Bloggers have deadlines. And within those deadlines, they have to come up with great topic ideas, click-worthy titles, engaging content, and eye-catching media. And they often have to conduct research before they ever sit down to write a post. Add to that the absolute expectation for perfect grammar and composition, and you understand that a blogger’s life is hard. To ease that life as much as possible, here are 10 tools for greater productivity at a faster rate.
Topic Idea Generators
1. Quick Sprout: Quick Sprout is a major source of ideas and suggestions for bloggers, but one great tool they offer is their topic generator. Once you know your competition, you can type in their URL’s and you will get a report of the posts that are getting the most views, responses and shares. You can then use those same topics for your own posts.
2. HubSpot Title Maker: This tool lets you enter 3 keywords related to your niche. HubSpot then generates 5 catchy and engaging titles which in turn give you 5 separate topic ideas. Do it every Sunday, and you have your post topics for the next 5 days.
Writing/Editing
3. BestEssay.Education: A custom writing and editing service with professional and creative copywriters – perfect place to go when you need to outsource some of your writing/editing to meet urgent deadlines and maintain your publishing schedule. Fully customized writing based upon your specifications
4. ProWritingAid: It may seem a bit weird that I am citing ProWritingAid on its own blog. But it is such a great tool, I want to recognize it and recommend it to anyone reading this post who has not yet tried it. This is a comprehensive editing and proofreading tool. It’s a great app, if you want flexibility in pricing for what your specific needs are. There is one version that is free and that will provide 19 reports related to grammar and composition errors. The Premium and Premium Plus versions are $35 and $40/year, for interactive editing, unlimited #’s of words, and plagiarism scans. Eliminate all embarrassing writing errors before you publish.
SEO
5. Yoast. A free WordPress plugin to get all that you need. Suggests meta tags, creates an XML sitemap and gives you an instant analysis of your SEO strength, making suggestions for improvement.
Media
6. Death to the Stock Photo: Sign up and receive a monthly email with a link to stunning, high resolution photos – free to use. A premium subscription allow access to all of their archives.
7. Canva: Design any kind of image you want, no matter how much of an amateur you are. Use stock templates or create your own. They provide a library of photography and illustrations, styles and fonts to make your graphics unforgettable.
8. SnapApp: Videos, interactive media – super easy to use. If you want quizzes, surveys, participatory videos and more, this is the newest trend in media for content marketing.
Distribution
9. Buffer: This will keep your publishing completely organized and on a schedule across all of your platforms. You determine the schedule and can even publish to the same channel multiple times a day with different headlines and images.
10. MailChimp: You can set up an automated system to automatically email all of your blogs posts out as you write them; you can also create special campaigns as you wish. It’s easy to create and design beautiful emails and is free to use for a contact list up to 2000 names.
No one can write your blog posts for you but these tools can make the whole process easier and certainly more enjoyable.
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Have you tried ProWritingAid yet? What are you waiting for? It's the best tool for making sure your copy is strong, clear, and error-free!
