10 Free Online Tools to Make Your Blogging Life Easier
Launching your blog was undoubtedly one of the highlights of your life so far. A little corner of the internet that’s all yours! The possibilities of your blog are endless. Followers, fame, and the thought of helping and entertaining people all over the world. You could barely sleep at night with all your ideas that were bursting at the seams to get out.
Fast forward to now.
Has your blog turned into a beast that devours every spare minute you have? Are you running out of time to do important things like eating and walking the dog because you have just one…two…five…ten more things to do before you go to bed?
Reclaim some of your valuable time!
These 10 free online tools to make your blogging life easier:
Streak – Are people even reading your pitches? This is an app that integrates with Gmail and has a lot of functions for lead generation and client management, but its best feature is simply that you can tell if and when your emails have been opened by the recipient. Streak takes all your guesswork away so you can schedule follow-up emails if needed.
Keyword Finder – speed up your SEO results with this user friendly tool. Keyword Finder lets you easily find keywords for your blog posts and lets you know which websites are in competition for each keyword, how difficult it is to rank for that keyword, and alternative words that will be easier to get optimized for in search results.
BuzzSumo – once you have your keywords selected, this tool enables you to search on your chosen words and it will generate a list of the most shared content across the web in relation to those words. With this knowledge, you can create better versions of already popular content to boost your own blog SEO.
HubSpot blog idea generator – do you spend too much time trying to think up topics for your blog? This generator will give you ideas no matter how niche your industry is. Simply type in 3 nouns and let it go to work. (Resist the temptation to type rude words in. You’ll get even less work done because you’ll be laughing too hard!).
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – if you want your articles to get found online, headline optimization is crucial. This analyzer lets you type in all your ideas and tells you how your blog title rates for SEO, with tips for improvements until your headline gets the green light.
Hemingway – an online writing and editing tool that helps you tighten up your copy. It gives you real-time tips for improvements as you write, a word count, and a readability score so that you know your content will be easy for readers to digest.
Grammarly – this is a popular spelling and grammar checking app that you can install on your Chrome or Firefox browser. It will keep an eye on everything you write across the web, including your emails and social media. It also integrates into MS Word so you can be sure everything you write is optimized and free of awkward typos.
Hunter email address finder – this incredibly handy app will help you find the email address of anybody connected to a domain URL. If you use the Chrome extension you can navigate to a web page, click the app icon and it will pop up a list of email addresses at that domain. If you’re looking for somebody specific at the business, type in their name and it will give you the best guess at their email if it can’t be located directly. This will save you valuable time searching all over the place for contact details of editors and website owners. It feels a little stalkerish, but I trust you will only use your new power for good!
Pocket – if you’re a blogger, you probably spend a lot of time reading other blogs and websites for information and ideas. Pocket is an app that saves web page content with a single click and formats it for easy reading so you can look at it later, even when you’re offline. It integrates with Chrome, Firefox and Twitter so you can save all those interesting reads from wherever you are.
Trello – getting organized is the key to supercharging your productivity. Trello lets you create ‘boards’ to tailor your workflow and keep you on track. Start boards for raw ideas, drafts, pitches or invoicing depending on your needs. Your boards can also be shared and worked on collaboratively with partners and editors.
If you find yourself struggling with your productivity, give some of these free tools a try or have a search for tools online that specifically address your needs.
You’ll most likely find there are free blogging tools that have the potential to streamline every imaginable aspect of your blogging life. What free online tools do you use to manage your time and your blog?
Rachael Pilcher is a copywriter and blogger who writes about all things related to business and marketing. In her spare time, she enjoys hanging out with her pug, Dexter, eating nachos, and traveling. Find her online: www.thecopybee.com.
Image: blackzheep/Shutterstock.com
