So I already did the tools I use for writing and now it is time for blogging. Blogging makes use of a lot of tools. Because you have to engage in social media to help with your blog. Well, it isn’t a hardship, engaging in social media is fun.
Obviously, though, there are different needs for different sized blogs. This one, my wee one, still growing by inches, doesn’t need as much as my other one where I made at least a little income on it… it is modest sized. So these are the basic things that help a blogger out to start with.
Nevertheless, here are some tools I use regularly for my blogs.
Grammarly
I have the free version of Grammarly on everything it goes on including my blogs. Because it just makes it easier to find those typos when you are tired.
Check your site out
Check your template and make any changes you need. Also, check with Website Grader to see if there is anything at all you need to adjust for traffic and processing.
Stock Images:
We all need stock images we can legally use. I usually use Pixaby or Pexels. But The Stocks has them and a lot more so I got there first and explore all the options they have for the perfect picture.
Image shrinkery
Your blog will have a hard time loading if your images are too big. There are more than a few ways to shrink them but the one I use is TinyPNG. It is free. It is easy. And you can even do 20 images at once. And it does speed up your blog. I have learned that from experience.
Customer appreciation button
Making money from a blog is difficult at the best of times. We want to write great content but we do not always see anything from it. As we all know there are affiliate marketing, offering a product, and ads, all of which do help a little. But I added Buy me a Coffee for customer appreciation if they so feel like appreciating that is. I put this under every post. I tried Paetron but you just do not get any hits there at all, maybe because I just have a wee blog and a modest blog. Anyway, it is always nice when people show their appreciation for your work. Income wise for me at the moment is very important so I am trying to make income at what I do best and that is a very difficult thing to do.
Make links short to market blog
We all know this one. I use Bitly
Use Pinterest
Now we should use a lot of social media to promote our blog. People forget about Pinterest but with Facebook changes, on my main blog, I get far more traffic from Pinterest now. The account for this blog is smaller. I utilize Tailwind to schedule pins at peak time and about 3-5 times a day.
These are my boards on my larger blog. You can see that I have a lot of boards, which is essential. As is a lot of pinning. Sharing content. And using sharable boards.
Mailing list
This is important for any decently sized blog. You can offer your products. You can give deals. Chat about your progress. All sorts of things. I choose Mailchimp for this.
Scheduling to social media
There are a lot of ways to do this. For Facebook use theirs, because they have a preference for it. But for other posts to social media, I use Buffer and also Tweetdeck
Content production
I use Canva and find it superior for image production. I make, always, a pinnable image for my blog post. And then content images for social media. Like this one for my page.
Other things I have yet to try
- Headline analyzer Getting a headline that will pull in traffic, more than it would with the one you choose, is a great idea
- Yoast– helps you with your SEO so you do not miss things
- Google Trends– to lock onto some trending topics to blog about
- Content generator– Looking for a topic… maybe this can give you some ideas
Other posts to check out because I said so:
Marketing: That author platform
Writer woes: Marketing and the author platform
The Wyrd 