Level up your blog: Essential online tools for every blogger

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!

Interior design marketing videos: 5 content ideas for a designer’s business

Interior design marketing videos: 5 content ideas for a designer's business

Are you an interior designer with a professional website and accounts on various social media channels? If so, you may regularly post highly targeted content to attract new leads and generate more sales. But do you get positive results from all those marketing efforts? Probably not, because SEO takes time and effort to gain results.

Social media marketing isn’t that effective until you choose the right social media platform and post various types of content. Also, you need to use a video marketing strategy and implement it on these social channels.

Because video marketing is a very effective marketing tool that 96% of businesses have planned to increase their budget to maintain or improve video marketing strategies, and almost 99% of businesses have found video marketing a very effective tool. It’s easy to create, requires less investment and engages well with the audience.

Implementing video marketing is a very effective method that allows you connect with the end customer. You can post service video promos and help your targeted audience contact you easily.

If you have any niggling questions, reading this post will benefit you and your business; it outlines the top 5 content ideas that have helped interior design businesses to grow faster.

Top 5 content ideas for a designer’s business

Let’s discover some of the most useful interior design content ideas that can improve your online brand authority and credibility.

How-to videos: approach to interior design project

Sharing your interior design work process among the audience is a great content idea for video marketing. It gives a positive impression and helps you look professional, knowledgeable and confident.

You can record discussions with the team and footage of bringing resources, tools and other things you use to complete your interior design project.

If you’ve worked in this industry for years, you may have noticed that many interior designers do this to build trust among their customers and increase brand authority.

Don’t think creating a service promo video is a tough task, as easy-to-use promo video maker tools are available online. You’ll feel at ease using these applications even if you don’t have professional video-making experience.

Post differentiator videos to hook new clients

Why should your client hire you for your interior design services? There are lots of interior designers and agencies offering the same services.

Hence, you need to share your USP, x-factor or differentiator videos to stand out from these.

These marketing videos give your prospects reasons to get your highly skilled services. For example, you can share some behind-the-scenes clips where you’re engaging with prospective customers to understand their needs. You can showcase that you’re passionate about your work and aren’t afraid to take on challenges.

Going live and talking with dream clients are also a great idea to hook the new audience. You’ll definitely gain some new leads and projects to work on if you have a strong portfolio.

Provide interior design footage at various levels

Updating your audience about projects’ various accomplishments is another way to hook them through service promo videos. You can also mention contact details here so the next leads can find you.

Sometimes your team may be willing to share beautiful design concepts or participate in discussions with you and other staff members. You could create a 3D walk-around and upload it to the website and social channels. It’s one of the best ways to produce unique content and publish it online.

This way, viewers can discover new design concepts and even small details that they can implement in their homes. Also, they can learn how you transform an idea into a real project.

You can create a compilation of testimonials from different clients using promo video-making tools. It’s another way you can benefit your interior design business to increase sales and profit.

Bust interior design myths and latest designs

Another great way to stand out from other interior designers and attract new leads is by busting interior design myths. You could advise the audience how to decorate their interiors using innovative approaches – busting design myths at the same time.

Additionally, you could create your interior design marketing videos on the subject of the best ways to organise a kitchen or how to decorate a bedroom for couples or kids. You could examine many different topics and start making stunning service promo videos for your audience.

Moreover, you could recommend to viewers how they can minimise home renovation costs and complete their renovation tasks in less time.

These marketing videos not only help your audience find answers to their design questions, but also help them find out about your services. So, if any prospective clients require interior design services, they may hire you without looking elsewhere.

Post design transformation case studies

Design transformation case studies illustrate how you helped your design client to solve their problem.

Here’s a scenario; let’s say your previous client obtained design services from another interior designer. They made many promises in their brief; however, when all was said and done, none of the previous design team’s attempts delivered the desired result. Ultimately, your client approaches you and shares their problem and asks your team to help. After considering the instructions provided by the client, your design team work tirelessly to produce an exceptional design project that finally pleased your client.

If you have experience of cases such as this in your interior design career, you could create a video about it to share it with your audience. It’s a great idea to pick the pain point of potential customers and attract them to take up your services.

Wrapping up

These are the top five interior design video marketing tips you could use to grow your business. If you have implemented a range of marketing activities yet haven’t achieved successful results, you should add video marketing to your next campaign and create a few quality service promo videos. Such content is evergreen and can drive ongoing results.

If you use these tips correctly, the content ideas could exponentially grow your interior design business. Thus, we hope you have shaped an idea of how you could create useful interior design videos for your audience.

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11 key tips to creating good blog content

10 key tips to creating good blog content

Once upon a time, blogging was the domain of a few internet-savvy people, journalling their daily lives. Fast-forward to 2018, and the blogosphere is a very crowded place. How do you make yourself and your content stand out? How can you get people to visit your blog, interact and return again and again?

We’ll share with you 11 of the key tips that we’ve learned about creating good blog content during our decade of writing and publishing.

Research your subject

Even though you may know a lot about your chosen niche, you can’t know everything. That’s what the internet’s there for! Stuck for ideas? Find inspiration for your content creation. Most importantly, visit other blogs that publish content in a similar vein. Every blogger worth their salt needs to size up the competition! Spend a few minutes or more browsing sites like Pinterest and StumbleUpon; flick through books & magazines. Lastly, attend events in person – blogger meet-ups, press days and launches are fab ways to get ideas, network and meet new people.

Travel bloggers

Know yourself

What are you good at? What do you know about? What are you interested in? Do you suffer from wanderlust? A travel blog is a perfect way for you to share your recommendations for stay-cations and trips abroad. A parenting blog can be a useful tool for stay-at-home mums & dads to connect with like-minded folks. Have you just got engaged? Then, it’s a good time to make and share your plans via a wedding blog. A general lifestyle blog can incorporate all these different segments as your life takes its different twists and turns.

Know your audience

Getting to know your audience helps you develop your niche. Find out who your readers are; investigate your visitor numbers and how many pages they visit. Demographic information including their age range, gender, location, whether they’re likely to have children and the type of device they use to visit your blog is all available from sites such as Google Analytics, Quantcast and Alexa.

'Add new post' page in WordPress

Content is king

Perfect use of grammar, punctuation, vocabulary and spelling should go without saying. Check, recheck and recheck again your content before hitting that ‘publish’ button. Use a catchy subject line. Pitch it right – don’t use too much jargon, cliché or acronyms. Make it interesting; use humour and find your ‘voice’.

There are a number of tools you should be using to ensure your copy is in tip-top shape. There’s a free version of Grammarly which helps you improve your sentence structure, punctuation and check your spelling. Activate the built-in spell check if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress or Blogger. Make sure your settings are set to your mother language – in our case, UK English as opposed to US, CAN, or AUS. Save thesaurus.com in your browser for when you encounter that ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ moment. Ditto, dictionary.com – sometimes you need to check if a word actually means what you’re trying to say, or find out that the adjective form of the noun ‘adjective’ is… ‘adjectival’!

In your own words

Under no circumstances plagiarise other people’s content. Firstly, it’s just rude. Also, you (and they) may be penalised by Google. Lastly, your credibility will be seriously damaged. If you must use other people’s words, enclose them in quotation marks and credit them using a link, if appropriate. For example:

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. Albert Einstein

If you want to use someone else’s image, contact them for permission first. If you don’t receive a response and you still want to use the image, credit the source and include a link back to the website or web page where you found it.

Pen sketch of a blog page layout

Consider the layout

Make use of headings, paragraphs, bullet points, numbered lists, bold fonts & italics; but don’t go overboard. Make it easy to read, otherwise, visitors will click away somewhere else.

Ensure your content is accessible to disabled people. Think about your visitors who may be visually impaired. Include alt tags for all your images for those that use a screen reader. Set your font size large enough to make the text easy to read. Make certain the contrast between text and the background is easy on the eye. Dark grey, sans-serif text on an off-white background, is ideal.

Unsplash stock photos

Include media

Break up text-heavy posts with photos, diagrams and illustrations. There are a number of websites where you can download copyright-free stock images for use in blog posts. Two of our favourites that offer high-quality, eye-catching photos are Pexels and Unsplash.

Make short, informative, relevant videos. Upload them to YouTube or Vimeo and embed them into your posts to save on your precious hosting space. Being stored on YouTube/Vimeo also makes them available to a global audience.

Don’t play hard to get

Be SEO-friendly – If your blog is on the WordPress platform, Yoast is one of the first plugins you should install. There is a free and a premium version (currently £69). It makes light work of inserting SEO title, focus keyword(s), meta description and so much more!

Go international – Do you have a fairly large foreign readership? Use tools/plugins to make your blog multi-lingual.

Smart phone screen showing social media app icons

Share your hard work

It can be time-consuming, however, cross-posting your content across social media is essential. Luckily, there are a number of free scheduling tools at your disposal. We like Postcron, which allows you to share and schedule posts (with images) on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and others… all in one go!

Engagement goes both ways

Regularly leave relevant comments on other blogs and Instagram posts. Pin/repin other people’s Pinterest images. Join groups in your niche on Facebook, comment on posts and engage with other members. Doing these things often results in people going to check out your blog.

Google Analytics reports

Analyse your stats

Which of your posts get the most hits? What subjects are the most popular? What gets commented on and shared the most? What time of day is the best time to post? Conversely, which of your posts get no attention? Can you go back and improve them?

Continuously tweak and work on your content. Over time, and with experience, your blogging will steadily develop and improve. Do you have any other ideas for creating good blog content? Share your content marketing tips below!

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Our Top WordPress Plugins

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WordPress plugins image

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 SEOthe 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?