Bloggers have a lot on their plate! The right tools can make your job way easier and help you reach your goals. Many tools might seem helpful at first, but end up being more of a time-suck than a value-add. Good tools should save you time and brainpower — not add to your workload.
That being said, there are four categories of tools all bloggers should explore to advance their efforts. After nearly a decade of blogging, I’ve compiled a few of my favorites from each category below.
Platforms to Manage Your Blog Strategy
I’ve always been partial to planning out my blog schedule on a paper calendar, but that’s not conducive to making changes or collaborating with a team.
ClickUp for Planning, Organizing, and Collaborating
ClickUp is one of the most powerful — and affordable — project management tools you’ll find. While the platform does have a bit of a learning curve, you’ll find it’s well worth it. ClickUp lets you:
- Plan your blog calendar
- Collaborate on content with team members
- Track the status of content
- Organize all blog assets
Evernote for Brainstorming & On-the-go Notes
Apple users may prefer the native Notes app, but I’ve found Evernote makes it easier to organize and search my notes later. For this reason, I keep it on my phone and laptop to store notes, draft articles, and strategize. My favorite Evernote features include:
- Multiple notebooks to organize by project
- Categories to tag notes by topic
- Ready-to-use templates
- Access from multiple devices
Blog Writing & Editing Tools
One of the hardest things about blogging is writing an article when you’re starting from scratch. These tools make it easier to get started and edit your content after writing.
SEMRush for Keyword Research & Topic Planning
Instead of writing from scratch, use SEMRush to build out a content outline based on relevant keywords. Use SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool to find key terms to include in your article based on your topic idea. Find keywords that are relevant to your topic, with a high search volume and organize them into sections. From there, it will be easier to build out your blog, and your content will be poised to rank well on Google search results.
Google Docs for Composing
Google Docs is perfect for writing your blogs. There are plenty of formatting options, but not too many to make it overwhelming. I like to write with _Print layout _mode off, as I find the page breaks distracting. If I have questions to revisit later or want to remember to add a link, it’s easy to use comments to make notes in the doc.
If you’ve ever closed Word without saving, you’ll understand why this is so important: Google Docs auto-save while you’re connected to the internet. I also love the editing history feature which makes it easy to see all document changes and restore past versions. Make sure to also turn on the offline work mode to ensure you can continue working on your piece even when the internet disconnects.
Grammarly for Editing
Unfortunately, most word processing programs still struggle to flag the wrong usage of _there. _Even with reading and re-reading your draft a few times over, there are bound to be a few errors that slip through. Tools like Grammarly can spot all those errors and recommend fixes.
If you pay for the premium version of Grammarly, it takes editing further than basic spelling and grammar to consider tone, concision, formality, and more.
Best Tools for Promoting Your Blogs
Once you’ve written your article, the work is just beginning. Now, you need to drive traffic. These tools make it easier to create and promote your articles to engage readers.
Missinglettr Drip Campaigns & Social Media Scheduler
Missinglettr’s Drip Campaign tool automatically develops a series of promotional posts for each new article you post. The campaign will include post copy, imagery, and hashtags — all you need to do is hit approve, but you’re free to edit the posts if you’d like. After approval, Missinglettr will schedule the campaign to publish over your selected timeframe — typically one year. Want to know more about Missinglettr? You can read a comprehensive Missinglettr product review here.
Missinglettr Curate for Content Distribution
Having others in the industry share your blog content can be a great way to reach a new audience, but it can be difficult to encourage this. With Missinglettr Curate, you can develop a promotional post for your article and add it to the Curate library. From there, users can find your post by category and easily add it to their social media queue.
Tools to Analyze Your Blog Performance
Without analyzing your blog performance, it’s hard to know whether your efforts are impactful or not. While some blog publishing platforms have minimal analytics reporting, it’s best to use a few additional tools to monitor your results.
Google Analytics for Site Traffic
Google Analytics must be installed within the code of your website but provides in-depth analytics of your site activity. The platform makes it easy to see how many people view your website, when, and where they visited from.
SEMRush for Google Rankings
Using SEMRush to find target keywords is just the first half of the equation. After publication, you should monitor your domain to find out what keywords you’re ranking for and what page you’re on. If it’s been a few months and your article is still on the second or third page of Google, take some time to revisit and update the content — you might be able to land a spot on the first page.
Missinglettr Analytics for Promotional Results
Missinglettr Analytics makes it easy to monitor how your campaigns are performing, where clicks are coming from, and when your audience is most active. Use Missinglettr to find out which posts your audience responds best to, when they’re online, and more.
Missinglettr has many tools to make blog management and promotion easier than ever. Give it a spin for free today to see how much time you could save.
