Over the past 10 years of growing my blog, one key thing I've learned is how important it is to use the best blogging tools from day one and also to know when you've progressed enough and are ready to move to the next level of tool.
When you use the right blogging tools on your website (whether you're a beginner or a full-time blogger), it can literally save you hours of time that would otherwise be spent on much more manual work.
Not only will these blogging tools save you valuable time and effort, but they will also allow you to do things that would not otherwise be possible without investing in hiring your own team of marketing specialists, writers, virtual assistants, or software engineers.
50 Best Blogging Tools in 2023 for Better Marketing, SEO, Copywriting, Social Media & Research
From keyword research to competitor analysis, and everything in between... writing blog titles Email marketing, raising awareness among your bloggers, scaling your social media promotion and much more, we break down all the best blogging tools you need to use on your blog.
Now, before we dive into the overview, if you're completely new to blogging, I've put together the ultimate guide to starting your blog. In fact, getting your blog online and optimizing it properly (with the right tools) is the first step in laying the foundation that will eventually attract readers. And my guide to starting a blog will position you perfectly to bring thousands of readers to your blog in the near future.
If you haven't launched your blog yet, go to my ultimate guide to starting a blog.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs has more than earned its reputation as one of the best blogging tools when it comes to defining your blog's SEO strategies, with a particular focus on keyword research and competitor analysis. However, to be clear, if you're new to blogging, this tool might be a bit advanced (and it's not free).
Having started as a simple backlink checker, many bloggers aren't fully aware of Ahrefs' power as a blogging tool. Its most relevant features for bloggers are that it's a content research and analysis tool, a keyword ranking tracker (with a history of SERP movements going back to when your blog first started ranking for its initial keyword), a competitor research tool, and on-page SEO tools like their analyzer. I know, it's a lot.
New features still appear quite often and are never released at the expense of their most popular features - they still boast of having the largest backlink index of any blogging tool in its category.
While Keywords Explorer has been my go-to (premium) tool lately, Ahrefs has truly earned its stripes as a backlink analysis tool. When analyzing your own backlink profile or that of a competitor you're trying to learn from, you can choose to display columns such as new links, lost links, unfollowed links, or followed links.
You can also group similar links, see only one link per domain or display the links by blogging platform. This flexibility allows you to easily get to the bottom of your questions.
Here are some of my daily Ahrefs searches:
- TopPages : This shows you a list of the most traffic-driving pages for the site you are analyzing.
- Best by Links This view ranks a website's pages based on the number of backlinks they have received.
- Content Explorer : Allows you to quickly generate blog post ideas that highlight trending topics in your space
- Competitor Research: This will quickly show the keywords a competing site is ranking for (along with traffic estimates)
Keep in mind that traffic estimates are calculated based on a site's organic ranking positions, the number of featured snippets, search carousels, and everything in between. As such, organic traffic reports can be incredibly accurate, even for small blogs. And if you want another SEO tool to compare Ahrefs to, check out SEMrush.
2. Google Analytics
Since 2005, Google Analytics has been a (free) web analytics service created and offered by Google that allows blog and website owners to track and generate reports on the their website traffic Today, it is just one of the tools offered within the global Google Marketing Platform brand, designed for marketers and advertisers to reach more readers.
In the Google Analytics dashboard, you can see critical data points like the number of readers who come to my blog each month, the distribution of new visitors versus returning visitors, the number of pages the average visitor views , how long he spends on a page, bounce rate and much more.
3. MonsterInsights
To put it simply, MonsterInsights is a very simple Google Analytics WordPress plugin for you to view your Google Analytics data right in your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin makes it to our list of best blogging tools because it allows you to easily connect your WordPress blog to your Google Analytics account (without hiring a developer or writing code yourself) – a task that can sometimes be a little more complicated for most new bloggers.
With a click of a few buttons in MonsterInsights, you can set up relatively sophisticated event tracking, e-commerce tracking, form submission tracking, and other features that will help you better understand your blog readers as you grow.
4. Serp Robot
Serp Robot is a Google Rank Checker free which tracks the position of your blog posts for the keywords you entered.
Its strong point is the accuracy of the rankings - hilarious if you consider that's the only job of a ranking tracker... but not so hilarious if you've ever tried using a ranking tracking blog tool.
Most rank trackers miss the mark, by and large. Accurate tracking is key to understanding the health of your blog (in terms of your ability to drive organic search traffic), as a big drop could be a sign of a downturn. possible manual penalty of Google.
5. Yoast
Probably the most installed WordPress plugin of all time (made by an independent company), Yoast SEO is indispensable among the best blogging tools.
Whether you run a personal blog or work in marketing and SEO for a company that entrusts you with the management of its corporate blog, Yoast SEO is a powerful free plugin that has been designed to make your blog as search engine friendly as possible.
After installing the plugin, you'll immediately see mini-SEO tools in the dashboard at the bottom of each blog post once you're in edit mode. All you have to do is enter your focus keyword (the target keyword you want the article to rank for in organic search), and the plugin will give you a detailed analysis of how to write a better title, a meta description, as well as recommendations on the number of links your article should contain, the number of times your keyword should be mentioned, the length of the article and more.
If I had to use only one of these tools on my site today, I would choose Yoast SEO.
6. Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo's blog content search tool generates a list of the most popular blog posts on a given topic, and you can see pre-validated ideas for blog posts.
With Buzzsumo, you can also monitor mentions of your blog across the web as they happen in real time. This makes it one of the best blogging tools specifically for marketers, as you can target unrelated brand mentions and convert them into new links for your growing blog SEO strategy.
The question analyzer offers the ability to search and list questions asked about a particular keyword phrase that your readers may search for, which is important if you want to capture featured snippets.
7. Twinword Ideas
Do you miss the old (free) Google Keyword Planner, or are you looking for a free alternative to some of the more advanced tools like Ahrefs? Well, Twinword Ideas is another great one to try. It's a free keyword research tool you can use to find out which phrases you should create targeted content for (in order to attract more good readers to your blog from search engines).
Twinword Ideas - a free blogging tool from the team at Twinword - It gathers keyword data directly from Google, making it more accurate than most other completely free keyword research tools available today. So, if you're wondering… Do people still read blogs? The answer is a resounding yes today.
In addition to the basic search function, you can view "popular topics" as well as data that calculates SEO competition on the topic, suggesting how difficult it will be for your blog to rank at the top of organic search results.
Unlike Google's original Keyword Planner tool (which is no longer a completely free resource) that gives a range of monthly search volumes, Twinword Ideas lists the exact search volumes you can count on.
8. SimilarWeb
What I love about SimilarWeb is their ability to transform often impenetrable numbers into easy-to-understand, colorful graphs. Information that might take hours to glean elsewhere, when based entirely on figures, can be extracted quite quickly with SimilarWeb's graphical presentations.
SimilarWeb's free version is on our list of top tools because it lets you see everything the paid account does, except for the time limit. With a free account, you can see website traffic analytics for a blog over the last three months. With a paid account, you can see detailed traffic reports for six months. It also displays global traffic, broken down by country. There's also a category ranking showing your own popularity within your chosen field. the niche in which you blog.
You can analyze data on visitor locations, search traffic you receive, referring sites, social traffic, keywords you rank for, paid advertising data, and similar sites you're currently competing with. However, traffic figures should be taken with a grain of salt. SimilarWeb tends to underestimate traffic for sites averaging fewer than 50,000 visitors per month, while often overestimating traffic for others.
Laser precision is not the purpose of a blogging tool like this, however.
SimilarWeb delivers what Ahrefs doesn't: it helps you visualize every channel that sends traffic to your blog (and take steps to learn from it). write blog posts that will repeat your successes).
9. Can I Rank?
Can I Rank? is one of the most exciting new blogging tools I've discovered this year. At the heart of their product is an AI-powered software engine that gives you actionable blogging tips and advice on how to improve your blog's SEO ranking, get more traffic, and even build a following. best blog post ideas to pursue based on your existing content and which opportunities will provide the most potential traffic value in the coming months.
Beyond the SEO-focused recommendations you'll get from Can I Rank?, their platform provides detailed instructions on how best to implement their advice or the option to delegate the task to an SEO consultant within their network. It's pure genius, and I've already discovered several high-impact content opportunities, so I recommend all serious bloggers give it a try.
10. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is another one of my top picks this year. With a very broad feature set ranging from keyword ranking tracking and research tools to competitor monitoring, advanced traffic analysis, marketing planning, and more, it's one of the most robust new tools I've come across in a while, and it has quickly become an essential part of my workflow.
What I like most about SE Ranking is that beyond the keyword position monitoring function that lies at the heart of the product, this blogging tool also provides a very comprehensive website audit function that will give you extremely actionable feedback on how to improve your blog's technical SEO footprint, which is invaluable for all small businesses.
Although it's one of the paid tools on this list, if you're serious about growing your blog, then SE Ranking is well worth considering weaving into your tech stack.
Outreach-focused blogging tools to scale your content promotion
With the most research-driven tools behind us, let's take a look at the best outreach tools.
These are designed with the express purpose of helping you target your blogger's reach, expand the promotion of your content, obtain high-quality guest posts, and establish partnerships with other bloggers in your industry.
11. Hunter
The premise of this free blogging tool is deceptively simple - Hunter It scrapes the internet for email addresses and lets you enter a domain and see all the emails associated with that company (that have made their way into the Hunter database). It's my go-to email research tool today.
Whether you need the email address of a CEO, a content manager, or a social media representative, Hunter's email search function will return either their exact email address, or, Their best estimate is based on emails from other companies they've discovered. What raises the bar with this blogging tool is its bulk functionality, where you can upload a list of domains or contacts to find or verify contacts for a larger-scale outreach campaign.
The free plan limits you to 100 searches per month (which is more than enough to implement a thoughtful blog SEO strategy).
12. Response
Respona is an all-in-one blogger outreach platform with all the tools needed to set up and launch any type of email campaign, whether for link building, digital PR, marketing, or even sales.
It's integrated with Google's search engine for simplified prospecting and pulls metrics like Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank directly from Ahrefs. An easy-to-use email search tool is also included, making it simple to find the right person's contact information without needing other tools. Features include:
- Automated email outreach
- Ideal for prospecting and finding contact information
- Advanced personalization of awareness campaigns
- Built-in analytics and reports
Respona's intuitive interface guides you through every step of creating and launching your outreach campaigns, tracks your performance, and monitors the status of your conversations with each prospect. The tool will be especially useful for link builders, as it was initially used to help Visme scale its link-building efforts, helping the website gain over 2 million organic visitors per month.
13. Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is remarkable in how it is able to process even hundreds of raw CSV files and provide you with highly accurate contact information for your blog outreach campaigns.
Primarily designed to become one of the best lead validation tools, Voila Norbert also integrates with other tools such as Drip and Pipedrive, making it particularly useful for sorting your leads and organizing campaigns to launch quickly.
14. Ninjas Outreach
Ninja Outreach is on this list of the best blogging tools because it's an all-in-one outreach tool that you can use to connect with influencers, feature guest posts, and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche.
Its main function as a link prospector can be accessed in the Outreach section. Enter a topic to find the best blogs you should connect with, with multiple columns highlighting social stats, SEO metrics, traffic numbers and contact details of people you should connect with and email. -email with your collaboration idea.
The features column even indicates whether the target website accepts guest posts, making it one of the best tools for bloggers looking to get more guest posts and attract high-quality links as part of an SEO strategy. Consider whether this type of outreach can be integrated into your blogging strategy and whether it might be worth the additional expense.
15. clearbit
The standout feature that makes Clearbit one of the most useful tools for content creators is its impressive integration with Gmail. Once Clearbit is installed, you can click on a contact you're about to email and you'll get a mini widget with a short biography of the person, their website, and the company they work for.
This is useful not only for personalizing your emails during an awareness campaign, but also for testing and validating whether a particular email address you have is correct or not.
Productivity-focused blogging tools to get more done (faster)
Alright, let's change gears again - let's talk about productivity tools - which is one of my obsessions.
These are my picks for the most essential productivity-focused blogging tools that will help you save time on tasks that can be done faster (and more efficiently).
16. Wordable
If you've been blogging for a while and ever tried to copy and paste a blog post you wrote If you have a draft in a Google Doc and then try to upload it to WordPress, you should know what a nightmare reformatting will be. Wordable is one of my favorite writing tools because it has literally saved me hours of my life.
Once you have registered for Wordable's free trialYou will download their plugin and install it on your WordPress blog. Then, with a single click, you can instantly export Google Docs into a WordPress post or page on your blog.
It's incredible, and it will even import images using the titles you originally gave the files in your Google Doc. Keep an eye out for future features with other blogging tools, like Trello and Evernote, to see if they eventually come into the pipeline with Wordable.
17. Focus Me
FocusMe holds a special place on my list of the best blogging tools because of how well it works. It helps me stay focused when I need to do critical work.
As a website and app blocker, FocusMe aims to help you eliminate energy-draining multitasking and limit the time you spend on distracting websites. Its promise of effectiveness is based on the belief that setting a daily 2-hour curfew for a specific website or app can result in 25% higher productivity levels.
18. Inbox When Ready for Gmail
The creators of this special Chrome extension for Gmail realized how obsessed we've become with emails these days and sought to tame that obsession, so you can spend more time on tasks that will actually help grow your blog (rather than responding to every email as it arrives).
Once installed, the extension helps you process emails in batches and minimize the time you spend on each email by adding a "Show inbox"and alternatively a button"Hide inbox"when you're ready to dive into emails or hide your inbox view. Personally, it helps me think twice before opening my inbox."
Another useful feature is that you can still compose new emails while the inbox remains hidden, so you don't have to worry about new emails popping up and catching your eye. You can also set a frequency limit on how many times you want to check your email per day, as well as assign specific time limits for each email.
Marketing related blogging tools to increase your traffic and build an audience
Whether we like it or not, recent blog statistics show that you need to promote your blog content if you hope to create an engaged target audience - and the right tools can help you do this much more effectively.
These are my picks for the most essential tools that will specifically help you sell your blog more effectively.
19. ConvertKit
While I'm the first to tell you to stick with free email marketing tools like Mailchimp at first, it won't be the best blogging tool for growing your email list in the long run. As your small business grows, you'll be able to afford to invest in blogging tools like ConvertKit that will do more to create things like automations and sequences that can generate income from your mailing list while you sleep.
Your email subscribers are just one step away from becoming paying customers for your online course, the eBook you've written, or the service you offer. For example, I've been able to set up fully automated sales emails that encourage the purchase of my blog books or one of my premium blog courses. depending on when and how a new subscriber signs up on my blog.
ConvertKit is designed specifically for bloggers and is affordable (starting at $29/month) for its full feature set, including email list creation, landing page builders, automated email setup, email subscribers, and templates to get you started. It also integrates directly with WordPress and other leading tools, making it a crucial dashboard for any experienced blogger.
20. Sumo
Sumo actually bundles more than twenty different useful tools into a single package. Here, I'll be talking about their three social media optimization tools.
We all know that posts containing images are more sharedRight? What if your blog visitors also want to share the images they find in your blog posts? It's easy to do with just one click using Sumo's image sharing tool. Beyond that, Sumo Highlighter lets readers easily share excerpts they like from a blog post by highlighting them (so other readers notice them) and tweeting about them.
Sumo share is a sleek and well-optimized set of social sharing buttons that you can embed in a blog post or on the side of your blog, so that readers are encouraged to share the content they like on your blog.
21. OptinMonster
As any new blogger knows, creating a mailing list is essential for learning to make money by blogging.
OptinMonster makes our list of the best blogging tools because of its effectiveness at capturing your readers' email addresses. It can be set up on any page of your blog (they also have an incredibly easy-to-use WordPress plugin), and their tools even let you A/B test different messages to learn the most effective ways to encourage readers to join your list or even complete a purchase. Not to mention that their opt-ins can be designed to perfectly match your blog's layout aesthetics.
22. Jasper
I won't fault you for being skeptical about AI-generated writing software. After all, how can artificial intelligence replicate the intangible aspects of a human voice, style, and tone? Well, they can't really (yet). But Jasper is incredibly effective for creating texts for blog posts, as well as other short forms of text such as Facebook ads, tweets, headlines, video scripts, and sales pages.
The way I see a tool like this being best used today is as a complement to your own capabilities and other proven blogging tools like Clearscope. Functionally, you can use it to speed up the process of writing your blog posts, eliminate writer's block and start generating content - or to fill in the gaps when it comes to getting your content to the end.
I've tried several of these tools, but they tend to produce incomprehensible text. Not Jasper, though. Its AI-powered writing assistant is trained by conversion and copywriting experts, which has helped it develop credible and effective writing skills. When you sign up, you'll get access to over 40 writing templates based on different use cases, from marketing strategy and email marketing to Amazon product descriptions, blog content, and more.
23. SocialSnap
SocialSnap is a WordPress plugin that adds beautiful social sharing buttons to your blog, with more customization options and faster loading than anyone else on the market.
Unlike other tools and plugins that add social buttons to your blog, SocialSnap is designed to be lightning-fast and won't slow down your page load speed at all—an important factor in your blog's overall SEO strategy. Furthermore, their share buttons are available in several formats: as a floating bar, a sticky widget, above or below blog posts, and even as pop-ups.
24. Click to Tweet by CoSchedule
Because of how minimalist and simple this free WordPress plugin is, it has become one of the most effective blogging tools I have installed on my site to amplify content marketing results.
It's as simple as it gets when it comes to embedding quick and easy tweetable quotes or content you want to encourage readers to share anywhere in your blog content.
25. Teachable
As your blogging business grows, creating and selling online courses will be a natural evolution on your way to success. monetization of your blogTeachable has long been one of the easiest-to-use online course delivery platforms, which can not only provide content to your students, but also collect payments on your behalf.
All you have to do is create your course content, design a sales page using their simple builder, and then connect Teachable to your PayPal or Stripe account. You'll then be ready to start selling courses to your readers.
26. buffer
As one of the very first social media marketing tools I used as a blogger, Buffer will always hold a special place in my heart. Its powerful scheduling feature is what initially drew me to try this blogging tool, and they now offer Twitter feed scheduling in addition to scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and tools for Shopify, Google, and more. Their easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality will help you quickly schedule social media posts.
This product is ideal for full-time bloggers and the team behind the product is great.
27. wishpond
Wishpond is actually a collection of tools designed to help you do one thing: sell and grow your business effectively. It earns a spot on my list of useful tools for marketers because of the number of different features you get after signing up: an online advertising dashboard, social media tools, email marketing, lead management, referral campaigns, landing pages, forms, follow-up calls, chatbots, and more. It's a one-stop tool dashboard once you focus on promoting your website.
Wishpond's most unique feature is that you get a dedicated marketing manager to join your team after you sign up. Their job is to guide you through every step of what it takes to create (and execute) successful marketing campaigns for your blog and your niche. They'll help you stay on top of industry trends, research specific optimizations you can make to your blog, and provide on-going practical advice to help you grow your site in the right direction. The best part? Pricing starts at just $49/month.
28. YouTube
Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (behind only its parent company Google)?
With several million people searching for answers to their urgent questions every day on YouTube, this makes it one of the most useful blogging tools to help you grow your target audience, attract more viewers who want to learn from you, and increase your influence.
In their effort to increase the viewing time users spend on YouTube, bloggers who publish longer videos that maintain viewer engagement will be rewarded by climbing in the organic rankings.
Here are some YouTube video ideas (and formats) you can use to create engaging content for your readers:
- Turn your popular blog posts into videos
- Share stories from your blog niche
- Create step-by-step videos that outline a process readers want to experience
- Discuss current events, news and industry happenings (alone or with a guest)
Ultimately, the more quality YouTube videos you can post and embed them in related posts on your blog, the more likely your rewards will come from search engines like Google who appreciate the close connection between YouTube video embeds and long contents.
29. Adobe rush
Adobe Rush is the company's newest video editing product, a simplified version of its immensely popular Premier editing software, designed to help bloggers and creators shoot, edit and share videos online as quickly as possible.
Rush is on my list of top blogging tools because I'm far from a professional video editor. It helps me take the simple videos I record and edit them into visually appealing content for my blog and YouTube channel in minutes.
30. Rev
Whether it's video or podcast transcriptions, subtitles for your YouTube videos, or even foreign language subtitles for your content that's starting to attract an international audience, Rev is my go-to destination for fast, high-quality services in this world.
31. Albacross
Albacross is a powerful B2B lead generation platform This gives bloggers (and small businesses) the ability to identify and monitor the companies that visit their websites. You can also gather valuable information about the organizations behind your readers, including size, revenue, industry, location, and even contact information.
Having this type of blog visitor data at your disposal will allow you to run much more relevant email marketing campaigns to promote your blog and forge more partnerships. Their integration with Zapier allows users to access a wide range of applications to which they can transmit data, including CRMs, email marketing tools, and more.
32. Prezi
This new (free) tool from the Prezi team is designed to help you create remote presentations that bring people together. At the heart of the product is the ability to appear on camera, right next to your content, when you present it via video to your audience, your team, or even your friends.
With the goal of fostering a more meaningful face-to-face connection with teams (and audiences) that are increasingly located around the world, Prezi is a go-to for bloggers and marketers of all persuasions.
Broken link and optimization-focused blogging tools
Now, one of my favorite aspects of blogging - working hard to ensure that content will be discovered by new audiences through tactics such as: guest blog posts, finding and fixing broken links, and creative ways to get content mentioned in strategic online outlets.
These are my picks for the best blogging tools that will help you get your blog mentioned on other top websites.
33. Linkminer
LinkMiner is a Google Chrome extension that identifies opportunities for you to link to your blog content, spotting broken links on websites you visit. Once installed, LinkMiner will highlight any 404 errors (broken links), so you can then contact the blog owner with a similar resource you've already created and request that your link be placed where the one was. broken before.
34. Ahrefs
This blog tool is a free SEO analyzer that you can use to get practical tips on improving your blog pages.
Simply enter the URL of the page you want to analyze to get a free report. Based on the quick analysis, your page will receive an overall SEO score, followed by a report with specific implementations you can quickly make to improve your page's score and achieve better SEO performance.
Image and video-related blogging tools to define your visual identity
Without a consistent visual identity and a well-designed blog layout on your blogging platform, it will be difficult to stay top of mind with your readers. These tools will help you excel in this area.
From optimizing your images to reduce page load speeds to designing high-quality images for your blog posts, these are the essential image and video tools you need to use right now.
35.Place it
If you are looking for a platform where you can create all your brand designs, placeit is a truly fantastic tool for bloggers of all levels. With over 94,000 templates and a growing library of professionally created designs every day, it's a fantastic hub for creating visuals. You can create everything from logos to social media campaign videos with branding in minutes.
Simply select your favorite video template, customize your text, change the color of backgrounds and shapes, and add your images or video clips. All of their video footage is made by a professional team, so you can access some very eye-catching templates to give your video marketing a good start.
Main features of this blogging tool to discover:
- Unlimited downloads
- Fonts and audio selection
- New models every day
- User-friendly
- Professional graphics
Price: Basic version is free / Full version is $12,70/user/month (or $76,23/user/year)
36. awesomely
Genially is an interactive visual content creation tool for your blog. You can use it to create everything from interactive images and infographics to website sliders, virtual tours, guides, and maps. They also have thousands of templates to choose from to help you get started.
37. Loom
I discovered Loom I only discovered it a few years ago and I am completely blown away not only by its versatility as a useful (free) blogging tool for recording high-quality screen-sharing tutorials, but also by its efficiency in capturing video directly to the camera from my computer.
Loom's features also include the ability to quickly (and privately or publicly) share the videos you record with a single click, pasting them into your email, via Slack or otherwise. Colleagues or clients can even place comments on your videos, or you can export the videos and upload them to a destination like YouTube.
38. pichic
This app for Mac lets you resize and compress images with just a few clicks, making it an essential tool among the blogging tools you need to use as your traffic grows.
With Pichi, you can achieve up to 95% compression without any noticeable drop in image quality. Images will download quickly, and as a result, your blog pages will load faster. Every extra second in page load time can decrease conversions and, conversely, signal to Google that your content shouldn't rank as highly in organic search results.
39. Adobe Photoshop
For truly unlimited image editing and customization, Adobe Photoshop reigns supreme among tools.
On the other hand, it can be one of the most complex tools to master if you have never experienced it before - the incredibly wide range of customization options for editing and even creating visual content means there is a steep learning curve.
40. Visme
Visme is a free online blog design tool that allows bloggers to create custom designs, blog images, infographics, social media posts and more, all without having to learn a complex set of tools or skills.
After signing up, you'll be able to choose from hundreds of templates to get started with, and you'll be creating visually appealing charts in minutes.
41. Logo.com
Logo.com offers a suite of design tools you can use to create a beautiful and memorable brand to help your blog stand out from the competition. What's especially great about Logo.com is that you can get started by quickly typing in details about your brand, your blogging goals, the color palette preferences you have.
From there, you can customize the color, icon, design, font of your logo, etc., to obtain an optimized logo file.
42. Zen Business
Logaster is one of the best online services for designing your brand assets (especially logo design), focusing on both quality and cost. What's particularly great about this blogging tool is that you can create a logo in just a few clicks, with their online generator that creates over 1,000 logos per hour.
With a specific focus on helping small and medium-sized businesses, their blogging tools offer the ability to quickly create high-quality logos and other visual elements to fuel projects such as a website redesign, a new media kit, stationery items, and more.
43. Unsplash
Unsplash has a huge library of free photos, making it a must-have among my favorite tools for bloggers when it comes to finding royalty-free images.
Studies have shown that blog posts that have a picture every 75 to 100 words They get twice as many shares compared to those without regular visuals. Their powerful search function isn't the only way to find images either—you can also browse collections categorized by familiar themes. Their library boasts a collection of over 810,000 photos from photographers of all kinds. You won't be disappointed in your search for the perfect blog images.
Project management blogging tools to keep your content on track
Finally, we have my favorite project management-related blogging tool that you can use to stay on top of editorial calendars while keeping your remote contractors, partners, and fellow bloggers in the loop.
44. skim links
Skimlinks is a monetization platform for bloggers that allows you to automatically affiliate and monetize product links within business-related content. 60,000 bloggers already use Skimlinks, including many of the world's top publishers.
Once approved by Skimlinks, bloggers can access up to 48,500 affiliate programs worldwide. Skimlinks also offers numerous tools and resources to help you increase your affiliate earnings, such as the editor toolbar to automatically calculate the commission rate you'll receive from a merchant website you visit, and several reports to track and optimize your performance.
Some of the useful reports you will have access to are:
Performance by Merchant : this report shows you which merchants pay you the most commissions and how they change over time.
Performance by Page : This report shows you which of your blog posts generate the most impressions, clicks, and commissions. You can also break down the posts by links to see which merchants are performing best in each post.
Trending Products : this report shows you which products are currently generating a lot of revenue for publishers in the Skimlinks network.
Broken Links : this report shows you the number of broken clicks on your website. You can filter by broken link types, such as Out of Stock, 404, or Inactive Merchants.
Skilinks is an indispensable tool for any blogger looking to optimize their affiliate marketing efforts.
45. Affiliate
Scaling your affiliate blog revenue presents two main challenges: keeping track of numerous different affiliate programs to connect to and dealing with inconsistent or unreliable reporting. For example, let's say you have a single article that links to products in five different affiliate networks. Trying to determine how much that article earns in total and whether it tends to increase or decrease after your latest edits is a lengthy and manual process.
These are the two main problems that Affilimate solves. It consolidates your affiliate reports into a single dashboard, allows you to create detailed, cross-network reports, and automatically attributes your conversions to specific articles and links on the page (saving you a lot of time). This can be a game-changer both if you're just starting out and want to see what's already working, and if you're developing and managing multiple different websites.
46. paper form
Surprisingly, the vast majority of free WordPress themes on the market today simply don't have a great interface for creating beautiful signup forms, and that's where Paperform comes in.
Paperform is an online tool that allows bloggers and web publishers to (quickly) create beautiful online forms, insert payment forms, or create easy-to-build product pages without any technical knowledge.
Whether it's surveying your audience, collecting email addresses, accepting payments, scheduling appointments, etc., Paperform provides you with a short snippet of HTML code that can be embedded directly into any page or post on your website.
47. easily
If you're looking to increase your blog traffic (but are on a tight budget), creating infographics can improve your website's authority and ranking. But how do you make infographics? Check out Easelly, a simple infographic creation tool with 4 million users worldwide. With Easelly Pro, you even get unlimited access to stunning infographic templates and over 1,1 million free illustrations and images created by professional designers.
It's also easy to embed an Easelly infographic directly into your blog. All you have to do is copy and paste a simple embed code from your Easelly canvas into your content editor. If you're in a hurry to create infographics from scratch, you can even ask the infographic design team behind Easelly to create custom infographics and animated graphics for you. Their paid plans start at just $49.
48. Survey Sparrow
When it comes to positioning your product in an extremely crowded market, you need to tick certain boxes. The most important one being thorough market research. And that's where SurveySparrow can help.
SurveySparrow is an omnichannel experience management platform that allows you to perceive your competition, market and consumer trends, and collect valuable data through surveys, polls and quizzes that you can embed on your site.
49. Missingletter
Missinglettr is a social media planner that can detect new articles as soon as they're published on your site and automatically start developing a social media promotion campaign. It also has a Curate feature that helps you find great content in your niche and add it to your publishing queue, which is ideal for beginners due to its simple interface.
50. Grammarly
If you haven't heard of Grammarly yet, you must be living under a rock. When it comes to AI-powered editing software, Grammarly is the leader for many bloggers looking to improve the readability of their blog content.
Although Grammarly doesn't (yet) have a native WordPress plugin, I've always used this powerful proofreading tool during the writing and editing process in Google Docs while working with writers and editors on my team. It's helped me avoid many embarrassing typos over the years.
Did I miss any of your picks for these best blogging tools?
Ultimately, I am a strong advocate of keeping your budget as tight as possible when it comes to purchasing blogging tools, especially in the beginning, when you can make the painful mistake of blogging by spending too much on paid tools, even if your tool expenses will be tax-deductible from your blog at the end of the year.
With the number of free (and very inexpensive) tool options available today, it's easy to maintain your blogging costs low enough while rapidly growing your website.
If you're not entirely sure what's truly worth spending money on today, in terms of positioning your blog for long-term success, use this checklist:
- Get the best web hosting plan you can afford, so your blog loads as quickly as possible.
- If you're on a tight budget, opt for a cheap hosting plan, a monthly hosting plan, or even a free hosting plan to get started.
- Grab an affordable premium WordPress theme that will help you design a beautiful blog that will impress readers
- Invest time in using the free blogging tools on this list (to the best of your ability) before opting for paid tools.
Now, are there any essential tools I've missed that should be added to the list?
Share with us in the comments below!