Blogging is one of the best ways to connect with the rest of the world. It helps you create your unique presence and establish yourself as a great thought leader. It allows you to share crucial information about the products and services of your business. Also, you can share your thoughts and opinion on various topics. Blogging acts as a great tool when it comes to creating a personality for your emerging business. High quality and consistently updated blog are the ideal way to grow your business and drive traffic.
But, to achieve all these, you have to keep in mind that blogging is not only about writing, but it is more than that. It is quite a lengthy process that includes doing research, putting your thoughts together, and of course, adding necessary images and screenshots. The process does not end here as it further requires you to optimize your content for search engines, including keywords, and then sharing it on the Web so readers can go through it. Of course, all these steps make blogging a time-consuming process that requires your diligent approach with a lot of patience. However, you can make it less time-consuming and more effective by using hundreds of blogging tools and applications available on the internet.
If you want your blogs to attract more and more readers, then make your blogs engaging. To make your blogging engaging and attractive, new technology has a lot of options. You can use several blogging tools to make your blogs beautiful, engaging, and impressive. All these blogging tools are available for free. These tools are essential if you want to become a confident, well-seasoned, and efficient blogger.
Here is the list of essential blogging tools that are available for free:
My Stock Photos
My Stock photos provide bloggers with creative and high-quality images to use in their designs for various purposes. The photos taken from the blogging tool can be used for marketing, advertising, business, and many other purposes. You can get updated images on the site as a community of expert photographers to keep adding photos to the site always. Its user interface is straightforward when it comes to searching for pictures from various categories. All images available are certified by CC0 license, which means you can use it for your commercial purposes.
Grammarly
Grammar and spelling errors are big pitfalls that are common in both native and non-native English speakers. These errors can make your readers lose their interest in reading your blogs. Grammarly is a great boon for the bloggers who are not so sure about their writing strength. The users can use the tool by adding it to their chrome. Powered by an artificial intelligence-based writing assistant, the tool checks for sentence structure, spelling, alternatives, punctuation, style, etc. It allows users to compose mistake-free, bold, and clear writing. Additionally, the free tool can organize the writing feedback according to your readers and give suggestions with perfect words that can help you express yourself better.
Todoist
To use Todoist is simple when it comes to adding tasks and completing them. But, the advantages of the tool are much more than that. You can use the tool to finalize a massive project for your team, schedule more events than expected ones, and keep track of your bills. Besides, you can set reminders, schedule weekly tasks, and turn your important emails into tasks. For bloggers, the tools are immensely crucial as they can organize their professional and personal life in a better way. Bloggers can use the app’s intuitive dashboard to organize your tasks in a list based on their priority. You can see your tasks’ progress, designate a particular person for a specific responsibility, keep the record of completed tasks, and create lists of subtasks.
Google Trends
Google Trends is one of the most fantastic services provided by the tech giant, which allows you to go through the list of top charts and hot searches of the day. It gives the record of most searched terms or phrases over a given period on Google. Bloggers can use it to research the keywords that have been searched comparatively more. It can show which keywords have triggered spikes more in the search volume. Besides, the tool helps give you information about the keywords that trend from top to bottom. You can even enter a specific keyword and find how it has performed in different locations over time.
Keywordtool.io
Being a well-seasoned blogger, if you are willing to get your blogs in the search engine rankings, then keyword research can help you the most. The free tool allows you to know about the specific keywords that your potential readers and customers are searching to create a useful blog about the specific topics. You can generate almost 750 reliable suggestions for long term keywords with the tool. To do all these, you don’t even need to create your account on the website. Additionally, you can get the keyword suggestions based on the language and Google domain you chose.
Sumo
The free blogging tool offers a whole set of different and useful tools that are immensely helpful in optimizing your site’s growth and make your users’ experience even easier and smoother on the website. From ecommerce and analytics to widgets of audience development and viral components, Sumo has a variety of tools that can be used for a variety of purposes. Bloggers can use the application effectively to make their blog engaging, boost their content sharing on the various social media platforms, drive more traffic, get more subscriptions through email, and a lot more advantages.
Yoast SEO
It is the most popular WordPress plugin for search engine optimization when it comes to your site performance. Getting more and more traffic to a website is entirely based on search engine optimization. The free application offers a wide range of useful features, tools, and settings, allowing you to optimize your site so it can get a higher rank in the search engine results. You can optimize your site for key phrases and keywords and provide a useful check for readability. The tool makes it easy for internet bots to crawl your website and provide the ability to work in every editor of WordPress and a lot more. Apart from these, it is easy to update your plugin regularly for efficiency.
Canva
Adding graphical content in the blogs makes them more enticing and capable of attracting more and more readers. The free tool helps bloggers create compelling content, even if you have little or no graphic design skills. With this handy tool, you can design beautiful and stunning graphics, including presentations, flyers, invitations, posts, business cards, etc. through pre-made templates. Also, you can drag-n-drop various elements, such as filters, icons, fonts, and stock images. It provides a photo editor, which is much easier to use, allowing you to change your image’s look by using settings such as filters, brightness, tint, and more.
Ahrefs
The application offers a wide range of search engine optimization tools that bloggers can use for free to get their site ranked higher in the search engine results. With the free blogging tool, you can research key phrases and keywords that are trending at the top, track your ranking’s progress, analyze the performance of your competitors, and a lot more. Ahrefs offer a lot more unique data points and useful features, which are an excellent source for bloggers. Some of its benefits include monitoring outbound links, getting alerts for keyword ranking, uncovering gaps in content, seeing the growth or decline of backlinks over time, etc.
Hemmingway
Lengthy, complicated words and sentences often come in the way of excellent writing, leaving it unclear and unimpressive for the readers. The free blogging tool is handy and paves the way for better and persuasive writing for bloggers who need to write frequently and for professional purposes. It highlights common and grammatical mistakes in your writing, points out lengthy and complicated sentences, and ultimately makes your writing look better and error free. The app highlights the different writing errors in different colors, allowing you to change your content quickly. Apart from these, bloggers can even format their content in the app instantly and then use it wherever they are willing.
Buffer
The social media app is perfect for keeping you abreast of your website’s analytics and performance on various social media platforms. It is easy to use and quick to set up the tool that allows its users to publish their brand’s story on social media platforms and measure its rate of engagement among the readers and audiences. Besides, the app allows the users to schedule the time to post your content on social media to make it massively useful. You can also use the tool for measuring your blog’s performance on various social media channels, creating more exciting reports and content, getting insight on the reach of the campaign, and rate of engagement and sales.
Desk
The little and straightforward yet intuitive tool is excellent for writers and clients for desktop publishing when working on blogging, writing, and note-taking. It helps users organize their thoughts and make their content ready for publishing on websites and other social media platforms. The app supports various publishing platforms, which include Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, etc. Besides, it offers a wide range of writing modes, shortcuts, and visual styles. Also, you will get a preview mode for the section of meta information and real-time editing.
The free app is useful when you want to search any personalized content according to your interest and save it for later use at any time, on any device. It is the best and one-stop destination for catching up on various news sources, your favorite blogs, and engaging content you have discovered but has not received the perfect place to go through them. You can save content from any device like mobile or computer through several integrations and applications and go through them offline. The tool is beneficial for bloggers and students, and various other users.
Meme Generator
People love memes as they not only entertain us but make us look at the brighter side of things. Memes are a great way to make your blog more engaging. Being a blogger, if you are willing to put up memes in your blogs and posts, then take the help of Meme Generator. With an easy and straightforward user interface, the app allows the users to generate or search memes of any type. It offers a wide range of visual and viral memes that you can add to your text.
Diigo
The powerful app is excellent at capturing information, sharing, and recalling tools, and storing information. With this app, the users can annotate various websites with virtual sticky notes or highlighting, categorize the different websites by notes, titles, groups and lists, and keyword tags. Besides, you can save the screenshot of the websites and share them with various groups. Also, you can find the desired results quickly while searching through bookmarks. Being a blogger, you can use the app to annotate the various web pages to use later for your blogs.
Evernote
With Evernote, you can capture anything like voice notes, web pages, images, texts, and a lot more. The app offers plenty of integrations and applications, just like Pocket, to save your desired items to your account. Further, you can access your notes or save items from anywhere through mobile devices or computers. Moreover, it will make things super-fast as you can search through all your items, notes, etc. The app helps you to focus on the professional, personal, and creative task at hand. Apart from these, you can attach your documents, organize tables and images, present ideas, and may more.
BlogJet
The developers of the app considered it as the most advanced blog manager and editor for Windows. It has the WYSIWYG editor; you don’t need to know HTML. With this speedy and fast app, you can add file attachments, YouTube videos, and Flickr images. Plus, the app has many other unique features, and it works with several formats of blogging.
Open Live Writer
The blog editor is very much popular among content creators. Bloggers can create new content, edit their previously written blogs, see their blogs before publishing to know how they will look, and set up plenty of blogs. You can add various things to make your blogs engaging, such as videos, Bing Maps, and images. The completely free app can be used with more than 100 plugins to enhance its functionality and add more features. You can also use the lightweight and powerful blog editor to compose blog posts or content offline.
Dropbox
The tool is considered to be the ultimate solution when it comes to syncing your files between your mobile devices and computer. You can use the Dropbox app, which works for every system and device. Also, the tool is integrated with many other apps. It makes your files not only safe and secure but also allows you to access them from anywhere. If you need to save various files to use them for later use, add all the files to Dropbox. Also, you can sync your files using any supported app.
ScribeFire
The users can get this extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. It is a feature-rich blog editor that allows its users to create and publish blog posts right from their browser. Further, the users can drop and drag images, texts, edit pages, categorize and tag, post to several blogs, schedule the time for posting blogs later, and many more. The app with endless features is both powerful and convenient to use.
Word Tracker
The app is convenient for determining what to write about and how to tweak the written articles so it can receive the maximum traction from the readers. With the blogging tool, you can find the most searched keywords for the subject of your content without leaving the editing screen. Besides, it allows its users to research the keywords and compare them with other instantly used keywords.
FireShot
The tool is an extension for Thunderbird, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and SeaMonkey. It allows its users to edit, capture, organize, annotate, upload, export, and print various screenshots from the Web. You can use a few capture options such as browser or selection window, page’s visible part, and the entire page. It provides a complete set of annotation and editing tools. The app comes with plenty of useful features and options. It integrates with email software allowing you to email the page you have captured.
Awesome Screenshot
It is a sharing, annotation, and capturing tool introduced by Diigo for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The users can capture the entire page, selected area, or the page’s visible part. The annotation tools of the app include adding arrows, text, shapes, and lines. Also, it offers a blur tool that works powerfully when it comes to protecting your personal information and privacy that may have been captured. The users will get three options to save your captured screenshots. You can save the content for a month to the Awesome Screenshot website, save it forever to Diigo, or you can also save your captured content on the computer.
Google Docs
Google Docs offer you the best way and most comfortable access to your saved content and blog posts from anywhere and anywhere. The only thing you will need to do is to save them in Google Docs. The web-based word processor allows you to work even on the go. Besides, you can collaborate with other apps in real-time. All these features have made Google Docs a tremendous and exceptional app for collaborative projects and posts.
Source :- https://harispot.com/free-essential-blogging-tools/
Daisy Martin is an avid technical blogger, a magazine contributor, a publisher of guides at mcafee.com/activate and a professional cyber security analyst. Through her writing, she aims to educate people about the dangers and threats lurking in the digital world .
