Last Updated on December 1, 2020
Bear in mind that some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you.
How many blogging tools do you use?
Two, three, five or none at all.
Would you believe it? That almost every second there is a website published. If you do not believe me, pause a while and go to internetlivestats.com and watch the drama.
Did you see it? It is shocking isn’t it?
Now that you have a blog or about to create one, what strategy do you have to rise above the noise and make your blog visible? Will your blog make it to the first page of Google for any of your keywords?
Tools help productivity. A shovel will assist in trenching. Similarly, blogging tools will help you in your blogging journey.
Before we get to the blogging tools, here is one piece of advice. If you are yet to launch your blog, make sure to choose one of the best website hosting companies. There are several of them. Like , and DreamHost.
Let’s dive into it.
1. Ubersuggest: A Blogging Tool for Your Competitive Advantage
Let’s begin with Ubersuggest. Neil Patel created this tool. If you have been in the internet marketing arena for some time you may have definitely heard of this guy. He is a very resourceful go-to person with your journey on internet marketing.
You know the best thing about Ubersuggest?
It is Free.
And Neil keeps on enhancing this tool. I’m not sure if he will keep it free forever. But while it free and available, let’s use it to the max.
Here is a snapshot of what you can do using this blogging tool, Ubersuggest. You can look at several aspects that include;
- Domain overview
- Top SEO pages
- Keyword ideas
- Content ideas
- Site audit
- Backlinks
You can analyze your website or your competitor’s site. There are two basic inputs. Your domain name and the keyword you are researching. When you input a domain name, the tool spills out the number of ranking keywords and the ensuing traffic for the country you have chosen. You also get top SEO pages as you continue scrolling down the results.
In a nutshell, this blogging tool will give you awesome data for your keyword research. It will bring to the fore content ideas you can use for your blog. It will even show you the most shared pages on facebook and Pinterest. Try it and you certainly enjoy it.
2. Workflowy: The Simple and yet very Powerful Organization Tool
Call it what you may, this is one of my favorite items in my blogging tools box. Workflowy is an organization tool that is web-based. It empowers you to create great lists. Be it daily tasks, notes, paper outlines, anything!
It is a text-based document. You can zoom in and it provides you the flexibility to organize ideas in the way you like.
Workflowy is so simple the way it is structured but very powerful. It’s an infinity document and you can continue collapsing its bullet system which takes you to very deep levels of what you are working on.
With Workflowy, you can organize thousands of ideas and notes in one place and yet don’t get overwhelmed. If you are dealing with a project, you can take it to big and complicated levels. You just need to keep adding depth to it.
But even if it gets complicated, Workflowy helps you to focus on only what you need to at a particular time.
Because of its simplicity and unassuming way it is structured, you may not realize its potential at first use. But when you use it for at least a week, you may never go back to your other tools.
I mainly use Workflowy as a blogging tool for structuring my content creation among other things. There is a free version and a paid version of this blogging tool. But for most bloggers, the free version is sufficient to conduct your business to your full satisfaction.
3. Grammarly: Root out grammar and structural mistakes from your content
Grammarly is a superb writing assistant. If google chrome is your browser, you can download an extension of Grammarly here.
This blogging tool is a powerful proofreader for your content. It comes in handy especially if you are creating long-form content. Those silly grammatical mistakes and spelling errors are taken care of by this blogging tool.
Grammarly helps you to fix a lot of writing mistakes. Some of these include grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. It can help you fix wordiness. It can detect the tone of your writing if it sounds confident, angry or optimistic or any other way than what you intend to communicate.
It can detect inconsistent writing style, unclear sentence structure and overused words among many other things. In short, it takes care of your writing. This means that your blog posts will be well optimized in terms of English structure.
There is a free version and a premium version of Grammarly. Just like with Workflowy, the free version of Grammarly is mostly sufficient for most users. However, if you want to use a great deal of its functionality, you can go for Premium which begins from around $11.66 per month.
4. Portent.com: A Superb Headline Generator
Before your site visitors read your blog post, the first thing they read is the headline. Give them a poor headline and they will not waste their time with your content.
Headlines must be structured in a powerful way. They draw in the reader and suck them into reading your content. This does not mean you must be churning out clickbait headlines. The content under the headline must speak to or answer the claim of the headline.
If not your website visitor will quickly bounce away and go on to look for other content that will answer their needs.
Portent.com is a powerful blogging tool that will assist you to generate eye-catching headlines. All you do is put in your keyword, or words that you would want to appear in your headline and click the button. Every time you click the button, the tool gives you a different headline. Continue doing this until you arrive at the headline that will suit what you want your blog post to be about.
5. TinyPNG: Slice Your Images Thin to Improve Loading Speed
Images play an important role in your blog. They break the monotony of text that may wear out your readers. And because of so many distractions in people’s lives, it is difficult for someone to continue reading blocks of text for a long time. So the images provide a break and also people are naturally attracted to visuals.
So it is important to include images in your blog posts. The drawback though is that images are kind of heavy and have an impact on the loading speed of your page. A slow-loading page will again increase the bounce rate as people are too busy to wait for crawling pages to load.
Here is where TinyPNG comes handy. It compresses your images while maintaining image quality. This way, the images become light and can load easily on your site. TinyPNG compresses your image by 30% to 50%. So an image which was 150mb can be reduced to the region of 80mb.
Special Tip
Let me give you my special twist to image reduction I discovered accidentally. If you notice the images on this site, I like putting a border on the images. I use a website called tuxpi.com. When I’m done with bordering and download the final image from tuxpi.com, the image is reduced further. In the example I have given above of the image reduced to 80mb, it can further be reduced to as low as 40mb with retained quality.
TinyPNG is free to use and it is a very powerful blogging tool to have in your blogging arsenal.
6. RankMath: A Powerful Shot in the SEO Arm
Here is an awesome SEO blogging tool for WordPress users. The goal of every blogger is to have their blog on the first page of the search engines. Obviously, when you rank high on the search engines, chances of receiving quality organic traffic is very high.
RankMath helps you to produce SEO friendly content. Such content will assist in pushing your blog up towards the first page of search engines for the keywords you are trying to rank for. This blogging tool will help you to optimize your content for search engines. Providing you with a chance to outrank your competitors.
RankMath brings automation to your WordPress SEO. It assists to optimize your blog posts eventually leading you to rank high. Some of the things included in the RankMath SEO suite are SEO analysis, advanced SEO optimization, rich snippets, XML site maps.
There is a long list of what this blogging tool can do. And the sweet thing to hear is that it is free. Try it today and you’ll surely enjoy it.
7. Canva: Image Creation Made Ridiculously Easy
Like I said above, images are a must-have on your blog. Canva is a tool used by many bloggers for image creation. It makes image creation very easy even for non-designers.
This blogging tool has templates that are already done for you. If you want images for your social media campaigns there is no need to start cropping your images the hard way. Canva has pre-made image sizes for almost any social media platform.
Canva’s interface is drag and drop. It has a myriad of beautiful fonts you will be spoiled for choice.
So this blogging tool is just there for everyone. It is free to use. Some images in its repository may cost you a dollar or so but the free stuff is more than one can ask for.
8. Answer The Public: A Blogging Tool for Content Creation Ideas
Here is a blogging tool that will assist you to generate ideas for your blog content. As you know quality content is the main thing that will drive readers and customers to your site. And sometimes, on your blogging journey, you may run out of ideas of the kind of content your readers yearn to see.
It is a simple blogging tool to use. You type in your keyword and the tool will go out and pull out the questions people are asking about that keyword. The tool breaks down your keyword into three main listings. It begins with the questions. So it gives you keywords with questions of what, who, why and when. It further gives you keywords with prepositions of for, like and with. And then it gives keywords in alphabetical order.
Apart from giving you content ideas, it is also a good source of LSI keywords that you can sprinkle in your content and rank for them. This blogging tool is really good. I like it even better when used in conjunction with Keywords Everywhere( I will talk about it below).
Answer the public has both free and premium versions. The premium version has more functionality of course. But the free version is sufficient for a great number of users.
9. Keywords Everywhere: Keyword Research Enhanced
I have been reluctant to talk about this blogging tool. The reason is that it has recently been moved from a free tool to a premium one. Nevertheless, it is so cheap to the extent that for some users, a $10 expenditure may last them up to 6 months. Moreover, it has the option of being switched off and use it only when you need it. That way your credit will not be consumed even when you do not need to use the tool.
Keywords everywhere is superb for keyword research. When you put in your initial keyword, this blogging tool will give you related keywords and other keywords people are searching for in relation to your keyword.
It also gives you the volume of searches per month for your keyword. This is also extended to the similar keywords it generates. So at a glance, you can know the popularity of the keywords you are targeting and decide which ones to pick.
Further, it gives you the cost per click for each of the keywords it churns out. This is a good metric especially if you are into Ad creation. The last metric I love about this tool is the competition of the keywords it gives you. This metric helps you to find out which keywords are competitive to rank for and which ones are easier.
10. QUORA: The Best Social Question and Answer Network
That’s true. Quora is the best social question and answer network. And it’s all free.
But what makes Quora a blogging tool?
As a blogger, you can use Quora to generate a wide range of content ideas. Also when you get to know that Quora receives more than 50 million website visits per month from the USA alone, you’ll realize the great potential to use this site for traffic to your own blog.
If you want to write a blog post, you can go to quora and key in your keyword in the search window. Quora will spill out the questions people are asking about the keyword you typed in. Most of the times you will find that the questions are as fresh as a few minutes from your search query.
Once you have several questions asking similar things about your keyword, it is easy to craft a blog post that will address the major issues in the questions people are asking. Actually you can frame your headline in response to the questions.
The other great thing is that you can use this blogging tool to get traffic to your website. Remember it is receiving more than 50 million visitors per month. To receive traffic from Quora you need to start answering some questions asked on Quora. This Q & A network allows you to place links in your answers. So if you are providing quality answers, Quora’s visitors will start following your links to your blog and you will get free traffic.
11. Web Hosting: The Blogging Tool Most Beginner Bloggers Overlook
No matter how you think about it, web hosting is a blogging tool that is critical to the bloggers’ fraternity. A poor choice of your web hosting provider will negatively impact your blog.
If for example, your web hosting is slow, then your blog loading time will be slow. This will frustrate your website visitors and the will bounce away to faster loading websites. The resulting effect is your blog will not rank high on google because website loading speed is one of the Google ranking factors.
There are many web hosting providers and obviously several factors to look at for a choice. Some of the factors people look at are pricing, technical capabilities like loading speed, uptime in a month and customer support.
Here are 4 web hosting providers that are recommended for your use.
Conclusion
The blogging tools considered in this article, when put to good use will give impetus to any blogger. I have tried to bring tools that cost nothing as much as possible although for some you still have to pay. I know there are a lot of blogging tools that I have not listed here. Some of the tools listed here may appeal to you and some may not. Or possibly you could have an alternative tool that you consider better.
What blogging tool do you use that you would like to share with others? Put it in the comment below.