Blog writing is a skill that can be learned and mastered. There are many tools available to help you write the best blog posts possible.
The following are some of the best free blog writing tools:
Grammarly – Grammarly is one of the most popular grammar checkers out there. It is able to detect errors in your writing and provide suggestions for how you can improve it. You can download it as an extension for Chrome or Firefox or as a standalone app for Windows and macOS.
Hemingway Editor – This tool helps you improve your writing by highlighting passive sentences, adverbs, and long paragraphs so that you can see what needs to be changed in order for your writing to be more engaging and concise.
Free Blog Writing Tools
Wondering what the best blogging tools are for WordPress websites and blogs? You’ve come to the right place! In this article, we’ll give you just that – ten of the best blogging tools available on the web to help you craft better blog posts, boost your traffic, rank on Google, and more.
10 insanely useful #blogging #tools for writing, SEO, marketing, content and more
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Let’s begin:
Ten of the best blogging tools for WordPress websites and blogs
- 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.
Top blogging tools #1: Sumo
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.
- Sendinblue
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
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.
- 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.
Canva
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.
- 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.
Blogging Tool #3: Grammarly
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.
- 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.
Blogging Tool #4: Yoast SEO
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.
Yoast proper SEO
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.
Yoast social sharing options
Pro Tip: Don’t just rely on Yoast blogging tools to fix everything. Make sure you set up your SEO settings properly!
- Ahrefs
While we’re on the topic of SEO, I wanted to mention Ahrefs. Ahrefs is a tool that allows you to do keyword research to ensure you’re targeting the best keywords with the highest traffic and lowest difficulty to rank for.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
While this tool isn’t free or cheap, they do offer a free two-week trial. Alternatively, you can use their competitors like Moz or SEMrush (who also have free trials, hint hint). Whichever one you choose, if you’re serious about ranking on Google, I highly recommend a keyword research tool. Without them, you only have access to Google Keyword Planner, which doesn’t really help you find the right keywords.
How to get the most out of Ahrefs
Ahrefs has many uses, including keyword research, competitor analysis, content explorer (which shows what’s getting the most shares for any topic), and backlink tracking. This is a pretty comprehensive tool, so I can’t school you in everything it does in just a few paragraphs.
I highly recommend you read through this Ahrefs guide. It’s very thorough and helped me learn a lot about the tool when I was first starting.
Pro Tip: One of the quickest and easiest ways I’ve found to discover high volume, low competition keywords is by plugging your competitor’s sites into the site explorer. Then, navigate to the “organic keywords” tab under “organic search” on the left-hand side. Finally, filter to positions with a max of 20 and keyword difficulty with a max of 10 or 15 and shift through to find the gold.
Ahrefs secret keyword finder
- Revive Old Post
Revive Old Post is a nifty tool that makes sharing your posts easy and automatic. It integrates directly with your WordPress posts and randomly picks a post from your archive to be shared at intervals you choose. Here’s how it works:
While the tool isn’t as cheap as some others on this list, it reduces the amount of time you need to spend remembering to share old posts or even think about social media. If you’re like many other blog and business owners who don’t like taking the time to constantly update their social feeds, this is a great tool for you.
How to get the most out of Revive Old Post
If you don’t want to invest in the premium version, there’s also a free edition of Revive Old Post. It works with Facebook and Twitter, which probably are the main networks you’re interested in anyway.
Revive Old Posts – Social Media Auto Post and Scheduling PluginRevive Old Posts – Social Media Auto Post and Scheduling Plugin
Author(s): revive.social
Current Version: 9.0.8
Last Updated: April 22, 2022
tweet-old-post.zip
80%
Ratings
30,000+
Installs
WP 3.5+
Requires
When configuring the plugin, the recommended getting-started setup is to have it share posts that have the minimum age of 30 days. That way, you can actually “revive” them back from the archives (like the name of the plugin suggests). You can also exclude your pages and focus on your blog posts primarily. You probably don’t want to be sharing your “about” page all too often, right?
Revive Old Post
- My Stock Photos
Finding high-quality, free to use images is a major battle every blog writer fights. Great imagery is a crucial piece of a great blog article. The next entry on our list of the best blogging tools – My Stock Photos – helps you do just that – find amazing, high-quality stock images. Free of charge.
My Stock Photos
You really can’t beat free. Just don’t go overboard on adding tons of random pictures to your posts now that you have access to them. Make sure they’re all relevant and add value.
How to get the most out of My Stock Photos
While the standalone images can make great featured images and text breakers, the real magic happens when you use these pictures in combination with the other blogging tools on this list. For example, you can upload them to Canva to use as the background and overlay text on them.
- Design Hill
The other image tools on this list had to do with finding and creating your own images. While free is definitely for me, sometimes taking on these projects yourself simply doesn’t cut it. Maybe you don’t have the time or maybe you don’t have the skill. Either way, Design Hill is a graphic creator marketplace where you can hold contests to have all kinds of images created for you.
Design Hill
I used Design Hill for my own logo design. I received dozens of designs to choose from. While some of them were cheesy stock designs that I could have made myself, others were really great. I ended up choosing this one:
All Natural Oasis
How to get the most out of Design Hill
While overall I was pleased with the tool, there are a few things I realized. Namely, the site is less than intuitive. Maybe I was just anxious to start and didn’t feel like reading the instructions, but hey, who wants to listen to instructions?
When starting your design, here are a few pointers:
Try to give the designers a good idea of what you want. Find and upload other designs you like and want to be similar to.
If you sort of like a design, but it’s not perfect, give the designer some feedback. They’re always willing to change things and work with you.
Don’t be afraid to eliminate designs you don’t like, and even designers if you feel they’re not working for you.
Rate some of the designs so people can understand better what you’re looking for.
For an alternative solution – something very similar to Design Hill – you can also check out 99designs. A bit more pricey most of the time, but it’s actually home to a much bigger design community than Design Hill, and they’ve been on the market for a long time.
- Live chat
While not the most obvious choice for a blog, having live chat capabilities can help you better understand your readers. You can ask them what they’d like to read about, get their feedback on your writing, and get an understanding of their biggest pain points.
There’s a handful of tools that we like when it comes to live chat. Each of them slightly different, so based on your needs, some might be better for you than the others. You can see them all here. And if you don’t have the time to read that, you’re probably going to be more than satisfied with Zendesk Chat:
Zendesk ChatZendesk Chat
Author(s): Zendesk
Current Version: 1.4.18
Last Updated: August 20, 2020
zopim-live-chat.zip
80%
Ratings
40,000+
Installs
WP 3.1+
Requires
How to get the most out of live chat
One of my favorite ways of using live chat is to collect survey results. You can create an automatic message that goes out to all your website visitors asking them to answer a question or fill out a survey.
You can create the survey with a tool like TypeForm. The shorter the survey, the better your results will be. My best response came from a two-question survey, which was really just one multiple choice question and an optional free text entry asking for any commentary.
Your take?
The blogging tools on this list have helped me grow my email list, find and rank for awesome keywords, and build a deeper connection with my blog audience. Plus, most of them are free or affordable.
best software for writing blog posts
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create.
So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses.
Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to build your blogposts, I’ve found a huge number of blogging tools that help with everything from coming up with ideas to spread the content far and wide.
Do you have a favorite blogging tool? Read on to see if it’s included here in the list, and drop a note in the comments with which ones you love.
blogging tools
The Huge List of 39 Blogging Tools
Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas
- Quora
The crowdsourced answer website can help lead you to the types of questions that real people are asking, questions that you can answer in-depth with a blogpost. Search for your keyword, and follow topics related to your blog’s focus.
quora topic
- BuzzSumo
Enter a topic or a URL into the BuzzSumo search box, and you’ll get a wealth of information on the content that performs best for social media sharing. BuzzSumo can be super useful for fleshing out an existing idea to find the perfect angle or in taking a broad look at the content that does well (and the blogs who do it best) in your niche.
- Quick Sprout
Enter a URL into Quick Sprout, and you get an analysis of the site’s performance and content. The “Social Media” tab shows you which posts from the site have been home runs, and you can take inspiration from the highlights on the list.
- Portent Title Maker
Enter a subject into the Portent tool, and you’ll get a sample blogpost title, complete with helpful and witty breakdowns of why the title might make for a good read. Refresh as many times as you’d like for new ideas.
portent title maker
- Blog Topics Generator
HubSpot’s title maker works similarly to Portent’s. With the HubSpot tool, you can enter three keywords, and HubSpot will give you five titles—a week’s worth of content—to work with.
hubspot blog post generator
- Twitter trending topics
The trending topics section on your Twitter homepage can be a super spot for grabbing ideas from the latest news. You can tailor your trending topics to go uber-local (the big cities near and around you) or even receive fully tailored tweets that take into account your location and those you follow. (Click the “Change” link at the top of the Trends section on your Twitter homepage.)
- LinkedIn Pulse
Similar to Twitter’s trending topics, LinkedIn Pulse pulls content from the channels you follow on LinkedIn and the people in your LinkedIn network.
For additional trending topics on social media, you can check out Facebook’s Trending section and Google+’s What’s Hot page.
Tools to organize your ideas
- Trello
We like to add all our blogpost ideas into Trello, turning each idea into a card that we can spec out with notes and move from list to list with a simple drag-and-drop.
- Evernote
For super fast idea collecting, you can drop everything into Evernote—notes, snippets, photos, webpages, and more. The tagging system in Evernote is incredibly robust, so you can keep your ideas with a simple tag in a number of cool ways—by topic, by idea stage, and more.
- Google Calendar
Calendar tools like Google Calendar can be repurposed as editorial calendars. If publishing one post per day, you can save your ideas as all-day events and move them around the calendar as needed. If you plan on scheduling multiple posts, add a calendar event to the specific publish time. Zoom in and out to see what you’ve got planned for a given day, week, or month.
calendar agenda
- Todoist
Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blogposts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on shared tasks with a team, too.
- Wunderlist
Another useful to-do list tool, Wunderlist can help you keep your ideas sorted into tasks and subtasks. Even consider adding a listicle idea and creating subtasks for each of the list items you want to add.
- Dropbox
When your ideas come with files, Dropbox is one of the best spots to store and share things like pdfs, Word Docs, design files, photos, and more.
Tools to create well-optimized content
- Google Trends
Is your blogpost idea a popular one? You can run the topic through Google Trends to see search volume for the different keywords and phrases you’re considering using.
google trends
- Keyword Planner
How do you frame your awesome idea into a far-reaching blogpost (that people can easily find)? Check for popular keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner lets you enter a series of keywords, and Google returns results on search volume and popularity as well as related keywords that might spark an idea for you.
keyword planner
- Keywordtool.io
An alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool returns up to 750 suggestions for every keyword you enter.
(For yet another keyword tool alternative, take SERP Stat for a spin.)
- Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
SEO plugins can help you fine tune your idea and blogpost into a specific keyword or phrase that will help with search results and help keep your blogpost focused. With Yoast’s plugin, you can type in the keyword that you’re after, and Yoast tells you how many different spots on the page the post appears and a nice green dot for when you’re ready to go.
Tools to help you write easier and faster
- Google Docs
Many bloggers go straight to the writing editor in their blog software (WordPress, Ghost, etc.). You can also consider writing in Google Docs for collaborating with others and tapping into the extra power of Google Docs’ spelling and grammar tools.
- Egg Timer
A super simple timer, tell Egg Timer how long you want to work—15 minutes for research, 40 minutes to write a draft, etc.—and Egg Timer will count down the time. When time’s up, a popup appears and the timer sounds.
- Toggl
One of the most straightforward and fun time tracking tools you’ll find, Toggl lets you add a task, push the Start/Stop button, and check back in to see a full dashboard of stats on how you spend your time. It could be really useful for bloggers who want to focus on the time they spend writing, researching, and editing.
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- Hemingway
A really interesting free marketing tool, Hemingway analyzes your text for readability, highlighting sentences that are a bit too complex or dense. The readability for the list post you’re reading now: A seventh grade reading level.
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- Grammarly
Copy and paste your article into Grammarly’s online grammar checker to how it performs against checks for spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, style, and more. The initial score is free to see. The specifics of what to change (as well as suggestions from Grammarly) come with their paid plans.
- WordPress Distraction Free Writing
This helpful tool is baked right into the WordPress editor. To access the Distraction-Free editor, click on the four-way arrow icon in the top right corner of any WordPress post you’re writing.
distraction-free editor wordpress
- Desk
Download the Desk app (currently Mac only) to write straight from your desktop in a clear and uncluttered editor (with markdown support), then connect directly to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, and a host of other online publishing sites.
desk
For additional desktop publishing tools, check out Zenwriter (Windows) and Ulysses App (for Mac).
Tools to create beautiful blog visuals
We previously covered a big list of 23 tools and resources for creating amazing visual content, many of which appear below. For the complete list of image creation tools, check out our related post.
- Death to the Stock Photo
Every month, receive an email with links to a new collection of free, high-res lifestyle photos. The site offers a premium subscription as well to be able to access and search its full archive.
brick and mortar
- PhotoPin
One of the 53+ places we scour to find free images, PhotoPin lets you search millions of Creative Commons photos from Flickr.
- Skitch
Grab screenshots and annotate with notes, arrows, and icons. Skitch connects directly to your Evernote account so you can save all the screengrabs you take.
- Meme Generator
Sometimes a simple meme says more than any other image could. Meme Generator lets you create a meme from scratch or use an existing meme character to add your own saying.
I-Have-No-Idea-What-Im-Doing-1
- Canva
Probably our most-used image tool at Buffer, Canva makes image creation super easy (especially for non-designers) with their premade templates, custom image sizes for every social media channel, drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and more. Most every original image you see shared from our social accounts was made in Canva.
Other great options include PicMonkey and BeFunky.
- Gimp
Photoshop is the king of image software. Gimp is like a free version of Photoshop. Most all major features are there, and amateur designers can get all sorts of things done with layers, masks, photo effects, and more.
- Share as Image
Turn text from any webpage into a shareable image with the Share as Image browser extension and bookmarklet. The Pro plan ($8/month) even lets you add custom branding to the image and choose from a huge number of background photos and fonts.
Tools to distribute your content far and wide
We wrote about the topic of content distribution tools in more depth in a separate blog post as well. Click through that post for even more ideas for tools and resources to try when promoting your content.
- Buffer
Once your blogpost is written and published, you can set up an easy sharing schedule with Buffer. Schedule your new article to go to your social channels multiple times with different headlines or images attached to each update.
buffer
- EMV Headline Analyzer
Emotional Marketing Value checks for emotional words in your headline, and the analyzer tool returns a score of EMV words compared to total words in the headline.
- Click to Tweet
Built by the team at CoSchedule (which also makes a helpful WordPress calendar and scheduler), this WordPress plugin makes it simple to highlight snippets of your blogpost for readers to easily share on Twitter. For sites not running WordPress, consider a tool like clicktotweet.
- Filament
In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.
filament
- Digg Digg
Digg Digg was built by our Buffer engineers a couple years back, and it’s been a staple on the Buffer blog ever since. What we’ve found most helpful with Digg Digg integration is the flexibility of where you can place the share buttons: floating to the left or right of the article (see our Open blog), pinned to the top or bottom of a blog post (see this Buffer Social blog), or manually wherever you wish inside your theme.
There’s a great list of social sharing plugins reviewed here, if you’d like more options.
- Google Webmaster Tools
Signing up for webmaster tools can reveal a lot of SEO opportunities for your blogposts. For instance, see where you rank in search engine results for certain keywords, then build links to your most popular keyword posts to increase the rankings even more.
- MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the biggest and best (and free) ways to send email to your list of contacts. You can set up automated campaigns that deliver each new post that you write, or you can create campaigns from scratch. MailChimp offers free accounts for those with fewer than 2,000 contacts in their list.
- Headlines
Run A/B tests of your headlines with this WordPress plugin from KingSumo. If the cost is a bit steep ($99 lifetime charge), you can try out the other Sumo plugin, SumoMe, which offers some handy tools for growing an email list, analyzing your blogposts, and sharing content to social media.
The blogging tools we use at Buffer
I’ve had the privilege of trying out many of these tools while writing online. At Buffer, we’ve hone our blogging process into a pretty lean groove. These are the tools that I currently use to take posts from idea to publish.
BuzzSumo, Quick Sprout, Feedly, and email newsletters to come up with ideas for blogposts
Trello to collect ideas and plan blogposts for the week ahead
Yoast SEO plugin for optimizing blogposts
The WordPress Distraction-Free editor for writing
Canva and Death to the Stock Photo for creating images
Buffer, Digg Digg, and MailChimp for sharing the blogpost to social media and email lists
Conclusion
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