Blogging Tools of the Trade

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

We’ve curated the list below with our favourite blogging tools of the trade. All the resources you need to help you manage your blog or website.

We’ve had our fair share of trial and error with everything from hosting to themes to plugins and editing software.

To help you out, we’ve curated the list below with our favourite blogging tools of the trade — all the resources you need to help you manage your blog or website.

If you’re just getting started as a blogger or online content creator, use the list of publishing resources below to help get started on your journey.

WEBSITE & HOSTING

We use Bluehost for most of our hosting needs. It’s reliable and they have amazing customer service! You won’t regret hosting your site here. They have some of the lowest prices ($3.95/mo) and you can easily get your WordPress site + blog up and running in minutes. Also, I’ve never experienced any downtime or site security issues with Bluehost, which is crucial to my business.

WordPress.org is the gold standard in content management systems (CMS). It’s used by more than 74 million sites that publish new posts every second. This widely used CMS has become a favorite among businesses because of how powerful of a tool it is. WordPress is free, secure and SEO-friendly.

Squarespace is another great platform to create and host an amazing online presence. Whether you need simple pages, striking galleries, a professional blog or an online store, it’s all included. Best of all, everything is mobile-ready right from the start. They also have great customer services and helpful tips.

THEMES

Creative Market is my go-to source for website themes, blog themes, templates, fonts, patterns and overall great ideas for designing and branding online content. For most of our clients, we use Creative Market.

Bluchic creates cost-effective feminine WordPress Themes for websites and blogs; with design-to-match business card, social media, newsletter templates and pre-made logos. If you’re an event planner, life coach, pastry baker, photographer or fashion blogger, you’ll be able to find a gorgeous theme that will perfectly suit your brand.

ThemeForest is one of the biggest collections of premium themes out there. They have everything from blogs to business themes. Plus once you purchase a website theme on Themeforest, you get free updates.

PLUGINS

WordPress SEO by Yoast is an all-in-one SEO solution for your WordPress blog. Its features include SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and much more. In addition to improving my blog’s rankings, Yoast also helps me write more SEO-friendly content. Yoast is comprehensive, user-friendly and free!

Google Analytics for WordPress makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic click-out and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Planoly lets you can play with your Instagram layout just like a magazine editor. You can use either the web dashboard or the mobile app to plan and schedule your feed.

Whenever you are scrolling through a beautifully laid out visually merchandised grid on Instagram, it probably took weeks of pre-planning, meetings, and production. Planoly can help you grow and interact with your growing online community on Instagram.

Tailwind is another visual marketing scheduling tool. But this one is specially for Pinterest. If you want to drive a lot of traffic to your blog as quickly as possibly, Pinterest is a great method to do so. But it’s hard to really leverage Pinterest for traffic growth manually, the old fashioned way. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, discover more content to re-pin, monitor conversations, join and manage Pinterest Tribes and measure your results.

Hootsuite is a social media scheduling service. Easily organize, manage and schedule your content across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Better Click To Tweet is a great way to let your readers easily share your content. It allows you to easily create tweetable content within your blog posts or page. Using a simple shortcode, your selected text is highlighted and made tweetable.

EMAIL MARKETING

Mailchimp is the world’s leading email marketing platform. Mailchimp allows you to send marketing emails, automated messages, and send targeted campaigns. Plus detailed reports help you keep improving over time.

SumoMe is a free plugin makes it easy for you to gain email subscribers and get new customers. It also syncs with email providers like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.

 IMAGE & GRAPHICS CREATION

Pic Monkey makes creative tools for photo editing and graphic design. This online platform has everything you need to make your ideas come to life — photo editing, collage making, graphic design.

Pablo helps you create beautiful images for social media sharing on every major network, with ideal sizes for Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.

Pixlr has a very similar interface to Photoshop. This web browser app allows you to create your work in layers, replace colour, transform objects, and more. But all from your browser. No downloads or plugins are required.

 STOCK IMAGES

PhotoPin is a free tool that helps bloggers and designers find beautiful photos with Creative Commons licensing. Download the photos and get attribution links already embedded.

Pixabay is the holy grail of free stock photo sites with over 270,000 images uploaded from different users. It is basically ShutterStock without having to pay. Licenses vary depending on the photographer.

WOCinTech is a Flicker photo album with free, high-resolution photos of women of colour in technical backgrounds, spaces, and work environments.

PRODUCTIVITY

Evernote can help you keep all of your content ideas, topics, research, lists, and notes organized. You can keep unique notebooks for all of your projects and collect notes, images, and reminders within that notebook. Plus it syncs from desktop to laptop to phone.

Dropbox keeps all your files safe, synced and easy to share. Bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and never lose a file again.

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is a great tool to use whenever you are stuck on topics to blog about. Fill in the fields with terms (preferably nouns) that you’d like to write about, and they’ll come up with a week’s worth of relevant blog post titles.

Need more blogging tools of the trade? Download our complete list of resources to help you manage your blog or website.

[sdfile url=”https://seegirlwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/see-girl-work-blogging-resources.pdf”]