Extremely useful Blogging tools for Writing, SEO and Marketing

Do you wish to start your blog but are unsure of where to begin?

Most likely you have sorted a list of what and how to write using MS Word. But do you know that there are so many writing and blogging tools out there that will not only help you in writing but would also guide you to make it better?

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Every blogger has different needs, a place where they can capture their ideas, with expansive formatting methods, and impactful content. Moreover, to rank the blog on top and to ensure that it reaches maximum readers, you need more than just a writing pad.

That is why we have listed down some of the best and must-have writing software so that you can craft better blogs, boost your SEO ranking, and grow your community.

Must-have Blogging tools for every blogger.

Evernote

Ideas never strike wholly; they come in fractions and mostly at unusual times. It becomes hard to note them down every time on your notebook or laptop. This is when Evernote helps you out.

This top-rated writing tool works in many ways, for users from all fields. Available as a desktop app (Mac and Windows), as a mobile app (both iOS and Android), and also available online, Evernote helps writers to store their ideas as notes or even make notebooks to remember everything.

Make multiple notebooks and search through them to find the specific note. This “search” function is used best when you’re an active note-taker, like in a class.

Moreover, it comes for free. However, you’ll have to upgrade to premium to unlock more features.

Price: Free/ $2.54 per month premium plan.

Google Docs

Google Docs is one of the top-grossing writing applications and is chosen by many bloggers, writers, marketers, and even students.

Why? The main advantage, it comes with the users are allowed to invite team members or guests to collaborate and edit documents in real-time. You can also add suggestions, and accept or reject them. The integration of Google Docs with Gmail also makes it easy to share updates via email with others.

The best part is that it works online, so whatever changes you make in your document get automatically saved to your Google Drive. Plus, you get templates and powerful add-ons, such as speech recognition and label creation, to enhance your experience.

Price: Free

Trello

Trello has been in the good books of professional bloggers since the very beginning. This web-based project management solution enhances the user experience by providing a digital dashboard where they can create, organize, and prioritize their tasks or projects.

The card system is similar to a Japanese billboard containing multiple lists. Here, the users can interact and collaborate on projects, and perform various functions like adding comments, links, and media to the project cards.

You can add your ideas to these lists, and even categorize them like ideas, to-do things, editing, published, and so on. Once the idea moves past one stage, you can move it to another list by the simple drag-and-drop method.

Trello allows you to integrate with other apps, easing out the process of switching between apps. It comes as a mobile application for iOS and Android.

Price: Free.

Grammarly

You might already know about Grammarly, your go-to spell checker. Why it is so popular over other spell checkers is because it is one step ahead; it detects awkward phrasing, poor word usage, and run-on sentences.

You can use Grammarly in many forms:

• As a browser extension,
• As an online tool,
• As a mobile keyboard app,
• As a desktop app, or
• As an add-in for MS Word

As a browser extension, Grammarly proofreads your text automatically for any grammatical, contextual, and vocabulary mistakes and offers on-page solutions.

As a separate application, it allows you to type or copy-paste your content to see a list of errors. That way, Grammarly not only checks your grammar but also suggests proper punctuation and word substitutes for quality writing.

The best thing is that you can now integrate it with Google Docs, although it is a Beta version. Although it is free, you get extended features, like Plagiarism Checker, when you upgrade to its premium plan.

Price: Free/ Premium plan starts at $11.66 per month.

Hemingway App

With its pleasing user interface, Hemingway is another one of the top-grossing writing and editing tools. While Grammarly checks grammar and plagiarism for your content, Hemingway assists you with its readability.

Too lengthy and complex words make it tough for the reader to understand what you’re saying and he might end up exiting your blog. Here, Hemingway helps you out by pointing out which words or letters you need to remove or change to make it readable according to the Grades.

Hemingway does their job very efficiently by highlighting statements high on complexity. So, you can either break it into two sentences or edit it to make it short. Moreover, it also mentions the number of passive sentences used in the content, along with adverbs with different colors on its web interface.

To give your readers easy-to-digest stuff, you can either open the web interface and start writing there, or you can install the Hemingway app. However, you can save your work on the desktop version only.

Hemingway comes for free, but with its premium version, you can get advanced features like offline use and can post your content directly into a CMS.

Price: Free / Premium plan comes at a one-time fee of $19.99.

Yoast SEO

One of the main concerns while working on a blog is to make it SEO-friendly, which is where Yoast SEO comes in handy. It ensures that your blogs are SEO optimized and covers all the SEO basics.

With Yoast, you can set the keywords for your post, and manage slug, amongst other features. Additionally, it also gives reports on the readability of the blog post.

This writing tool is available as a WordPress Plugin and you can use it as a guideline to optimize your page.

You can simply start by installing the plugin, and writing the content which you have planned. Next, you will see Yoast’s analysis of your content at the bottom of your page. It highlights the content that needs to be fixed in red or orange color. Keep editing until you hit “good” SEO.

Moreover, you can create a social-friendly image for your blog post and copy it to display to get more traction and make it look interesting.

Price: Free/ Premium starts at $89 for one website.

Google Keyword Planner

How would you ensure that your target audience finds your content? For this, keyword research is necessary, where Google’s Keyword Planner enters the scene.

Boosting your organic search traffic becomes easy with this tool as it forms keyword ideas, shows your historical statistics, along with generating traffic forecasts.

The “Find keywords” option gives you keyword ideas that make it easier for interested people to reach your blog. Hence, when you’ll look up in this tool, many keyword suggestions will pop up, along with:

• Avg. monthly searches
• Competition
• Top of-page bid (low range)
• Top of-page bid (high range)

And you can even look up to 10 seed phrases or keywords instead of just a single word.

Another option is “volume and forecasts” where you get the details of your keywords. Like with “forecasts,” you can see how your keywords might perform in the future. And with “Historical Metrics” you can see search volumes for 12 months, meaning how frequently your keyword is being searched for the last 12 months.

Overall, it shows the performance of the keywords to you, so you can choose which one to go with.

Price: Free.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo has the same working motives as the keyword planner by Google. It analyzes and explores hundreds of millions of keywords, to give a comprehensive report on the most shared content related to that keyword.

But this tool is a bit unique too, as it performs multiple functions which explore the types of content that get maximum traction, and which you should go for.

The content discovery feature lets you explore infinite topics, trends, and forums to get inspired for your blog. It shows in trend and what might soon go out of trend. Similarly, the content research option scans the internet for the best content so that you get better insights.

Moreover, it helps in finding truly influential businesspersons for you, including authors, creators, artists, etc. who have engaged audiences and a strong social media presence. With the monitoring feature, you can track the mentions, trends, and updates, along with keeping track of the industry competitors.

Price: The basic plan starts at $99 per month.

Stock Images

For bloggers who like to include visual content in their blogs, like intuitive images to enhance their readability, stock images are of utmost importance.

Imagine a house with no picture frames or empty walls; it’s still a house, but adding some art on the walls would make it appear attractive and appealing. Similarly, this tool accessorizes your blogs to make them easy to understand for the readers.

Various bloggers from different niches, like creative arts, science and technology, food and cooking, and even religious ones, add images, gifs, screenshots, or informative videos to their blogs. That way, it might seem that stock images are not necessary to have, but they are surely something that would bind the readers to your page.

Many websites offer stock images that you can download and use for your blog, without any issues of attribution, like Pixabay, Unsplash.com, Pexels, Tookapic, etc. There are also premium stock photo sites like Shutterstock if you want exclusive images for your blogs.

Canva

For those who believe in creating their images instead of downloading them from other sites, Canva is the right place.

This tool is used when, despite having ideas in mind, you can’t create your blog banner or the images that you want to incorporate.

Canva offers high-quality templates to create jaw-dropping visuals for your website. Its wide range of features includes a drag-and-drop feature, overlay, create custom banners among others.

Choose any template you like, add the quotes or captions on it through the overlay feature, or create custom banners in any form, either featured images, section headings, etc.

For beginners or someone who wants to explore more ideas and trends, Canva also uploads interactive tutorials on their website.

Price: Free.

Buffer

Being passionate about blogging and uploading meaningful content on social media is surely a good practice, but it backfires when it goes out of hand and becomes unmanageable.

This is when you need Buffer in your life, which schedules and publishes the posts on your social media accounts and helps you reach a wider audience at the right time and occasion.

Moreover, you can integrate various accounts of this tool, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others, so that it knows when and where to post the content. It also has a powerful analytics system that sorts down your content according to its performance and you can discover trending topics in your mentions.

Above that, once you have published your post, you can also promote it and set up a schedule with Buffer with the help of different headlines, tags, and images so that your article is visible every time it is on the platform.

Price: Free / Pro plan starts at $15 per month.

Google Analytics

Probably the most important of the blogging tools we have mentioned yet is Google Analytics, as it stays right by your side once you start your blogging journey.

With the invaluable features it offers, Google Analytics helps you to understand anything and everything about your blog. What are your most popular articles, when did those articles perform the best (which days), where is your traffic coming the most from (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), and on which devices do your articles get to read the most (laptop, or mobile, etc.), and so on?

Additionally, you can even dive deeper and find out the demographic data about your visitors, their interests, what they look up the most, etc., and so on.

This writing tool is like the one-stop-shop of all applications and software, where you can learn about your site’s performance and how to make it better, where to concentrate, etc., and all of this for free!

Price: Free.

Thrive Leads

Once you have written your content and published it. Now is the time for promotion, but how?

The best way is to promote your blog or website through email; the readers are more likely to open your mail and read what you have sent them, instead of opening your tweets or reading your Instagram captions. Hence, you should start collecting the email addresses of your readers.

Now Thrive Leads enters the scene where it creates simple and easy forms on your blog to collect email subscribers.

It forms easy to look at and register email forms for your website, which can look like a simple ribbon across the top of the site, or even cover your whole page to ask for a subscription. Secondly, whether a professional blogger or a beginner in the industry, everyone having an online business requires an email list to sell their services or products to the clients, and email is the best way to do that.

Price: Free.

MailChimp

Thrive Leads works best when used with MailChimp to enhance your emails and make them look appealing.

Different emails work in different ways, and those with interesting subjects and attractive themes work better. This is why MailChimp offers a great platform to create and send emails to your growing database very easily.

Additionally, you can set up welcome emails for your new subscribers and introduce them to your website and content. Also, set up an RSS-to-email campaign so that whenever you post something on your website, your subscribers automatically get emailed or updated about it.

MailChimp comes with pre-built, customizable email automation so that you can connect with your subscribers instantly and easily. You can also integrate it with other tools like Canva and WordPress.

Price: Free/ Paid starts at $304.57 per month.

Wrapping Up

Most bloggers who are starting new use WordPress to set up their blogs, which is a good choice. But to move forward, you need the right writing tools to ensure that you always remember your ideas and work on them to drive maximum readers to your blog.

Our list of the best blogging tools that a blogger must have suggests the best ones used by professionals of the industry.

You’re free to choose your blogging tools from this list or from somewhere else. We suggest you explore and try out the apps or software before purchasing them, to see your pace and which ones fit your workflow and writing style.

Image source: Freepik Premium