, it isn’t an in-depth grammar-checking tool.

This word editor lightens up your words and makes your writing bold, clear, concise, and more impactful.

It does so by highlighting the words and sentences of your work using different colors.

The online version of Hemingway Editor is free and you can download the paid version, Hemingway App (a desktop version), on a one-time payment of $19.99.

Blogging Tools: Hemingway App

Official Website: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

 

#15. Google Docs

 

Instead of writing your content in the content manager of your blogging platform (WordPress), you can use Google Docs and post your content directly from it.

You can collaborate with your team members and edit documents. As it’s a product of Google itself, you can easily share your content with others using Gmail.

It also has very powerful spelling and grammar tools.

Official Website: https://www.google.com/docs/about/

 

#16. Edit Page

 

It’s a WordPress plugin that helps you to select the best title for your blog post.

You can use the process of A/B testing for different titles and discover which one gets more page views.

The readers will decide to read your article only if they find it interesting.

If you select the best headline, your readership will increase, and higher will be the CTR.

And the best part?

It’s a free plugin.

Blogging Tools: Edit Page

Official Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-experiments-free/

 

Images and Graphics

 

#17. Canva

 

To attract the attention of your readers, you need to make your blog or social media posts visually more appealing.

Why pay thousands of dollars to professional designers to make graphics for your blog when you can do most of the work yourself using a very easy-to-use tool, Canva?

Best of all,

You can do that for free.

The paid version is also available if you want additional features.

It’s super easy to use. And that’s its beauty. You don’t need to be a Photoshop expert.

Using its drag-and-drop feature you can create beautiful customized images, infographics, charts, and other images you require for your blog or social media channels.

Canva also offers quality templates for various social media sites. For example, a Pinterest template will help you create images your readers may find easy to pin.

Blogging Tools: Canva

Official Website: https://www.canva.com/

 

#18. Design Wizard

 

This tool could be a viable alternative to Canva.

Design Wizard allows you to create amazing videos and images in minutes.

There are over 17,000 templates (10,000 free) and over 1.2 million images in their database.

Design Wizard: Best Blogging Tools

 

With its free features, you can resize your designs, upload logos, and create custom color palettes.

Just select a template out of its thousands of pre-made templates according to your needs.

Then edit the elements in your selected template, like changing or uploading backgrounds, images, videos, and colors.

You can also add a logo, change fonts, or include a caption.

Finally, download the images/videos.

You can then share them instantly to your social networks or schedule them using their Buffer, HubSpot, or Marketo integrations.

All their videos and images are available for commercial use.

So, no copyright complications.

The basic plan is free. Upgrade to paid plans for more features.

The pricing starts at $7.41 per month or $89 if billed annually.

Official Website: https://www.designwizard.com/

#19. Stock Images

 

You can check out the following websites that offer copyright-free images:

  • Pixabay
  • Unsplash.com
  • Pexels

You don’t need to ask for permission or give credit to the artist, even for commercial purposes.

There are also some paid tools like Death to the Stock, Shutterstock, and PicMonkey.

Death to the Stock offers a 14-day free trial and the paid plan starts at $12 per month if billed annually and $15 if billed monthly.

Depending on your requirements and budget, you can also go for Shutterstock. Its plan starts at $199 for 750 images per month.

PicMonkey offers a 7-day free trial and its plan starts at $7.99 if billed monthly and $72 per month if billed annually.

Official Websites:

https://pixabay.com/

https://unsplash.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

https://www.shutterstock.com/

https://www.picmonkey.com/

 

Creating Well-Optimized Content

 

#20. Yoast

 

This is the WordPress plugin.

It covers almost all the basics of On-Page SEO.

Yoast SEO: Taking care of your WordPress SEO

SEO is the most popular and effective way to increase your rank on SERPs so that you get more traffic to your blog.

And Yoast is the favorite SEO tool for millions of users.

Official Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

 

#21. Google Page Speed Insights

 

Just enter the URL of your webpage and you’ll get the reports on its performance both on mobile and desktop. It also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your webpage.

Page speed is a very important factor in determining the rank of your site on search results. If your site loads faster, its bounce rate will also be lower. Your readers will be happier, page views will increase and if you are running a store, the sales will improve.

GTmetrix and Pingdom are also the other page speed tools you can try to check the speed of your site and fix the problems if any. They also give suggestions on how to fix the problems.

Official Website: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

 

#22. JetPack

 

A WordPress plugin, Jet Pack offers security, performance, and site management tools.

It keeps your site backed up and sends alerts via email or push notifications about downtime.

You can customize your pages – like home page, blog posts, sidebars, widgets – without any coding skill.

It provides security to your site by preventing all unwanted intrusions with its effective brute force protection, malware scanning, and spam filtering.

It also lets you schedule the promotion of your new blog posts before publishing them.

Most of its features are free and you need to upgrade to its paid plans for some additional features.

The paid plan is between $39 yearly to $299 yearly.

Blogging Tools: JetPack

Official Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

 

#23. Akismet

 

Akismet: Best Blogging Tools

This is an anti-spam WordPress plugin. It helps you to focus on the business of your site by filtering out your comment spam.

Spams are annoying. It just litters your blog posts.

And, since 2005, Akismet has been keeping spam off the web with an average of about 7.5 million per hour.

It has three plans: Personal, Plus, and Enterprise.

Personal – Free (for personal sites/blog)

Plus – $5 per month per site (for commercial use)

Enterprise – $50 per month, unlimited sites (for large networks or multisite installations)

Official Website: https://akismet.com/

Email Marketing

 

#24. MailChimp

 

This is the best email marketing software for new bloggers because it’s free for up to 2000 subscribers.

And, as your list of subscribers grows, the pricing also increases.

With its pre-built templates, ready-made segments, and one-click automation, you can start a beautiful campaign within just a couple of minutes.

Blogging Tools: MailChimp

Official Website: https://mailchimp.com/

 

#25. ConvertKit

 

This is the best tool for experienced bloggers. It was created by Nathan Barry. He himself was a blogger and he designed this tool with bloggers in mind.

Specifically for bloggers.

You can customize and embed forms on your site which will help you to convert your readers into subscribers. You can organize these subscribers by tagging them based on their interests and activity. And group those tags into segments that will help you send the right message at the right time.

You can also use one of its best tools – a visual automation tool – to visually create marketing funnels. This will help you to know where your subscribers are and make sure they are receiving the right emails.

It has a 14-day free trial and after that, the package starts at $29 per month.

Blogging Tools: ConvertKit

Official Website: https://convertkit.com/

 

#26. AWeber

 

It’s one of the most popular email marketing companies with 100000+ email marketers.

With its powerful email marketing and automation tools, you can create beautiful, engaging, and professional email newsletters within a couple of minutes and send them to your subscribers.

And, using its testing feature, you can discover what emails perform the best and what emails need improvement.

There’s a 30-day free trial period and after that, you have to join one of their pricing plans depending on the number of your subscribers.

The price starts at $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers.

Blogging Tools: AWeber

Official Website: https://www.aweber.com/email-marketing-features.htm

 

Social Media Marketing

 

#27. PostPlanner

 

Blogging Tools: Post Planner

Sharing and promoting your blog post on social media channels is very important to boost your traffic and sales.

The results of Buzz Sumo and Buffer’s analysis of Facebook posts say that Post Planner posts get 5 times more engagement.

It helps you find the top-performing content and share it at the best time possible across different social networks.

You can schedule your content to be posted at a specific time with bulk uploading.

Or, you can also add your best-performing content to a queue to recycle.

The price starts at $3 per month.

Official Website: https://www.postplanner.com/

 

#28. Buffer

 

After publishing your blog post, you can schedule it for all of your social media platforms and Buffer will automatically share it according to your posting schedule.

Just install the Chrome extension and Buffer will add the content to your queue. Your post will then be published at the optimum time which may gain you maximum shares.

To see how your post is performing and how to improve its performance, you can use Buffer’s analytics.

The plan starts at $15 per month if billed monthly and $12 per month if billed annually.

Blogging Tools: Buffer

Official Website: https://buffer.com/

 

#29. Sprout Social

 

With Sprout Social, you can schedule your posts across different social media profiles at once.

It lets you try testing different headlines in the posts you’ll be sharing to find which one performs the best.

It’s also quite easy to find influencers in your industry and ask them to have a look at your content. And they will definitely share your blog posts in their network if they find them worth sharing.

It has a 30-day free trial.

The paid plan starts at $99 per user, per month.

Blogging Tools: Sprout Social

Official Website: https://sproutsocial.com/social-media-management/

 

#30. Tailwind

 

If you’re a Pinterest and Instagram user, Tailwind is a must-have tool for you.

Just download the browser extension and schedule multiple pins or grams at once with a bulk upload.

Instagram’s Hashtag Finder suggests the best Instagram hashtags reach more and more of the right people.

This tool lets you publish all of your posts to Instagram and pins to Pinterest at the optimum time to gain maximum audience engagement.

You can analyze your results using its analytics to find what’s working and what’s not.

Blogging Tools: Tailwind

Official Website: https://www.tailwindapp.com/

 

Analytics

 

#31. Google Analytics

 

  • Where are my visitors coming from?
  • What are my top-performing posts?
  • What devices are my visitors viewing my website on – a mobile or a desktop?
  • Which platforms are sending most of the traffic to my site (social media, search engines, or other blogs)?
  • What country or city are my visitors from?
  • What are my visitors doing on my site?

These are the questions that must be in your mind once your blog is live.

Google Analytics answers all these questions and it helps you in so many other ways as well.

You can compare the performance of your site for the current month with the previous months.

You can also monetize your blog/website using eCommerce tracking.

Just use your Gmail ID to log in to Google Analytics. After that add your site and see your analytics.

It’s a free tool and, best of all, powered by Google itself.

You can also check out the following tools to analyze and optimize your site:

  • KISSmetrics
  • SEMrush
  • Google Search Console

Official Websites:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/

https://www.semrush.com/

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

 

Conclusion

 

Stay up to date with the best blogging tools.

Blogging is more than just writing quality content.

You also need to research keywords and rank for them, grow your email list, find amazing images, optimize your blog posts, and get streams of traffic.

Only then you can get an edge over your competitors.

These 31 tools will help you blog more efficiently by increasing user engagement, reducing bounce rates, improving click-through rates, and ultimately, conversions and sales.

What are your favorite tools? Did I miss any important tools to include in my list? Do share your thoughts in the comments section.

 

 

 

 

 

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