Nobody in the world, no matter how prolific they are, can afford to be inspired all the time. From relatively mundane writers blocks that happen because of other things going on in our lives to more serious situations where the information we’ve learned to so heavily rely on, suddenly dries up for months on end. How does one deal with such roadblocks?
Different people have their own ways of taking care of the problem, but one of the most consistently effective methods is having the right set of tools to back you up. Whether for inspiration, to improve your writing, increase productivity or bolster your marketing efforts, there exist dedicated tools that take care of your exact problem.
These are our 17 favorite blogging tools for streamlining every area of the content creation process.
1. Canva
Canva is one of the most useful tools you can integrate into your workflow. This app’s main function is to create custom images that can be used as part of your social media marketing efforts.
Stock photos are great and all but it’s often difficult to find a photo that captures the right emotions, and even when it does, some editing work still has to be done – a logo will likely need to be added, as will promotional text. If you aren’t skilled with Photoshop (which is most of us), Canva offers a beautiful GUI for producing very detailed photos.
2. Google Keyword Planner
A lot of research goes into writing blog posts – appropriate titles, images, sites to be linked and keywords to use. Google’s Keyword Planner takes care of the latter of these concerns for you.
It gives you access to a variety of keywords, depending on your input, and you can then pick them according to competition, uniqueness, search volume, or length. Using the right set of keywords is an effective means of targeting very specific audiences.
3. Evernote
Evernote is a well-known note-taking app. It’s most obvious functionality is taking notes that can be synced across all your devices. Since you never know when inspiration might strike, this app is useful for taking notes when an interesting idea strikes. But the most interesting feature that Evernote gives access to is the web clipper.
If you often get stumped on which topics you should write for your blog, a great way of making sure you have plenty of content to reference is saving the relevant webpages as you browse. “Bookmarks easily get disorganized because they serve as a central location for nearly everything. To save all that information in a well-organized place, the web clipper is all you need,” says Monica Rachel from professional writing services, she often uses this service and even glad to advise it to other writers.
4. Grammarly
Grammarly is a generous blogging tool that can be used to correct your spelling and grammar in a matter of minutes. By using Grammarly, you ensure that people don’t wander off after running into typos and improper grammar on your site.
The free plan has a very detailed feature set and qualifies as one of the tools every blogger should use before they post a new article. The paid plan comes with more comprehensive details, including plagiarism checks and recommendations for better writing.
5. Ahrefs
Google Keyword Planner is a great piece of tech but it sacrifices a lot of key features for the sake of simplicity and mass-market appeal. Ahrefs has no such limitations. It is a keyword planner that you can use to find the best targeted keywords ordered by search volume and competition intensity.
While this isn’t cheap (or free), it comes with heavy-hitting features like adding websites to your search lists, metrics on which keywords get the most clicks and the number of social shares they get. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
6. Hemingway
Aside from being an international author of international acclaim, Ernest Hemingway was also famous for his particular writing style. He detested the passive voice and believed that there was no bigger scourge in writing than using overly long sentences and unnecessary words.
The Hemingway Editor makes and attempts at enforcing readability rules like helping you to break down complex sentences and eliminate the use of too many adverbs.
7. MailChimp
Emails are one of the most effective marketing tools. According to Mckinsey, the next-closest marketing tool, social media, is up to 40 times less effective than email marketing. MailChimp is a business-friendly platform that allows you to do everything that involves marketing campaigns – from designing templates to managing simultaneous campaigns. It’s easy to use and the free plan comes with enough features to cater to the average businessperson.
The free plan allows you to send up to 10,000 emails a month to a maximum of 2,000 subscribers, which is perfect for SMBs.
It also gives you access to an in-built CRM that can be used to monitor subscribers and comes with very detailed integration options. If you’re a small to medium business that relies on tools like Zapier and WordPress, then MailChimp is the perfect solution.
8. Rushessay
When the inspiration to create content is completely lacking, but you still need to publish an article, rushessay.com is a tool you can use to generate SEO-optimized content. The service’s name is a bit of a misnomer. While it does offer assignment help, it is also a go-to source for different types of content for businesses of all sizes, even multilingual SEO content.
9. Audacity
With the massive resurgence in popularity that podcasts have been enjoying of late, it might be time for bloggers to dabble in the world of audio content creation. In which case, few tools – paid or otherwise – come close to the extreme feature set that Audacity provides. It can be used for recording audio – interviews with influencers are a good use case, but it is also quite useful for editing them.
10. Impact Blog Title Generator
For those days when you don’t feel inspired enough to come up with something to write about, Impact Blog Title Generator is there to save the day. Type in the primary keyword you want to work with and it will provide hundreds of different tile options to use.
When the inspiration well is particularly dry, this tool even has a “Writer’s Block” option, which does exactly what you’d expect – it gives space to unleash your creativity.
11. Google Docs
Most bloggers prefer to use their default blogging platforms to write and edit content, but Google Docs has a lot of features that can be used to greatly streamline the content generation process. If you’re willing to put in the work and do some digging, Google Docs allows the installation of extensions that will let you post directly to WordPress.
Aside from team collaboration, Google also debuted a grammar checker on the website relatively recently, though the spell checker has always been around.
12. Buffer
Buffer is one of the most efficient social media management tools you will ever come across. The main functionality it offers is scheduling and managing social media posts on different social media platforms. You can individually customize every post for each platform you make a post before having Buffer post them for you immediately.
One of the most interesting features it includes is the ability to automatically post at times of the day deemed likely to gain the most traction. You can even A/B test through the app if you’re not sure it does what it claims to do.
13. Toggl
Toggl is a tool that can be used to track how much time you spend on specific tasks. The most effective way to become a better writer, for example, is writing more content. Toggl can be used to enforce such constraints, or for the less creative, it can also be simply used to record the amount of time you’ve been working on a project.
They also offer pretty detailed visualizations to help you understand what would otherwise be meaningless numbers on a screen.
14. Google Analytics
Speaking of tracking metrics, Google Analytics is by far the most used analytics tool in the world, and with good reason. It’s a mature framework with relatively detailed bits of information that can be used to track the number of visitors on your website and the different actions they take on your website. No blogger has any real excuse for not using Google Analytics since it’s completely free.
Some pieces of data that they make available (and you might find useful) include average session duration, source of incoming traffic, most visited pages, user retention, visitor count and unique visitor count.
15. Essayshark
Another great service that can be relied on when content marketing ideas just don’t click is EssayShark. Again, don’t mind the massive misnomer – this is more than just a resource to pay for papers. It’s a custom paper writing service company that gives you access to several writers all around the world. After judging these according to the portfolios made available through the website, you’re free to pick who best fits your requirements.
16. Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
Anyone that uses WordPress as their main blogging platform has no doubt come across Yoast at one point or another in their careers. Since its introduction, it has quickly grown in popularity and established itself as the go-to plugin for improving SEO.
Part of its charm is the fact that it comes with a very generous free plan that does everything from scanning your page for keyword density to giving you recommendations for lengthening or shortening certain paragraphs. If you need to carry out quick and comprehensive content analysis checks on your content, few other tools on the market come anywhere close to the capability Yoast offers.
It even comes with hard-to-find features like a sitemap generator, an internal link builder and social media integration tools to further bolster what should by now be a bulletproof campaign.
17. EMV Headline Analyzer
One of the most common SEO mistakes marketers make is forgetting to optimize their headlines. A proper headline is often referred to as a work of art because it needs to have the perfect balance of length and preferably, emotions. The EMV Headline analyzer is a tool to help you do just that.
The Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) headline analyzer scans your headlines for emotional words and returns a score based on other commonly-used EMV words. It also gives you a list of words that can be used to improve things.
Conclusion
There are hundreds of different tools out there that claim to grant your writing a massive boost, but not every one of them delivers on those promises. This list features everything from content generation tools like Canva to analytics tools like Google Analytics. Integrating each of them to your workflow will remove a lot of the friction that normally exists and will save you time, increase productivity and possibly dig you out of the empty well of lost inspiration.
Author’s bio lines
Tiffany Harper is a talented writer from New York, an extremely active woman, and a real leader. She began her career as a journalist and later proceeded as an educational writer and editor. Now she works as an expert consultant with Superior Paper writing service, which might be one of the best paper writing services, mostly in the technology digital marketing area. Please do not hesitate to contact her on Twitter.
