Every writer has their own methods and preferred processes to produce a piece of work. Some writers prefer a pen and paper, others like to sit at a typewriter and get their thoughts down on paper, while still others prefer to simply jot down notes in their phone or directly type out their thoughts on a laptop.
There are also those who choose to use specific tools when writing–those who may not have the best spelling or grammar skills will often turn to online writing services like Grammarly, which will help correct spelling mistakes, offer synonyms for commonly misused words, and point out grammatical errors. There are also programs such as ProWritingAid that use artificial intelligence to cut down on time spent editing, ensuring that your content is polished before it is published.
Some writers find using tools such as these helpful–but for others it can be distracting or just too much clutter!
Blog Content Writing Tools
1. Sumo
Sumo is one of the sweetest free blogging tools out there. It allows you to add social sharing buttons, email capture forms, and various analytics to your blog. There’s also a paid version that gives you access to more advanced features, like a/b split testing and more intricate templates.
Sumo is one of my all-time favorite blogging tools because it allows you a lot of versatility and power, even at the free level.
For example, Nate Desmond increased his email list by 1000% virtually overnight using Sumo. He’s not alone; Robbie Richards collected 4,635 emails with the tool. How would you like to see the same results?
How to get the most out of Sumo
While installing the Sumo app is incredibly simple, just putting it on your site isn’t enough to start collecting emails like a machine. Here are a few tips to take full advantage of Sumo’s tools.
- Follow Sumo’s guide to getting started with list builder.
- Optimize your popups for conversions.
- Offer multiple ways to sign up; Welcome mats, exit-intent popups, inline content upgrades, etc.
- Don’t let those new emails go to waste – make sure you’re sending them something every week or two.
You might also like these WordPress marketing tools.
2. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is like a swiss knife of digital marketing. You can design a personalized email template using their advanced email options. Furthermore, you can use it for custom SMS marketing and live chat. Also, use heat-maps, A/B testing and real time statistics to create a high converting email copy.
We’d particularly recommend it for eCommerce, since Sendinblue comes with additional features such as the Facebook ads module, re-targeting and landing page creation. We’ve been using Sendinblue ourselves, so we really have first-hand experience as to its abilities. All these features are the head reasons for why we added it to our list of blogging tools.
How to get the most out of Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a great digital marketing software and a powerful email marketing tool. Sign up for free on their platform and enter the details about your site for a custom experience. You can use it for word-of-mouth marketing to retain your customers. Create and send personalized emails to your loyal customer base. For instance, create personalized coupons for returning customers. Further, A/B test your templates to get the best out of your marketing campaign.
3. Canva
Canva is probably the best tool on the web for creating custom images that you can then use either on social media or as part of your blog posts. Think, featured images, in-content images, etc. Basically, anything to make your blog more visually appealing.
What I like about Canva is the quality of templates that they offer. One of the most important factors to succeeding with blogging and social media is having great images that please the eye.
How to get the most out of Canva
One of my favorite kinds of images to share is the quote overlay. This is where you take an image and add one of your favorite quotes to it. According to Twitter’s own data, tweets with quotes got 19% more retweets than those without.
Another great use of Canva is creating custom banners for your blog posts. These could come in the form of your featured images, section headings, or images to explain a key point.
4. Grammarly
Grammarly is probably my favorite blogging tool on this whole list. It helps you ensure proper grammar and spelling in your articles automatically! Great writing is a key to executing your blog content strategy.
How to get the most out of Grammarly
Install the Grammarly browser extension (it’s free!). While it’s not compatible with everything (like Google Suite), it does work with WordPress. Now you can type right into your WordPress content manager and it will underline incorrect words or phrases.
You can also type directly into the Grammarly app. This makes it easy to click on the correction without interrupting your flow.
5. Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is easily one of the most important pieces of blogging or website management. One of the best blogging tools for SEO is Yoast SEO, which makes sure you cover all the SEO basics and all your pages and posts are properly optimized.
What I like about Yoast is its extreme simplicity of use. All you have to do is follow their instructions after you’ve created a page or written a post and you’ll ensure basic SEO on every page.
How to get the most out of Yoast SEO
Once you’ve installed the plugin, simply write your pages and posts as you normally would. Once you’re done, scroll down to see Yoast’s analysis of your page. Fix anything in red or orange until you hit “good” SEO, or a green “Y” next to your publish button.
Note: You don’t need to have green lights across the board. While Yoast gives you a good idea of what you need, SEO isn’t an exact science. Sometimes you want “stop words” in your keyword or slug. Sometimes you can’t put a keyword on a page enough times to satisfy Yoast without sounding robotic. That’s OK – it won’t affect your rankings by much. Use it as a guideline, not as the law.
Also, another cool thing Yoast does that most people don’t realize is allowing you to change the social sharing information of any page or post. You can create a social-friendly image and copy to display instead of the default featured image and meta description.
Pro Tip: Don’t just rely on Yoast blogging tools to fix everything. Make sure you set up your SEO settings properly!
blogging tools for beginners
1) Grammarly: Grammer checker
As the name suggests, this Grammar checker tool that lets you check the grammatical errors in your copy.
Grammarly is available as a free chrome add-on. For advanced features, you can switch to Grammarly pro version.
It helps you improvise your writing by suggesting corrections wherever necessary. When you are a blogger writing your heart out, you need not care about Grammar with Grammarly installed.
The main functions of Grammarly are:
- Grammar checking
- Suggests proper punctuations
- Error-free writing
- Suggest word substitutes for quality writing
Grammarly Chrome add-on works with almost all the input areas of your browsers. However, the among many awesome features, there’s just one downside to it. If you plan on writing your article with Google Docs, Grammarly doesn’t work with that.
But for your WordPress blog, you can use the WordPress editor instead. It gives you all the editing options as well as lets you draft the article if you are not writing for publishing purpose.
Grammarly is a free, user-friendly and very useful writing tool for bloggers. It helps you proof-read quickly and create a reader-friendly article.
2) Ginger
Ginger is similar to the Grammarly tool, it detects Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in your article. This tool is too available as a Google Chrome addon.
This tool too has a premium version where you can buy the premium product with more features. The Gingerly tool also helps you get rid of repetitive words in your statements.
It provides you insights on what synonym of the word can help make the statement more effective by reducing word redundancy. The built-in dictionary constantly checks for the statement’s validity and suggests corrections wherever required.
Besides, Ginger can also help you with translation in over 40 languages. Ginger jas three premium plans for those who want advanced features. You can buy it at $29.96/month, there’s a Quarterly plan at $41.97 the best one at $89.88/year.
3) Hemingwayapp
Hemingway is one of my favorite editing tools. While Ginger or Grammarly checks grammar for your article, Hemingway is determined to help you check on the readability.
Hemmingway editor is free, and you can access it at hemingwayapp.com
You can just open the web interface and start writing there. The blog readers will certainly enjoy being on your site when you deliver your message in a swift, uncomplicated method.
The Hemingway editor suggests easier alternatives for difficult words and highlights the statements that are difficult to read. The most difficult statements are highlighted so that you can try to make them easier. You can either break the statement or shorten it.
It also alarms you about the use of passive statements, because active statements are suggested for better readability. Also, it highlights adverbs, so you can avoid it wherever possible. All these features are available with the web interface of the Hemingway app.
However, with the Hemingway app, you cannot save your work. That feature is available in the desktop version of the hemming way app.
This premium version runs as a desktop software, available at $19.99.
4) Slick Write
Slick write is also an online editor for proofreading your article. You can either use the editor to write your article using the Slick Write web editor or upload your written article into the editor.
Unlike Hemingway app, the slick write lets you save your work, that will be saved as a text document. Moreover, the statistics section of this editor shows you the graphical representation of your text article.
Besides, there is also a feature to combat your writer’s block with the word association feature. You can just enter the word and will show the association options to choose from.
The Slick write is a feature-rich tool for enhanced writing. You can use their Chrome and firefox addons to easily submit your work to slick write.
5) Paperrater
PaperRater is a tool for spelling check, grammar check, and plagiarism detection.The scoring system can help you self-evaluate the readability of your article. This editor lets you upload your pre-written copies in form of word documents, or notepad or Wordpad files.PaperRater is free and for advanced features, you can also go for a premium version. One of the best things about PaperRater is that it is extremely fast. It helps you find the mistakes in your writing and correct it real time with the available suggestions.There is also a Vocabulary builder option for those who are interested to use different synonyms of a word. You can either use the free web interface of PaperRater or choose their premium plans of $7.48, monthly or $47.70 annually.
6) Google Analytics
Once your blog is live, you would like to know if it is getting any views or not. Google Analytics can help you find out, what kind of traffic your site is getting.
Google Analytics is a comprehensive analytic tool that comes with many advanced tools to track traffic and draw insights. However, for beginners, it can help with the following features.
Shows best and poorly performing pages
With the help of Google Analytics, you can easily find the best and the worst performing pages of your website. This report can help you identify the poor pages that need modification.
Moreover, you can also evaluate the page style and patterns among the pages with maximum traffic and apply the same strategies you used on those pages on the poorly performing pages.
Shows the total number of visits for a duration
This shows the actual picture of how your website is performing and how many people are actually reading your blogs. Google Analytics gives you precise reports on the total number of hits for each individual page for the specified duration.
Amazing comparison features
Google Analytics also lets you compare the performance of your site during two different periods. For example, you can compare the performance of the current week with the week at the beginning of the year. Tracking progress and the success of your campaigns get easier with this feature.
Shows you insights on demographics
Know your audience with the Google Analytics Demographics reports. When you know your audience & know their interests, you can write exactly what they would love to read.
Other high-end features for advanced reports about the traffic
The ones mentioned above were some of the very basic features of Google Analytics. Besides them, there are many advanced features that you can use like events tracking for your special marketing campaigns, campaign management, etc.
Google Analytics is free and easy to use the tool. Once you start using it and start finding out the weak as well a powerful factors about your blog, you can strategize and plan your path ahead easily.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines