There Are Loads Of Great Blogging Tools For Beginners!
If you are looking for the best blogging tools – from platforms to resources – then you are in luck! Having been through the process of starting a blog three times now, we think we have something to say on the matter!
If you are new to blogging (maybe determining if blogging is for you) then starting off with the right tools from day one can make all the difference in your growth. Just so you know,
So, here’s our advice for beginners on how to start a blog, tools to use, and tips that we wish we would have known! We have tried out a lot of different tools and we love using the following to achieve our blogging success.
Good Hosting
If you want to make it as a blogger, good hosting is essential. Hosting is the backbone of your site – and if your site is down, you aren’t going to get any visitors.
We would recommend that you are self-hosted. This means that you purchased your domain and hosting separately and they were brought together to bring your site online. We believe that platforms like Wix, WordPress.com, and other website builders have limited potential to grow and scale with you.
We’ve tried a few different hosting companies so far and we really like Siteground. Just so you know, we HAD Bluehost but we just overall have a better experience with Siteground. To be honest,
Siteground has an affiliate program, too, but they have also helped us out quite a few times when we had troubles with plug-ins, site errors etc. Their support is almost instant through chat, and they have always been nice and super fast to fix things. You can check them out here!
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Trello
Coming from the world of startups before we dove into blogging and writing, we got introduced to Trello. This online tool is essential to our success because it keeps us organized, on track, on time, and on task!
Basically, Trello allows you to create tasks on “cards” which can be moved between different columns on “boards”. For blogging, you might name the columns – Ideas, In Progress, Working, Published – and a blog post can move between them as you write it. It helps you (and potential team members) to know where tasks are in the completion cycle!
You can also label the cards to keep them categorized, you can set due dates, and much, much more! We love Trello – check it out here.
Keysearch
Depending on the niche you are blogging in and how seriously you want to take your blogging, keyword research is something you should do when writing posts. Good keyword research helps you write posts that are relevant to people searching and reading. That’s just good content creation.
While there are loads of tools out there (some are very expensive and complicated to use), there’s one that is simple to use and pretty cheap at the introductory price range: Keysearch. We love Keysearch – we use it literally every single day.
In short, Keysearch allows us to search for keywords in different languages for different audiences to help us guide what to write based on difficulty and the number of searches on a keyword or phrase. Now, it’s s guide – it’s NOT the official ranking that comes from Google.. but it’s pretty good to gauge which keywords are good and which are awful.
Blogging without a tool like
Tailwind
Tailwind is a Pinterest (and Instagram) scheduler – and an absolute life saver for us. We know that there are people that swear by manual pinning, but we just don’t have the time to spare during the day. If it wasn’t for Tailwind, our pinning would be quite inconsistent – and we all know that Pinterest doesn’t like that.
Using Tailwind for Pinterest allows us to spend more time on writing new, engaging blog posts or experimenting with our pin design to increase click-through-rate.
If you feel like there are just not enough hours in the day and you feel overwhelmed already with all the tasks you have to do for your blog, then give Tailwind a try. They have a free trial (no credit card required) which is the perfect opportunity to try it out. Start Your Free Tailwind Trial Here!
Buffer
If you want a good tool for helping you out with social media posting, growth, and engagement, then Buffer is for you. There are other services (like HootSuite) but we’ve used Buffer over the last few years and like it.
Buffer has a free version that has a limit on the accounts you can link. But it’s still great if you want to just keep your Twitter and/or Facebook feed alive with fresh content you are writing. We have also worked with the paid version (through other companies) and it’s pretty thorough to work with! You can check out Buffer here.
Canva
When it comes to graphics and pins for Pinterest, we mainly use Photoshop and Lightroom to edit our photos and make pins. That said, if you are a beginner blogger and don’t have any previous experience with these programs, then starting out with Canva is great.
Your learning curve as a new blogger will be steep enough already… so you don’t need to add Photoshop to that mix. You can always learn that later when you want more options than what you can create with Canva.
We have used Canva a lot in the past and still use it every once in a while now. For example, we just recently designed our business cards with it.
One important tip we would like to give you: try to customize the templates as much as you can when creating Pinterest pins on Canva. Otherwise, it can be difficult to stand out on Pinterest – and when your pins don’t stand out it can be difficult to get traffic to your website. If you want to check out Canva, you can do it here.
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Grammarly
If you are a terrible speller or typer (Bruce is bad at typing) then Grammarly might be your best friend. Basically, Grammarly is like the spell-check in Microsoft Word but it lives on your computer or in your browser. You can use it to spellcheck documents, blog posts, social captions, and more.
There’s a good Chrome extension if you use Google Chrome to browse the internet. We use the free version and love it. As we said, it is great for catching typos which always happens when we first start typing out a blog post. We always read things through for a final proofread before posting – but Grammarly makes this final proofread go more smoothly!
There is also a paid option that offers more functionality. For example, it suggests synonyms for words you have written. This is something that we might invest in in the future, especially since Lisa is not a native English speaker and sometimes has some trouble coming up with different words. But for now, we are happy with the free version.
Yoast SEO
Finally, we come to a good WordPress plug-in for SEO. Search Engine Optimization is super important when you are starting as a blogger. Knowing what to write is one thing – but knowing how to write it (and how to build your entire site) is also important when it
Yoast is a plug-in that can help you with that. This means it helps you build/write blog posts that will (ideally) be seen favorably in Google’s eyes. The plug-in isn’t complicated and offers suggestions on where to tweak or change things. Remember, they are suggestions and not a magic blueprint.
Yoast is good to check when starting out blogging but after a
If you are blogging on WordPress.org, download Yoast SEO here.
And there you have it – some of the best blogging tools for beginners. Some of these you might love and some you might dislike from the moment you first try them. As we said, there are variations of most of these so do a little more research and find ones you like. We love everything above and wouldn’t be where we are without them. That’s a truth – so let us know which ones you like!
As always, Stay Curious,
-B&L
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