Blogging is a laborious, tedious, and sometimes frustrating activity for marketing professionals to pursue. That may explain why there are very few companies that do it really well.
Despite the challenges, blogging on a regular basis can and does deliver impressive results, not the least of which includes higher search engine rankings, new leads and thought leadership.
So, the Swyft team decided it was high time to share some of the tools we rely upon to produce our own three blogs. Here is a short-list of the must have blogging tools you will find useful.
Blog Topic Generator
Built by HubSpot, this tool can help you brainstorm some nifty titles for your upcoming blogs. Simply type in a few keywords you want to focus on, and the tool will spit out a few title ideas. The results can seem pretty canned from time to time, so don’t take the suggested titles as gospel but as a starting point for your topic creation.
Feedly
Feedly is a RSS reader that uses AI technology to filter out news based on your preferences. In addition to tracking business news and events relevant to your industry, Feedly uses keywords to filter articles and tracks which articles you’ve saved in the past to curate the perfect blend of stories tailored for your feed. Feedly makes sifting through the news and staying up to date on the latest trends and conversations (which can inform your blog post topics) easier than ever.. Best of all: it’s free to use.
WordPress
It would be remiss not to mention the platform that keeps our blog running in the first place. Not only can WordPress be used to write, design, and schedule blog posts, but it also makes it easy to add keywords to each post in order to optimize for SEO. WordPress offers different plans tailored for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and small businesses.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a marketing project management tool that includes strong blog scheduling support. Its intuitive calendar scheduling feature allows you to set up blog posts weeks out and even add social media posts in support of the blog post. It will also help you measure the popularity of your posts so you can dial in on what your followers enjoy the most. CoSchedule also makes it easy to work alone or in teams.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a must have for the writing-challenged among us. Not everybody went to school and studied English Literature or Journalism. Mastering those dangling participles and misplaced modifiers is no easy feat. Add the plugin to your browser and Grammarly will catch any writing mistakes faster than your high school composition teacher.
Canva
Canva is a must-have content marketing tool that can help you design anything from infographics to quote overlays to in-content images—without any graphic design experience. One of the most helpful features is the premade templates, which makes it even easier to create high-quality graphics without hiring a professional graphic designer. As an added bonus, content created in Canva can also be used across your social media.
Google Docs
Google’s word processing app is exceptional, automatically saves updates, is shareable with others on your team and doesn’t have all the distracting options that a Word doc has. In short, it allows you to write and edit efficiently and easily copy over to your blogging platform. We are using Google Docs to write this post now, in fact.
Yoast SEO
This free WordPress plugin is essential for applying best SEO practices to each of your blog posts. Yoast sits at the bottom of your post and allows you to quickly optimize a post with just a few clicks and text entries.
MOZ
MOZ is a keyword research tool that ensures you are targeting keywords with the highest amount of traffic along with a difficulty score for each word. MOZ also performs rank tracking, backlink analysis and site audits—practically everything needed to improve your site’s SEO.
Unsplash
A high traffic blog usually has appealing photos to draw in a reader. The problem is that most sources of quality stock photos can cost an arm and a leg. This is where tools like Unsplash come to the rescue. Unsplash has thousands of free-to-use photos across over 20 different categories to use for your blogging needs. Photos available on Unsplash are a collection of submissions from professional photographers, so you can use the best quality photo for the least amount of price.