My Favorite 2015 Blogging Tools

blogging tools

It’s no secret (at least to fellow bloggers) that running a successful freelance blogger business can be hard work. Luckily, there are a multitude of blogging tools out there to help streamline the process, increase your productivity and prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. Here are some of my favorite tools to make blogging life a little easier.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a great editing and collaboration tool, offering pretty much the same functionality as Microsoft Office, but with the added bonus of being absolutely FREE. The ability to work collaboratively with others on projects and documents is great, especially if your blog has multiple authors, and the fact that work is stored on a secure cloud server means it can easily be accessed from anywhere by simply sharing the web link.

But aside from being a great editing and writing tool, one of the best things about Google Docs is the additional functionality through helpful add ons (such as thesaurus, language translator and Mindmeister – an application for mapping out content ideas), which are available all over the web.

Evernote

Evernote is fantastic for content curation and for your own ideas. It’s a great online tool for organization, making it simple to store ideas, notes, photographs, webpage content, plans and draft blog articles – all in one place

It allows you to be flexible in the way that you organize your notes, content and information – allowing you to name your different ‘notes’ anything you like, and use tags to categorize your content for easy searching.

Another reason Evernote is a useful blogging tool is the fact that it can be used across multiple platforms and is great at syncing between different devices. So, if you’re out and about – and make a couple of quick notes on your iPhone – you can then access them on your desktop later when you come to crafting them into your next blog post, even if you use a Windows PC.

More great blogging tools include…

Tweetdeck

Controversial as this statement may seem, crafting high-quality, killer blog posts is only one facet of successful blogging. Promoting your posts and additional content to your targeted audience via social media is paramount for any new blog to gain traction and start to grow an online following.

Tweetdeck is perfect for managing your social media presence. It offers the function of scheduling your tweets and posts, meaning that you could share and promote your blog posts multiple times a day if you choose to. It’s easy for tweets to be lost in a busy Twitter feed, so by promoting your blog posts via Twitter, say, 3 times per day – this gives you a much better chance of having your content seen and then read by your followers.

Tweetdeck is also a great tool for organizing your own Twitter feed, curating the content you follow into lists that you can then browse singularly – without having to trawl through your entire feed to find the content that is important to you. You can also use Tweetdeck to follow specific hashtags, which is great if you are looking to engage more personally with your followers and prospective readers of your blog, or if you’re taking part in a Twitter chat.

Podio

Podio is an online tool for project management and communication. It has been described as somewhere between an online social network for businesses and a project management platform, like Asana.

One of the biggest benefits of using Podio as a task or project management tool is the fact that it is extremely flexible. When used as a blogging tool it is great for keeping track of projects and also to keep yourself and other users (if your blog has multiple authors) of due dates for posts and content creation.

The ‘social’ aspect of Podio is great for collaboration, allowing users to share files and information freely through the activity stream (kind of like Facebook’s news feed, but private). This allows for easy communication between collaborators, who are able to ask and answer questions and share ideas. And one more thing – it’s FREE!

SEMRush

It’s no secret to anyone who is familiar with writing for the web that keywords matter – a LOT! The primary way people will find your content online is by searching Google for keywords and phrases, so it’s drastically important to make sure you show up as high as possible in the search engine rankings.

It’s also no secret that there is a lot of competition out there. This is where SEMRush can give you an advantage, as it shows you the keywords that your website ranks for, and the monthly amount of searches for those keywords. This information is highly useful if you’re looking into improving the optimization of your blog content, or if you want to know which keywords you should be focusing on when crafting your next blog post.

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