8 Great Blogging Productivity Tools
Sarah
Successful blogging is a multi-faceted undertaking that requires more than just the skill of turning a phrase — bloggers must also produce quality content on demand. So while a background in English and a strong voice certainly help, increasing your productivity wherever possible is more important. However, productivity encompasses many facets, including organization, time management, and discipline, and with so much to focus on, it can be difficult to stay productive. That’s where blogging productivity tools come in.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of these tools that can help the average blogger get more done. In fact, quite a few are available at no cost. Here’s a handful of tools for blog writing that will get you started.
1. WordPress
As free blogging tools go, it doesn’t get much better than WordPress. This premier blog creation site allows anyone to easily build, customize, and launch a blog. Sure, you could put in the hours to learn HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but if you’re looking for a proven way to get your blog off the ground without the headache of learning to code, WordPress can get you there.
2. Grammarly
To be clear, there is no substitute for a professional editor. However, if you’re on a budget and can’t afford a professional to polish your content, you can turn to Grammarly in a pinch. This software is a step above a standard spell-checker and will do a decent job catching most of your grammatical errors, misspellings, and miscellaneous typos.
It’s still an investment at $29.95 per month, but if you want to produce high-quality blogs, you’ll need to ensure your content is as error-free as possible.
Depending on how you set up the app, you can have it check for more than standard spelling and grammar: it can also evaluate your sentence structure and writing style. And the upside to Grammarly (compared to hiring an editor) is that you’ll see the changes it wants to make in real-time. This means that you can pay attention to its suggestions and become a better writer over time.
However, don’t accept the tool’s every suggestion blindly: there’s no quicker way to sound like a robot that has a screw loose.
3. Creative Commons Media
Blogs that consist of nothing more than blocks of text are visually unappealing, which is why you rarely see blogs that don’t include graphics. However, you don’t necessarily want to pay for graphic images or waste time creating them in Photoshop.
That’s why media licensed with Creative Commons is a blogger’s best friend. This organization is devoted to free and open access to creative works, typically for use in educational content. Its search portal will dig through several outlets to find media you can use without paying a dime in royalties.
4. Pomodoro Timer
You may have tried racing against a ticking clock in an effort to make yourself more productive, but the Pomodoro technique is a particularly unique strategy that many people see significant success with. This strategy is based on the idea that breaking work into short intervals (usually 25 minutes) can dramatically increase focus and productivity.
You can find Pomodoro timers for free online or simply set a 25-minute alarm on your phone. When the timer goes off, take a few minutes to get up and get the blood flowing. Walk around, pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee, or stretch your legs.
While it might seem simple, dividing your work into short sprints will help you harness every ounce of creativity and get enough mental breaks to keep yourself fresh. And when you’re trying to build a library of blog posts, you’ll need all the rest you can get!
5. Dropbox
This cloud storage solution may not immediately strike you as a particularly useful blogging productivity tool, but when you think about how easy it is to access content from any device via Dropbox, you might reconsider.
After all, an idea may strike you anywhere and at any time. And while you can use a notes app to jot it down, you don’t want to have to retype it once you get home. You may not even remember to.
On the other hand, Dropbox allows you to sync your ideas and drafts across all your devices, making it easy to write on the go, pick up where you left off on another device, and work on your blog from anywhere.
6. Semrush
Once you’ve written your blog posts, optimization is the next step. And while you could spend hours trying to figure out the best keywords to use in your content, there’s a better solution.
Semrush is a very effective tool for researching the keywords you need to rank your blog posts in search engines. But unlike similar tools, it comes with a particularly useful feature: You can use it to check out your competition and see which keywords bring them the most traffic. As industry leaders will tell you, keeping your enemies close is a smart business strategy, and Semrush can help you track your competitors and share in their successes. It’s the next best thing to an SEO copywriting agency if you want to climb the search engine results and claim the top spot.
7. Surfer SEO
There are tools like Grammarly meant to make content more readable, and there are tools like Semrush to boost your rankings in search engine results pages. However, Surfer SEO is an AI-powered content optimization tool that’s seen huge strides in recent years in helping writers develop content that satisfies both readers and search engines.
Leveraging the power of keyword density analytics and natural language processing, Surfer can give recommendations on the fly for making your text more readable and findable. If you keep its recommendations in mind and apply them as you go, you should end up with a green Surfer score, indicating that your content is Surfer-approved for search engines and human readers.
For writers wanting a single tool to help with content creation and transform their blogs into professional content, you won’t find many better options.
8. Google Analytics
You’ll never know how far you need to go if you don’t measure your progress. Thankfully, it’s never been easier to analyze your results than with Google Analytics. This tool is designed to help bloggers track traffic, conversions, geo-data, popular content and searches, and even mobile visits.
This data can help you to hone your efforts for optimal success, investing more time and money in strategies that show success and ditching tactics that don’t seem to be paying off. Where blogging productivity solutions are concerned, this suite of tools is hard to beat. Companies worldwide use it daily to build and improve their digital presence.
Blogging Productivity Tools Will Get You Started — We’ll Get You Noticed
These blogging productivity tools can help you refine your writing, improve your SEO, and measure your results. They’ll also help you crank out more content and build an impressive backlog. However, if you want a one-stop shop that will scale with your business, free up your time, and get you noticed by the right audiences, get professional B2B blog-writing services from Write Collective.
Write Collective provides custom, high-quality content marketing packages for businesses of all sizes. So whether you need 10 pieces of content or 100 unique blogs, our talented team of writers has you covered.
If you want to build your brand image with quality blog content, connect with Write Collective today.