Level up your blog: Essential online tools for every blogger

Starting a blog can be exciting, but it also comes with a steep learning curve. Mastering content creation is just the first step. To truly thrive in the blogging world, you need a toolkit of online resources that streamlines your workflow, enhances your content and helps you connect with your audience.

Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or just starting out, these essential online tools (many of which are free to use or offer a free trial) will become your best friends:

1. Content creation & editing

Grammarly: No more embarrassing typos or grammatical errors! Grammarly is a lifesaver for ensuring your blog posts are polished and professional. It checks for grammar, spelling, punctuation and even clarity and tone.
Canva: Design visually appealing graphics for your blog posts, social media and promotional materials. Canva offers a vast library of templates, fonts and stock photos, making it easy for anyone to create stunning visuals.
Hemingway Editor: This free online tool helps you write concise and impactful content. It highlights complex sentences, adverbs and passive voice, making your writing clearer and more engaging.

2. SEO & analytics

Google Search Console: Gain insights into how your blog performs in search results. Track keywords, identify errors and understand user behaviour on your site.
Google Analytics: Track website traffic, user demographics and content performance. Gain valuable insights into what’s working and what needs improvement on your blog.
Yoast SEO: Optimise your blog posts for search engines like Google and Bing. This plugin helps you improve readability, optimise meta descriptions and ensures your content is SEO-friendly.

3. Social media management

Buffer: Schedule and manage your social media posts across multiple platforms. Save time and ensure consistent content delivery to your audience.
Hootsuite: Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts, track mentions and analyse social media performance.
Later: Ideal for visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, Later helps you plan and visually organise your social media content with a calendar and preview feature.

4. Image optimisation & stock photos

Smush & TinyPNG: Optimise your images for faster loading times and improved SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Several free online tools allow you to reduce file size without compromising quality.
Unsplash & Pexels: Access free high-quality stock photos for your blog posts. These websites offer stunning images from talented photographers, allowing you to elevate your content visually.

5. Email marketing:

Mailchimp: Build an email list and send newsletters to engage your audience. This popular tool allows you to create beautiful email campaigns and track subscriber interactions.
ConvertKit: A powerful email marketing platform designed for creators and bloggers. It offers automation features, landing page creation and helps you grow your email list effectively.

Beyond the tools: The human element

While these tools can significantly enhance your blogging journey, remember that the core of successful blogging lies in human connection.

Engage with your audience and your niche: Respond to comments, ask questions and create a sense of community around your blog. In addition, leave relevant and engaging comments on posts on other blogs in your niche.
Focus on valuable content: Provide insightful information, helpful tips and engaging stories that your readers will relate to and appreciate.
Be consistent: Regularly publish high-quality content to keep your audience coming back for more.

By investing time in learning and mastering these essential online tools, you can transform your blog from a hobby into a thriving platform that reaches and resonates with your target audience. So, grab your digital toolkit and start building your blogging empire!

On our radar: Sugarologie’s Cakeculator

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A post shared by Adriana | Sugarologie (@sugarologie101)

Sugarologie’s Cakeculator is simply the best thing invented since sliced bread! Adriana, the whizz behind the Cakeculator, takes a very scientific (but easy to understand) approach to the recipes that she shares; she has a PhD in Biochemistry/Molecular Biology!

I often come across a cake recipe online or in one of my vintage cook books where the number of portions it makes is just too many. Usually when I bake, it’s only for Justin and me. A cake where you get 8 portions will last us four days… that’s if we want a slice on that many consecutive days. Most cakes will start tasting a bit stale after a few days too.

The simple drop-down menus on Sugarologie’s Cakeculator automatically works out recipe quantities. Simply choose the size of cake tin; e.g. 6-ince round (and the number of layers you want to make) or 1 dozen cupcakes. In addition to the tin option, you select the flavour of cake you plan on making; for instance, red velvet or chocolate. After this, you decide on the type of frosting; there are various types of buttercreams, meringues, cream cheese, whipped creams. Finally, click on the submit button and your chosen recipe with the correct amount of ingredients pops up as if by magic.

There’s no time spent having to do your own workings out, and there’s no waste… or panic when you realise that you haven’t made enough mixture!

Our Top WordPress Plugins

As we mentioned in a previous post about our essential online tools, WordPress powers our blog.

The main reason for us choosing WordPress is its easy, user-friendly interface. It’s also great for the huge number of plugins that can be installed to tweak, personalise and improve your site. Here’s a list of our top, can’t-live-without WordPress plugins:

CommentLuv – Rewards readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. It encourages a community and helps you discover new posts & blogs
Cookie Confirm – allows you to easily insert a customisable notification for readers to choose and save their cookie preferences (**now deprecated**)
FeedBurner FeedSmith – detects all the ways of accessing your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every single subscriber (**now deprecated**)
Google XML Sitemaps – generates a special XML sitemap which helps search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to better index your website
GTranslate – gets translations with a single click between 58 languages (more than 98% of internet users) on your website
Hyper Cache – improves your website’s perfomance and save resources
Jetpack by WordPress.com – enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. Tools such as site stats, spelling & grammar check, social sharing and lots, lots more!
nrelate Related Content – allows you to easily display related posts on your website (**now deprecated**)
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – tells you which plugins are slowing down your website (and when you use as many as we do, that’s really useful!) (**now deprecated**)
Shareaholic – adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your pages and/or posts
Skimlinks – helps you to easily monetise content by converting product links in your posts into their equivalent affiliate links on-the-fly. Adds a new revenue stream to your blog, including monetising the links in your RSS feed, without affecting your readers’ experience
Tumblrize – automatically cross-posts to your Tumblr blog when you publish a post on your WordPress website (**now deprecated**)
Revive Old Post – helps you to keep your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them via Twitter. You can set the time, frequency and number of tweets to post
WordPress Backup to Dropbox – we’ve previously mentioned about what a great invention Dropbox is – and this is one of the things we use it for! It keeps your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes (**now deprecated**)
WordPress SEO – the most recommended WordPress SEO tool! Very easy to understand & use
WP CleanFix – an all in one tool that checks, repairs, fixes & optimises your WordPress website
WP Greet Box – shows a different message to your visitors depending on which site they arrive from – e.g. you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed and more!
WP Missed Schedule – every so often in the past, we’ve scheduled posts that for some reason or other just didn’t “send”. This little plugin sets our minds at ease!
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – although we use nrelate Related Content on the actual website, this one is seen by our RSS feed readers

What do you think of our list? Do you have any indispensable, top WordPress plugins not on here?

Our Essential Online Tools – Part 2

Following on from Part 1 of our essential online tools, this is the 2nd half of the list of resources that we use on a daily basis for making the tasks of blogging and running an online shop that little bit quicker, easier and more efficient.

Picasa – If you have a gmail account, you automatically get 1GB of online space to store photos… for free. We tend to use it to store high res cut out photos for journalists. We simply put the images in a folder and send an email containing the link to the folder. Sending emails with large image files attached take a long time to leave your outbox and arrive at their destination (if they arrive at all!). (**now developed into Google Photos**)

PicMonkey – Started by people from the now defunct Picnik, PicMonkey is an online image editing tool. We tend to use Photoshop for most of our photographs but PicMonkey has some fun and simple-to-use tools. Perfect if you’re a complete beginner too!

Pinterest – Only a year ago we’d all have been saying “What’s Pinterest?” Today it’s the most addictive thing since… Facebook! We use it for inspiration, a reminders board and a marketing tool for our own shop stock.

Smush.it – A Yahoo tool that after a recent taste test, I’ve switched to using JpegMini (see part 1 of Our Essential Online Tools) as it makes image files smaller. (**now deprecated**)

Strong Password Generator – never use the word “password” as your password ever again!

Thesaurus.com – There was always a well-thumbed copy of Roget’s Thesaurus on our bookshelf when I was young. Now I regularly use this 21st century version. There’s nothing worse than using the same old adjectives when blog writing… I’ve banned the word “nice” from ever being used!

TweetDeck – The most easy-to-use desktop Twitter client I’ve found. When not using TweetDeck, I use Twhirl…

Twhirl – This for me is better than TweetDeck when I need to be logged into more than one of my Twitter personae simultaneously. (Did you know our Weimaraner Fudge has his own Twitter account?!) (**now deprecated**)

Twilert – A useful little Twitter tool that alerts you of “tweets containing your brand, product, service… well any keyword you like really!”. Any time someone, somewhere in the Twittersphere says “H is for Home”, we get an alert. (**no longer a free service**)

Twitpic – I used Twitpic exclusively until the rumours about them claiming copyright over users’ images. I migrated to yfrog (see below) and, even though the copyright issue was quickly sorted out, we’ve not really used it since. (**now deprecated**)

Twuffer – A great, easy to use Twitter scheduling tool. This is my favoured option for sending or re-sending “generic” tweets as you can line up any number of tweets!

Vertical Response – We’ve been using Vertical Response to send our email newsletters ever since we started up 5 years ago. It wasn’t that user friendly to begin with, but, if you’re clueless about HTML, their WYSIWYG email builder is really easy to use. They also have lots of free online learning resources including webinars.

WiseStamp – WiseStamp helps you to create a snazzy looking email signature with icons & links to your social media accounts. You can even have multiple signatures – business & personal. We use WiseStamp in conjunction with our Gmail account (see “Mail” in part 1 of Our Essential Online Tools). WiseStamp currently works with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer and supports Gmail, Yahoo! mail, Hotmail, AOL mail, Thunderbird and Outlook.com.

WordPress – The granddaddy of all tools! WordPress is the platform I use to build, design, run & maintain our blog. It’s easy to use, there’s a great online manual (called the Codex) and help forums. Need your blog to do something amazing and technical that you have no idea how to implement? There’s bound to be a free plugin already designed to do just that!

yfrog – I take a fair few photos on my iPhone when we’re out & about to post on Twitter. Some are of our shop stock but there are lots of random shots of Fudge and food – as our yfrog photo stream will attest! (**now deprecated**)

Do you use any of these? What can’t-live-without tools do you use that you think should be added to this list?

[Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. Please see our disclosure statement for more info.]

H is for Home Harbinger

Tag: online tools

On our radar: Sugarologie’s Cakeculator