Bloggers: Here are the 7 Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed
As a blogger, you are limited by three things. First comes creativity. If you don’t have creativity, you’ll never be able to launch a blog and consistently populate it with fresh, relevant content that engages readers. Second comes your writing ability. A creative idea is only successful if you’re able to put it into words and convey your thoughts with compelling language. Third comes your tools. Every blogger needs tools and resources to maximize time, polish posts, and produce share-worthy content.
You Need These 7 Tools
As a blogger, are you missing out on the third part of the success equation? While you may be a creative and skilled writer, you also need access to the right tools. In particular, you need the following tools:
Pingdom. Do you know how often your website crashes? Can you definitively say how many hours of uptime and downtime your blog experiences per week? At what times is your blog most likely to go down? With Pingdom, a premier website uptime monitor, you can find answers to all of these questions and more.
Daptiv. Blogging is a business – and you need to treat it like such. That means organizing projects, scheduling tasks, setting deadlines, and keeping an eye on everyone involved in the process. When your blog gets too difficult to manage in a spreadsheet, it’s time to upgrade to a project management tool like Daptiv.
Paint.net. If you have the budget (and need) for Photoshop, by all means, go ahead and purchase it. Photoshop is certainly the best photo-editing tool on the market. However, if you only occasionally edit photos and don’t have the money to drop on an expensive tool, Paint.net is the perfect solution. It’s a free blogging tool that allows you to edit images like a professional.
Buzzsumo. Every good blogger has identified top competitors and likes to keep an eye on what they’re doing. Buzzsumo simplifies this process by allowing you to analyze which topics are performing best for the competition. This ultimately allows you to pick better topics and garner additional traffic.
Tubemogul. If you’ve invested in video blogging, you understand that the process of uploading and publishing videos across multiple platforms is extremely challenging. It takes lots of time and patience. That’s why you need Tubemogul. This incredibly robust tool makes publishing your video blogs across all platforms as simple as just a few clicks. It also has built in analytics, so that you can see how your videos are performing on different sites.
Grammarly. One of the hottest tools right now is Grammarly. This Chrome extension helps you improve your writing quality, regardless of whether you’re typing an email, publishing a post, or whipping up a quick social media comment. It can save you a lot of embarrassment and catch errors that you may have overlooked. From commas to spelling, Grammarly is a comprehensive spell check tool.
Google Analytics. Every blogger needs to understand who they’re reaching and how people are engaging with different posts. There are a number of different analytics tools on the market, but Google Analytics is the best. Not only is it free, but it also gives you access to an enormous amount of data.
Find the Right Tool
While a blogger’s creativity and writing skills are certainly important, you could argue that even the best blogger is only as good as his resources. With that being said, you may be limiting your potential if you aren’t currently using any of the tools mentioned in this article. Take the time to study each of these solutions and determine a couple promising options. You never know – one of these tools could be the missing ingredient to your blogging success.