No Fluff, Only Must-Have Stuff
Blogging is mostly about writing informative and engaging content. However, good quality content is not the only component that makes for a successful blog. You’ll also need amazing graphics, impeccable grammar, and proper search engine optimization (SEO), among other things. Therefore, a wise thing to do, would be to look for the best blogging tools for beginners to help you get started with these things.
Fortunately, we’ve done all the research for you. By now, you probably know what blogging platform you want to use. However, the right blogging tools can make your life a lot easier, and we know exactly which ones you need!
In this article, we’ll look at seven essential blogging tools for beginners. We’ll show you what you can use them for, and for each one, we’ll also suggest an alternative. You can use our picks for any blogging platform, including WordPress. So, let’s dive right in!
📚 Table of contents:
Canva gets a lot of flack from professional graphic designers, but it’s a lifesaver if you’re not a professional. With this tool, you get to create a variety of designs, such as logos, infographics, featured images, backgrounds, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Canva comes with a simple visual builder and a broad collection of pre-designed elements you can use in your graphics. Therefore, we think it’s one of the best blogging tools for beginners. It helps you create essential graphics for your site without having to hire a graphic designer!
📌 How to get the most out of Canva: The service offers a robust free plan that comes with numerous templates and pre-made designs. We recommend that you stick with the free plan as it offers more than enough features for new blogs.
👉 Alternative: If you want to experiment with more design features, try using Pixlr. This is a freemium online photo editor that offers more advanced editing options than Canva.
Writing error-free content can help you project a professional image and establish authority in your niche. Grammarly is your best bet if you can’t afford to get someone to edit and proofread your blog posts. You can use this tool as a standalone app or a browser extension.
Grammarly analyzes your writing and checks it for spelling and grammar mistakes. It can also make suggestions on how to simplify phrases to improve the flow of the content. You can click on the suggestions as you’re writing your post and choose whether to implement them or not.
If you’re confident in your writing skills, you might not need a tool such as Grammarly. However, everyone makes mistakes, and it’s nice to have a safety net. Plus, it saves you having to proofread your own work.
📌 How to get the most out of Grammarly: You can set up the Grammarly extension for your favorite browser and it will automatically check your work for errors. If you just want the tool to proofread your text, you can use the free version.
👉 Alternative: The Hemingway Editor is a text editor that analyzes your writing to help make it more concise and easier to read. If you think your writing needs a bit more punch, consider trying out this tool.
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor your blog’s presence on Google. This tool can provide valuable insights into your blog’s performance, including which keywords drive traffic to your site and how well your content ranks in search results.
If you’re new to blogging, this information will help you understand which of your content ranks best and use that information to optimize your posts. Search Console also gives you reports on technical errors and other factors that can affect your rankings.
Search Console is one of the most user-friendly SEO blogging tools for beginners. It doesn’t overwhelm you with information and focuses on specific SEO factors.
📌 How to get the most out of Google Search Console: We recommend that you start using it straight away so it can begin collecting data, even if your blog is brand new. To do this, you’ll need to verify your blog by adding a small piece of code to your website. Once verified, you can access detailed reports on your blog’s search performance.
👉 Alternative: Google Analytics provides incredibly detailed information about your blog’s traffic, audience demographics, and user behavior. However, it can be a little overwhelming if you’re new to SEO.
LowFruits is a keyword research tool specifically designed to help you find “low-hanging” fruit. This means it helps you identify low-competition keywords that are easier to rank for in search results. These tend to be long-tail keywords that answer very specific queries users might have.
Targeting these types of keywords is the way to go for most new blogs. Low-competition search terms will enable you to get your blog in the top results of search engines for at least some queries, even if they don’t have a lot of traffic.
To use LowFruits, simply enter a topic or keyword related to your blog. The service will generate a list of related search terms for you to target.
Unlike most other keyword research tools, LowFruits tells you which search terms have top results with low domain authority (easier pickings), how many words those pages have, and what type of content you’d be competing against. This makes it one of the best blogging tools for beginners when it comes to SEO.
📌 How to get the most out of LowFruits: We recommend that you use the pay-as-you-go option. It’s much cheaper than alternatives such as Ahrefs or Semrush and it gives you more than enough searches for blogging research.
👉 Alternative: Google Keyword Planner is another helpful keyword research tool, although it is primarily aimed at advertisers and requires a Google Ads account.
You might have heard of Ahrefs – it’s one of the most popular SEO blogging tools for beginners and professionals alike. It does everything from helping you research new keywords to producing on-site SEO and competitor reports.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a free tool that enables you to analyze your blog’s backlink profile. It helps you identify which sites are already linking to your content as well as opportunities for the acquisition of more high-quality backlinks.
Backlinks are essential for improving your blog’s search engine rankings. Search engines take backlinks as an indicator of your site’s credibility and authority.
You can start by visiting the Ahrefs Backlink Checker page and entering your site’s URL (or that of any specific page). The tool will then generate a detailed report on your backlinks, including the referring domains, anchor texts, and the overall Domain Rating (DR).
📌 How to get the most out of the Ahrefs Backlink Checker: We recommend that you use the tool periodically to check for new backlinks. If you’re not seeing the number of backlinks grow over time, there may be a problem with your content strategy.
👉 Alternative: Semrush’s Backlink Analytics is another great option for analyzing your backlink profile and identifying opportunities for improvement. It’s also free and provides you with in-depth results.
Email marketing is essential to any blog, even if you’re just starting out. Most successful blogs have email lists with hundreds or thousands of subscribers. Every time they want to promote something, they can simply send out an email to their subscribers.
Sender is one of the best email marketing platforms on the market. You can use it to collect email addresses from blog readers, craft campaigns, and send regular newsletters. Plus, you get to use a visual builder to design pixel-perfect emails and even automate campaigns so that messages go out at the right time.
📌 How to get the most out of Sender: You might want to take advantage of their generous free plan, which supports up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month. As a new blogger, this is probably more than enough!
👉 Alternative: Sendinblue is another popular email marketing tool with a range of features, including email automation and landing page creation.
High-quality images can make your content more interesting and engaging. However, not every blogger is a good photographer. Therefore, one of the most essential blogging tools for beginners is a stock photography website like MyStockPhotos.
MyStockPhotos offers a vast collection of high-resolution images for bloggers to use in their content. The site’s easy-to-use search function can help you find the perfect image for your blog posts.
Every image in MyStockPhotos uses the Creative Commons Zero license. This means that you can use them for any type of project you want, even commercial ones. You can also modify photos and you don’t need to include any attribution.
To use MyStockPhotos, simply search for images related to the topic you’re writing about. Then, you can download them in your preferred resolution and upload them to your blog.
📌 How to get the most out of MyStockPhotos: Use as many photos as you need to make your blog posts more engaging. Don’t be shy, they’re free!
👉 Alternative: Pexels is another excellent source of free stock photos, offering a wide variety of images and videos for your blog.
You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT. It’s the hottest AI tool on the market and it can help you come up with topic ideas, catchy post titles, meta descriptions, and other content. It can also help you format and structure your posts, though we don’t recommend using it to create entire articles.
Aside from some special use cases, most people using ChatGPT will not have access to real-time data. ChatGPT’s information bank was based on input through September 2021. This means that any events or things you want to ask about after that, it won’t have information on.
It’s also well established that it does not always generate accurate results – though it won’t reveal that to you. In fact, it’ll sometimes present false information with full confidence. Therefore, you may want to double-check any information provided by AI tools so as to ensure that the blog posts you publish are informative and factual.
Conclusion 🧐
In this post, we’ve looked at some of the best blogging tools for beginners. Each tool on our list can help you perform a specific task, be it SEO, creating graphics, or finding stock images. These are all things that can help you grow your blog.
You can start by using LowFruits to identify the right keywords for your content and Google Search Console to better understand what’s working and what isn’t. Once you start getting more visitors, you can set up Sender to build an email list and send regular newsletters.
Do you have any questions about which blogging tools for beginners to use? Let us know in the comments section below!
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