Friday 17 August 2018

5 of the Best Blogging Tools

Blogging has proven to be one of the best ways to grow your business online. Blogs give you the opportunity to showcase your brand as an authority, publish consistent content and get more traffic to your website.

However, just like with social media marketing, paid advertising and other online marketing strategies, there are several different steps and tasks involved with blogging.
Creating, organizing, publishing and promoting content can take a lot of time. Luckily, there are some great blogging tools that help make the process easier for marketers who want to implement blogging into their content marketing strategy.

I have compiled a list of five (5) blogging tools to make your audience closer to you.


1. WordPress

The first step in the blogging process is to build a place for all of your content to live. WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) available and it’s perfect for blogging. WordPress powers over 74 million websites like: Techcrunch, mashable and many others and is particularly popular among businesses. Some of the key benefits of WordPress for blogging are:
  • Ease of use
  • Simple content editor
  • A wide selection of themes/templates to create a professional looking blog
  • A variety of free and premium plug-ins that allow you to add cool features to your blog without needing to know how to code or develop
  • A built-in blogging feature
  • Painless integration with several other tools you may use
  • A very helpful and active support forum and community
  • You can have multiple users with different permission levels so your entire team can contribute
you can also add any existing site you have built else where to WordPress.

2. Yoast SEO Plug-in

One of the most popular ways to get traffic to your blog posts, particularly if you don’t have an established audience, is through search engine optimization (SEO). Organic search traffic comes from people who use Google, Bing or other search engines from looking up specific phrases. Once they receive their results, they can enter your site. This is why it’s important to have a high rank on search engines, so you get more traffic to your blog.
There are a variety of factors that impact SEO, but the two major categories everything falls under are:
  1. On-page factors: Such as meta titles, Web development, urls, the actual content on each page and page structure
  2. Off-page factors: Such as backlinks, mentions of your company/website online and social factors
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plug-in designed to help you improve some of the most important on-page SEO factors–even if you aren’t experienced with Web development and SEO. This plug-in takes care of everything from setting up your meta titles and descriptions to creating a sitemap. Yoast even helps you tackle the more complex tasks like editing your robots.txt and .htaccess.

3. Canva

Having a blog post full of text makes your content less appealing and will immediately turn visitors off. Adding in visuals like infographics, charts and other images can help break up your content and make it easily digestible.

The problem that a lot of bloggers run into is figuring out how to integrate images into their content. This leads to bloggers loading their posts with stock images that aren’t eye catching or of any value to the post. Canva is a free tool that makes it easy to create custom graphics to go with your blog posts.
Whether you want to make infographics, featured images or just a few visuals to go within your posts, you can do it all in Canva.

One of the best things about Canva is it comes loaded with templates so all of your graphics can be sized perfectly for each specific social media site. If you want an image to be easy for your readers to Pin, choose the Pinterest template. Or maybe you want something that people can Tweet. You’d then just choose the Twitter template.

4. Google Analytics

Your content is created and you’ve been promoting it through social media and email marketing tools. Now, you need to know the results of your efforts. Google Analytics is the most popular blogging tool to track the performance of your content.
The more you log-in and check your analytics, the more comfortable you’ll become with the dashboard. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your blog, make it a priority.

5. Readability Test Tool

Would it shock you to find out the average college freshman reads at a 7th grade level? That means if your writing is too technically advanced, your audience may not fully understand your content.
The Readability Test Tool helps you ensure your blog posts are easy to read. It uses the top readability indicators to let you know the approximate grade level of your content.

You might also like: Two ways in which you can make money from Google

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