Today I wanted to take a look at what I think are some of the best tools for bloggers. Of course, everyone will have different opinions on this, so I’ve tried to stick to the tools that I personally use for my blogging business.
First of all, I want to say that when you start blogging you don’t really need any tools other than a good host and blog name.
However, when you start taking blogging more seriously there are some tools that you might find useful for various areas of blogging such as designing graphics, researching keywords for SEO or scheduling social media posts.
Here are my best tools for bloggers.
Best Tools For Bloggers
Canva
Canva is the main tool I use for creating graphics for social media, Pinterest Pins, blog logos and featured images for blog posts.
Canva has both free and paid options. If you’re just getting started with blogging then the free version should provide plenty of templates images and design tools to fulfil your needs.
The paid version of Canva offers lots more templates, editing tools (such as being able to remove backgrounds) and a huge range of stock images.
The stock images that are included are one of the mains reasons I pay for Canva pro. I was spending hours each week trying to find suitable royalty-free images for my blogs, whereas now I can usually find something straight away and can use as many as I want per week.
The cost of a single stock image is usually approx $1 or £1 so I’m easily saving this over the course of a month. Canva pro costs £10.99 a month or £99 for the year.
You can sign up to Canva using this link.
Best Tools For Bloggers: Keysearch
If you want to take things to the next level with your blog, you might be thinking about improving your SEO skills.
Keysearch is a tool that shows you how often people are searching for terms, words or phrases in Google and how difficult those terms are to rank for compared to other websites.
For example, the term ‘Saving Money’ is very hard to rank for and it’s unlikely a small blogger would beat big well-established websites like Money Saving Expert and The Money Advice Service.
Keysearch can help suggest other phrases on the same topic that are easier to rank for.
Bloggers use this tool to look at which search terms they could potentially rank for, therefore increasing traffic, and in turn, ad revenue.
Keysearch can be used for both planning new posts and updating old posts with better keywords too.
You can sign up for Keysearch using this link.
Rank Math
While we’re on the subject of SEO, my preferred SEO tool for blogging is Rank Math. If you have a WordPress blog it’s simple to install from the plugin area on the dashboard.
I recently switched to Rank Math after years of using Yoast and overall I prefer it. It gives a more detailed overview of what you need to get your post to rank in Google and so far the results I’ve seen have been good.
Grammarly
When you’ve been working on a piece for hours and hours it’s so easy to become a bit blind to what you’ve written. And no matter how good your writing is, it’s easy to make mistakes.
Whether it’s spelling, grammar or something else, the Grammarly extension can help improve your writing and will help your blog look more professional by picking out and eliminating any little mistakes and typos that you’ve made.
You sign up to Grammarly here.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the first things I set up whenever I create a new blog.
Even after five years of blogging, I do still find it a little bit tricky to use, it is a great tool for measuring page views and other metrics.
Google Analytics is considered the industry standard so if you’re planning on working with brands based on your traffic, you’ll want to get this installed ASAP.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool and its free version is perfect if you’re not ready to invest in a paid tool yet.
Buffer is really easy to use with a simple interface where you can upload blog posts or graphics ready to be scheduled to social media.
Lyrical Host
No blogging tool as such, but if you want to take your blog to the next level then you’ll need a really good hosting plan. Lyrical Host is my host of choice as they provide an excellent, fully managed service.
This means they’ll help if anything happens to your blogs such as malware or a virus or anything else you’re having issues with from a tech perspective.
A few other reasons I love Lyrical Host:
- Huge customer resource centre which includes social media templates, checklists, workbooks and more.
- They plant trees on your behalf annually to offset the carbon footprint of your website.
- Free SSL Certificate (other companies charge for this)
- No price increase on renewal.
- Designed to go viral, so if a post blows up, they won’t slow your site down.
- Amazing Facebook community.
Packages with Lyrical Host start from £13.99 a month. While this may seem expensive compared to places like GoDaddy and Sitegroud, these companies almost always hit you with a huge price hike come renewal time. You can use my code BLOGGINGBEAUTIFUL to get 10% off your hosting plan.
What did you think of my best tools for bloggers? Is there anything you would add to this list?
