Blogging Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

Blogging Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

Are you an international business leader, with a resume similar to an Ehsan Bayat profile? Do you work for yourself and run a business from your house? Either way, you probably create some type of content on a regular basis. If you have a company blog, you may know that it’s important to regularly post unique content, yet you find the entire process tedious. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there to help you become more efficient at blogging.

1. Block spam comments with the WP-Ban Plugin for WordPress. The plugin will automatically blocks commenters by looking at their IP address. You can also setup customized messages from visitors from particular IP addresses.

2. The Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin is easy to use and lets you know exactly how well your SEO is setup for each blog post. The plugin lets you make sure that you have the right keywords or phrases in the right areas, like the URL and the meta description. There’s also a bulk editing option, which lets you change the data for all of your posts in one place.

3. Get Creative Commons images for either free or for a small fee from a variety of sources, including iStock, Shutterstock, Creative Commons itself, Pixapay, or Unsplash.

4. If you need to do some editing work on your images, but you haven’t yet invested in Photoshop, Canva is a great alternative. PicMonkey is another excellent, and fun, photo editor.

5. Encourage your readers to share your blog posts with the SumoMe Share app. It’s free to use and it’s easy to setup, thanks to drag-and-drop. Plus, it looks great on both desktops and mobile devices. The best part, though, is that it will tell you which pages are getting you the most shares and clicks.

6. Use the Idea Generator from Portent the next time you’re stuck on a title. You put in the topic or a phrase and the generator will give you a title suggestion. You may need to tweak it a bit for accuracy, but it definitely won’t be boring.

7. A great blog manager will post mainly evergreen content, which means that the topic won’t expire after a few months. The best part about evergreen content is that you can continually promote the content you’ve already created. The YARPP plugin, which stands for Yet Another Related Post Plugin, lets you show old blog posts that relate to your current one. WordPress has a similar plugin called Related Posts.

8. If you’re not a writer, or even if you are and you need some extra help now and then, use the Hemingway Editor to clean up your content. After you copy and paste your text, you’ll find out which sentences and are too complex. When it comes to writing for the Internet, you want your copy to be succinct, clear, and simple enough to be understood by various audiences.

9. When you’re out and about, ideas will tend to pop into your mind. Keep track of them all with an app like Evernote or Wunderlist, which will sync to all of your devices.

10. If you find yourself clicking over to Twitter five minutes after you’ve sat down to write a blog post, use Stay Focused on Chrome, which will limit the amount of time you can spend on time-sucking sites.

11. Can’t figure out what to write about? Pick from today’s most popular topics by checking out Google Trends. This is a great way to increase traffic to your blog, because you’ll be giving people what they want.

Blogging doesn’t have to eat up all of your time. By setting up tools and processes to be more efficient, you can keep up with your editorial calendar and still get the rest of your work done.