If you’ve been around Blogelina for any length of time, you’ve seen us offer loads of ideas for tools to maximize your time when blogging. Here’s a roundup of all those tools, and then some. There’s a Tool for every need. We’re so lucky to be in the age we live in!
Let me remind you of this trick of productivity. Every time you sit down and face a task, ask yourself:
- Do I need to do this now?
- Can I automate this?
- Can I delegate this?
These are time management funnels from Rory Varden. You need to dedicate time for every task so they don’t overwhelm you. That takes care of the first funnel. If it’s scheduled for tomorrow, do it tomorrow. If it’s for today, what time? Now? After lunch? Leave it then and move on.
Tools and techniques answer the second funnel. Anything and everything that can maximize your time, use them.
As for the third funnel, do you need to use the tools yourself? You might want a VA, writer, web developer, or graphic designer to handle them instead, so you can focus on what matters most, like your core services and growing your business.
Content and Marketing Tools for Your Blog
Blogging is your presentation to the world. It’s your front room. By itself, it’s already a marketing tool. So blogging revolves around content and marketing. The tools I use, found and included here, inspired this collection.
All of these are free or have free trials– because come on, you pay for awesomeness!
For filling and setting up your editorial calendar and collaboration with your team:
- Wunderlist
- Trello
- IFTTT
- Todoist
- Google Calendar
- Toodle-do
- Co-Schedule
- Buzzsumo
- Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer
- Feedly
- Pulse
- Alltop
- Paper.li
- Social Mention
- Open Site Explorer
- Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
- Headline Generator
- Headline Analyzer
For watching your schmoozing through interaction and links:
- Buzzstream
- Mention
- Social Mention
- SproutSocial
- Open Site Explorer
- Screaming Frog
- BrokenLinkChecker
- Majestic
- Xenu Link Sleuth
For blog maintenance: block and discourage spam.
To keep an eye on your ads and remove the headaches so only the income and thrill remains: BuySellAds, AdRotate and WP-Insert
For your lead magnets:
- Google Forms
- Wufoo
- NinjaForms
- Picreel
- Leadpages
- Feedburner
- Feed Validator
Content audit (How’re ya doing? Are you doing it right? Is everything all right?):
- Moz Content
- Open Site Explorer
When you’ve got a blog and countless other social media accounts, you need password management:
A roundup of the best password managers from PC Mag.
Your social media management platforms and tools
Social media is marketing, and marketing is Social Media. These platforms have great features free, and more heavyweight powers in the paid tiers.
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Tweetdeck
- Audiense (formerly SocialBro)
- Commun.It
- SocialOomph
- Sendible
Social media tools
DIGG DIGG and Sumo Me Image Sharer: Fool-proof tools that makes your blog lazy-proof. All your readers need to do is click on any of the social share buttons to share your blog, tweet something, pin your images, etc,.
Sumo Me’s Free Tools:
I love SumoMe! This is the blogger’s best friend, but especially beginner bloggers, who don’t have the funds to throw at paid tools.
- List Builder – create a fancy lightbox pop up to build email subscriptions (for MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse and many others).
- Share – for mobile/web sharing of your posts
- Welcome Mat – a landing page call to action that pops up when visitors land on your website. You can start building your list!
- Heat Maps – shows you where people go and stay (or leave) on your website
- Scroll Box is an email collection box triggered by how far your reader makes it down the screen.
- Smart Bar is a free alternative to Hello Bar, a floating bar on top or at the bottom of the page to invite people to subscribe.
- Highlighter makes it easy to click to tweet about your article by selecting popular parts of your writing
- And we all know and love Image Sharer!
For valuable insight on your blog and social media marketing/campaigns
KISSmetrics and Sprout Social – KISSmetrics measures engagement, not likes and views, but what makes your audience kiss you through comments and shares, so to speak. Sprout Social does the same, measuring and monitoring your engagement and influence scores. Both deliver their reports in a clean visual.
Speaking of no technical mumbo-jumbo there’s also–
Quill Engage – Takes your Google Analytics report (including your Facebook conversions), translates it and delivers the most important points to you in everyday English.
Can’t talk about social media without…
Image and graphics tools:
- Stencil
- Nimbus Screenshot
- Snappa, Canva, Pablo, PicMonkey
- Haiku Deck
- Thinglink
- Piktochart and Infogram
- Skitch
- Quickmeme, Meme Generator
- Pixlr
If you’re serious about blogging, you don’t just click publish.
You also measure. What do you use? Yoast is great for its Analytics and SEO best practices
You also promote. This goes back to the schmoozing and social media tools above, and email tools, reaching out to influencers and fellow bloggers.
- Reddit – Not just for getting ideas on what to write about– with luck, strategy and the right topic, your blog post has a potential of going viral here. As of June 2015, that’s 36 million user accounts and billions of comments you’re tapping into.
- LinkedIn Pulse – a self-publishing app for writers, bloggers, and industry experts– all the right audiences to impress and give you the chance for a breakthrough.
As usual, I looked around and ShoutMeLoud has a mega collection of blogging tools for your perusal! Blogging is no longer an idle hobby. It’s smart and it can be cut-throat. These tools are weapons, really, to give you the ability to have an edge over your competitors! But yeah, we don’t see each other as competitors. That’s the beauty of blogging: it’s one huge resource, isn’t it? It’s just a matter of becoming one of the trusted resources.
So, what tools have you used, and which do you plan to try out?
Please share in the comments below!
