Top 20 Online Tools For Bloggers (Must Read)
March 3, 2013 Blogging Tools
If you are blogging you most certainly need some new tools that will simplify your writing and make your work more effective. Keep reading. Here’s a list of the best online tools every blogger should know about:
Top 20 Online Tools For Bloggers |
Must Read : Blogger Resources
Quora is a great blogging tool you can use to find ideas you can elaborate on in your next blog posts. There’s a large number of topics you can choose from to create a feed of information related to your interests and see what other people want to know, what questions they post and the answers they get. You can also ask others to help you out answering your questions and sharing their own personal experiences on the subject. The same way you follow topics you can also follow particular questions you are interested in and get notified each time someone new provides an answer.
The Content Idea Generator is actually a Google document which automatically updates with news and stories related to your entered keywords and from a variety of sources, including Google News, Reddit, YouTube videos, tweets, public Facebook updates and much more. It’s also a great tool that can help you generate more ideas for your blog content.
If you are looking for a tool to help you track the content you find online you should try out Diigo. It will help you organize and store the interesting articles, notes, bookmarks or pictures you’ve collected for a quick retrieval when you’ll need them. You can also embed notes to the content you’ve already saved. Diigo also supports iPhones, iPads and Android devices.
With Disqus you can create a great community around your blog. You can vote comments up or down, keep an eye on regular commenters, include related blog content at the end of the post and see the comments as they happen, in real time, which makes the post and the comments much more connected with each other.
Pictures will help you attract your readers’ attention and invite them to your blog to read more on the topic. You can use your own photos for this purpose but in most cases you won’t have available a corresponding image. This is where the photo-sharing website Flickr comes to help. Using its advanced options you can search for photographs with creative commons that are allowed to be used for commercial purposes. If you decide to use them on your blog it is recommended to show respect of the intellectual property and include a photo credit linking to the original creator’s Flickr page.
In addition to Flickr you can also use Instagram to find pictures you can share on your blog. You can integrate Instagram with Flickr and Facebook and this way quickly and easily grab a nice looking photo, edit it using the lighter filters which will really lift its appearance from the norm and help you stand out and provide the required impact on your audience.
On Google+ you can create a circle intended only for storing and organizing the articles and media you’ve found online and can use as ideas for your next blog posts. Don’t add other people in that circle so you won’t annoy them with your brainstorming. Since this content is already indexed you won’t have any problem finding your saved ideas.
Another powerful tool you can use for generating and organizing blogging ideas is Evernote. Anything you see, read or hear that triggers an idea in your brain can be saved on your Evernote account, organized in different notebooks and tagged with keywords to ease your search later. With their web clipper extension you can easily store whatever you find online, including text, links and images, and all these notes can be accessed at any time and from nearly any device that exists out there.
Distractions are your biggest enemy. They are everywhere around us and since you’ll do most of your work online it won’t be easy to keep them away, particularly if you have a short attention span. Luckily there are tools like Focus Booster that can help you stay focused on your writing, breaking up your working time into separated 25 minutes work periods followed by 5 minute breaks to improve your creativity and mental agility. This tool blocks out the usual work flow and productivity interruptions like checking your social and/or email accounts so you can better concentrate on your blogging.
Alltop is an aggregated news website that collects headlines of the latest online stories from some of the best blogs and websites. This blogging tool allows you to research and cover the most recent news and events in your field of interest without having to jump from one news website to the next. These articles will give you insights and inspiration for the topics you want to address on your blog so your readers will always be informed about the latest trends and practices.
Digg Digg is a free blogging tool you can use to add sharing buttons for the popular social networks on your WordPress blog that will make it easy for your readers to share the stories on their favorite social accounts. What’s great about this tool is that you can download all plugins at ones and display them however they best fit your blog making your content as shareable as possible.
WordPress is definitely a tool bloggers should know about and possibly the best investments they can make to promote their ideas, thoughts, opinions, personal experiences and even products and services. It is one of the best platforms on for your content marketing efforts and is perfectly integrated with most other applications you’ll use for promoting your blog. The full screen editing mode on WordPress helps you clear your mind and better concentrate on your writing rather than thinking about things like proper formatting, tags, categories, etc.
Another great and useful idea generating tool is InboxQ. You can use it to create one or more campaigns with different keywords you target on your blog and any time someone asks a question on Twitter that includes those queries you’ll be updated to answer it. This way you can promote your blog and name online, and if you find the questions interesting enough and think your audience might like them, in the future you can also write blog posts based on those questions and answers.
With Storify you can search opinions and articles on your topics of interest to make some points using third party content on your blog. This blogging tool also enables you to seize and capture global reactions to certain events in real time and share the news and tweets on your blog while the event is still happening.
If you started losing yourself between all the things you need to do during the day and worrying whether you have forgotten something important you’ll find Trello’s project management tool very useful. You can break down your projects into smaller and more manageable tasks and if you are working with remote employees you can also use it to faster and easier delegate assignments and keep track of their completions.
You can start with original, creative and relevant content on your blog but in time you’ll need some help to figure out what your potential audience interests are and what things are they talking about. Using PopSurvey you can create and embed different surveys into your blog and then evaluate the responses of your readers with reports customized to your particular needs which are also provided with the tool.
If your audience likes reading your posts, be certain they will even more enjoy your voice when listening to a podcast you’ve broadcasted on your blog. Podcasting is a great tool which if properly combined with your regular text blog posts will make your connections with your regular readers much more personal and deeper, helping you develop closer relationships.
Another great blogging tool for finding creative commons photos is Photo Pin, a tool where you can see previews of images that most fit your searched queries and then choose to download them in multiple sizes. To be able to properly credit the person who created that picture this tool provides you with the attribution link (in HTML) which you can add to your blogging software HTML editor.
Bloggers who have multiple writers will find Markup.io truly useful. This is actually a browser extension which you can use to make a copy of some blog post before you edit it and then send the URL to your writer to compare both versions and see the made corrections at once. In addition to this you can also include arrows, highlights and text boxes to make your feedback even more beneficial.
Your hard disk is probably full with lots of collected ideas, started and already finished blog posts, content from other writers you have on your blog, and losing your computer and all those files may be one of your biggest fears. Dropbox is a an online storage space where you can upload, save and organize all your past and current work and access it from any place where there is an Internet connection. Once you download this free software a DropBox folder is being created on your computer that functions same way like any other folder type, except that the files saved in that folder are automatically uploaded on your DropBox account online.
Also Read : Must Have Free Blogging Tools
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Comments
The Evernote web clipper is cross-browser and cross-platform so it works on various devices including a PC, Mac, and even mobile devices like the Apple iPad and iPhone.
Yeah Bro thanks for sharing with us this points have a great day 😀
Yah Brother you got it thanks for stopping by 😀
it’s a good tool for getting post ideas 😀
thanks for stopping by brother I hope you will enjoy these tools 😀
Hi,
I really much needed !! i like you post it seems really informative and useful for me ! these tool will definitely helpful for me!!
thanks for share with me!!!
Thanks Guri have a wonderful day ahead 😀
Another great tool for bloggers is http://www.proofhub.com. This tool enables great planning, organization and delivering over projects which leads to timely and successful accomplishment of projects.