Blogging is one of the marketing tools new and established businesses use to attract and engage users. This form of marketing has helped to establish erstwhile no-bodies as successful businesses and it continues to hold sway in the internet marketing sphere.
With so many people relying on blogging as a means of driving more traffic and sales to their business, it’s only required that anyone that wants to be successful at it makes importunate efforts to deliver tasteful and perfect blog posts regularly.
For these efforts, thankfully, we can all rely on tools and services (SaaS) to help make these efforts a lot easier. I will be sharing 5 of the most useful blogging tools you can rely on for your blogging success and how to make use of them.
#1. Content Idea Generator
In one of my past blog posts, I shared some 19 ways to come up with new content ideas. Coming up with fresh ideas for your blog might be really daunting if you have no external sources to rely on. Relying on a tool to help you generate ideas for blog posts by imputing related terms you wish to come up with content on is the most efficient way to go by it.
Credit: Portent website screeshot
This is what makes tools that serve this particular need so important among content marketers. One of the most commonly mentioned ones, particularly among internet marketers, is Portent’s Content Idea Generator.
To use the tool, just head over to the webpage https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/ and enter your keyword of choice, then hit the “arrow” sign.
The concept behind this tool is to help you come up with as many titles or topics to blog about as possible. Unless you’re looking for a fully-ready blog post, this should be enough for you.
The following are similar tools you can pick from:
- Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
- BuildYourOwnBlog Idea Generator
- ContentIdeator
- Portent’s Content Idea Generator
Most of these tools are easy-to-use and require no training whatsoever. Just pick a tool of your choice and head over to the tool page, and follow the step-by-step process.
#2. Grammar/Spell Checker
Before you decide to surrender all your editing responsibilities to a tool, I’ll warn that it is not recommended to solely rely any software to do intelligent jobs as editing your work. While these tools might help you out once in a while, they are no substitute for a professional editor or editing your work by yourself.
That been said, we all make mistakes when it comes to spelling. But sometimes, these somewhat innocent oversights might either end up making us feel embarrassed or cost us as much as a thousand dollar deal.
Writing for the internet takes some getting used to. A lot of bloggers and internet marketers cannot afford to hire an independent editor to go through their blog posts. While this might be the case for many, it doesn’t mean it should wreck your blogging or internet marketing career.
However, you can count on tools to do the job for you. Below are some commonly used spelling and grammar tools that can help your blogging efforts:
- Small SEO Tools Spell Checker
- Grammarly
- White Smoke
- SpellCheck Plus
#3. Duplicate Content Checker Tool
Nothing hurts your blogging effort as bad as publishing duplicate content for your readers. Google has several updates targeted at blogs that consistently post unoriginal content on their blogs. And what’s worse, it speaks poorly of your brand.
Nothing screams “foul” than a reader coming over to your website only to find exact match of the same content he just read on a more popular blog, especially without any form of attribution.
This is mostly the case for bloggers that innocently open their arms to welcome guest contributors on their website. In order to avoid sinking your blog down the “forgotten search pages” of Google, embrace a culture of running your blog posts on a duplicate content checker tool.
It is even recommended to check for plagiarism in content you wrote yourself. With millions of pages already syndicated on Google, several similar reading sentences in a single blog post could end up making the Google duplicate content police start sniffing around your website.
And the fun part is that checking for duplicate content is one of the easiest things to do. Just copy or upload your post into the checker tool and wait for it to run a check for you. Looking for where to find plagiarism checker tools?
- Plagiarisma.net (I use this one regularly)
- Grammarly.com/Plagiarism Checker (Yes, Grammarly also has a tool for this)
- SmallSEOTools Plagiarism Checker (And so does this site too)
#4. Motivation and Productivity Tool
Are you seeking motivation for your next post idea? Nothing could be more worrisome to a blogger than to sit down and stare at a blank monitor screen for over one hour. Being poorly motivated is often linked to stress and lack of adequate rest.
Most of the tools that can help you combat issues related to motivation might be out of what internet marketing pros and developers can create for you, but it’s not an issue everyone of us is not used to. The following tools are what I recommend when your productivity and motivation seem low:
- Exercise: this activity stimulates our brain to become more active, thereby improving our productivity at work.
- Listing to music
- Evernote
- Today.txt
#5. Social Media Marketing Tools
After we’ve gone over the idea generation and productivity aspect of blogging, you’re on your way to publishing a stellar blog post. You’re expecting this blog post to hit so many screens that your inbox will be loaded with offers instantly. But wait, there’s another problem! You actually need marketing for that to happen, right?
Come in social media.
Social media can help your blog post to quickly get noticed. However, there’s a little bit of science to getting how to share your articles the right way on social media. That is why social media tracking and sharing tools are very relevant in blog post promotion.
Here are some of the best tools in the market:
- Buffer
- Buzzsumo
- IFTTT
- Post Planner
Conclusion
As far as blogging goes, there are countless ways to make it happen. But this blog post has covered some of the most essential tools to help you make your blogging success as easy as possible. Do you have any ideas you think I should have mentioned? Share it with us in the comment section.
(AboveTheFold)Blogging Image Credit (Flickr User: Sean MacEntee)
Thanks for sharing the tools. Definitely will help a lot of bloggers. I have a little bit of confusion, if you please clear them a bit. Could we implement these tools for wordpress or this are for general CMS? Anyhow, it’s a nice article :)
Thank you for some of the ideas. I still have a lot of improvement to do in the Social Media area.
Thank you very much, I’m gonna use the first three tools in my website now