When you are first embarking on your SEO journey, one of the most intimidating steps can be starting your blog. However, for today’s Tuesday Tips, TKD Design is here to help with a comprehensive list of blogging tools that will save your life!
One of the first things to consider when beginning your blog is to decide what platform you will be using. Here at TKD Design, we highly recommend using WordPress. WP isn’t the number one blogging platform in the United States for nothing, after all! It is comprehensive and intuitive without being difficult to manage, making it perfect for blogging.
Blogging Tools
Once you have your blog set up, and a couple of starter topics in mind. Now what? It may seem super challenging to take on that blank post page, but luckily, we’ve compiled these resources to help (we know because they’ve helped us)!
1. Canva
Canva is a convenient tool for creating infographics for blogs. Infographics are easy for readers to understand and can display helpful information clearly and concisely. Infographics are easy to copy and pass around to many potential readers, making them a valuable resource to beginning web designers. Canva offers many free options for users, where your creativity is the only limit! They have countless templates to choose from, and customizations you can add.
PicMonkey is an online design and photo editing service that can be used from a web browser, or through the mobile app. It can be used to edit and “touch up” pictures and images, create stylish designs and logos, and to create posts for social media blogging.
PicMonkey’s mission is “to empower everyday creatives to communicate visually.” PicMonkey is convenient, easy to use, and intuitive, making it the perfect addition to your blogging arsenal.
3. SumoMe
Every beginner blogger should know to ask readers for their email address in return for the latest blog updates. But keeping on top of such a task is time-consuming – that’s why SumoMe exists! SumoMe is a fantastic blogging tool that works for almost any website.
- Using Sumo will help you:
- Increase web traffic
- Increase social shares
- See what posts are getting the most attention from visitors
- Get more subscribers for your email list
You can also use Sumo’s List Builder feature to encourage readers to join your email list by offering giveaways or exclusives to your site visitors.
SumoMe has more than 5 million users worldwide and is used by popular blogs, including The Four Hour Workweek and Social Media Examiner.
4. LeadPages
Leadpages is an amazing online tool that you can use to boost your email subscriber count. It provides tons of stylish templates to help you with this, plus it has other useful features as well.
You can also use LeadPages to:
- Make lead magnets
- Host webinars
- Create sales pages
- Make landing pages
These will all help to grow your email subscriber list. LeadPages is a very robust and intuitive tool that we recommend to any beginning blogger.
5. Evernote
While Evernote is not completely essential for blogging, it is an extremely useful organizational tool that you can use to stay on top of your blogging projects. It can be used for virtually any organizational purpose. It stores notes, memos, emails, projects, and anything else you can think of under one safe, secure business account.
6. W3 Schools
W3 Schools is a fantastic site for the student web designer. It has numerous references and tutorials on the main web design languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, and SQL. In addition to the tutorials, it has reference sections for each language. So if you know there is a snippet to re-set that float-left, but can’t remember exactly what it is, check W3 Schools. There are countless resources for beginning and advanced web designers alike, even color charts!.
W3 Schools emphasize simplicity in its learning system, meaning you spend less time studying and more time working. As you can imagine, knowing all the programming languages can help you get a leg up on your blogging competition!
7. Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is the best free resource for unlimited creative fonts! They also offer the best online web font generator, so you can blog in style!
8. Unsplash
Images and visuals are an essential part of successful blogging. Without visuals, you may not be able to keep your reader’s attention, and the quality of your post may decrease. Plus, without visuals, you do not have the opportunity for Alt Text, a necessary part of SEO.
So, pictures are super important! But, you don’t have to pay for them (contrary to popular belief). Unsplash is one of the largest (and best!) royalty-free galleries you can find. They have hundreds of thousands of images of every topic imaginable. It is free and straightforward to use. Enter a search term, find a photo you like, save it, and post it in your blog. That’s it!
Grammarly
Making sure your blog post flows well, and is without error, is probably the most important part of publishing a blog post. But unless you have a full time proofreader, it can be difficult to judge your own work. That is why Grammarly is here! Grammarly not only acts as an advanced spell check, but it will also rewrite sentences if needed. It also has a built in plagiarism tool!
And while there are literally hundreds more blogging resources across the web, these are some of our favorites. In fact, we love them so much, because they have become nearly essential for blogging.
Contact TKD Design today for more help with writing, optimizing, and publishing your site’s posts.
