Free blogging tools for beginners
There are many blogging tools out there for beginners and experts with exceptional features .However not all of them are free. Many of them have free and paid versions, and there are some that are totally free. Today's post is about some of the free tools for blogging, that I use and that makes life simpler. As your blog grows, you may want to invest in paid tools as well, to take advantage of the essential features and to take your blog to the next level.
Most bloggers start their blogging journey on a limited budget so it's good to take advantage and utilize these free tools that will help get things done easily. The analytics and stats from some of these tools can help one informed of the performance of their blogs. Some other tools help ease blogging tasks , improve overall content , marketing , organize content and security . With the help of all this, one can focus and concentrate on creating good content and make improvements where possible.
15 Free blogging tools for beginners
Grammarly
As the name suggests, this tool helps correct your grammar when you write content for your posts. It can correct spelling, punctuation, correct sentence, suggest alternatives, remove repetitive words, and is very beneficial. The last thing you want is for your reader to get upset and lose interest due to incorrect grammar in your content. They may even decide not to visit your site again! So it is important to take grammar checks seriously.
The best part is you can add this tool to your chrome browser as an extension. This makes it easy to use when you write content using your WordPress editor. It automatically comes up with red underlines where there are mistakes and you can correct them as you type. Grammarly also has an online checker where you can copy and paste your content to check for errors. The premium version has many more features like checking for plagiarism, recommend enhancements, etc. However, the free version itself has a good amount of checks and is very helpful.
Canva
Canva is a great tool on a web-based platform and is very popular with most bloggers. This tool can be used to design graphics, you don't need technical knowledge to use this tool. It has professional templates for logos and Pinterest pins, layouts, and a great photo editing tool as well. They have many free and paid images and you can upload your own as well.
It is a great tool to design images, ebook covers, cheat sheets, and printables. You can drag and drop images and text overlays. In fact, I designed my logo using Canva when I first started blogging and still using the same. You can also use it for creating infographics and create images for Quotes. It is a free tool but they do have paid version as well for advanced features. This tool is highly recommended if you have not tried it.
Yoast SEO for WordPress
Yoast SEO for WordPress - We all know how important SEO is for blogging. Yoast SEO helps in improving your on-page SEO. Install the free plugin, activate and set it up. After you write your post, navigate to the Yoast Analysis section. It will prompt in red and orange if your post content needs improvement or changes.
It gives suggestions and changes to the keywords, meta description, inbound links, outbound links, and so on. The readability of your text, grammar, how long your sentences are, active and past tense are all checked for. You can also change the meta description for your social shares like Facebook and Twitter if you wish. It rates two options readability of your post and the SEO analysis and finally, you get a "good" with a green button if all looks okay. This may just be the basics of SEO that you fixed, but at least you have something to start with.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner - This tool is very helpful to find and research keywords. There are many paid tools out there that are really cool but Google Keyword Planner is a free tool and so really helps if you are on a tight budget. Once you enter the potential keywords you wish to use, it will generate the search volume of that keyword with ad-related words and phrases. So you can plan your keyword strategy based on the search volume and other factors. Write posts to use those long-tail and short-tail keywords where possible. I have a detailed post on how to use Google Keyword Planner here. You just need a Google Ads account to use AdWords.
Google Trends
Google Trends - This tool is helpful to find what keywords or searches folks are searching for and take advantage of that. It helps find interest in a keyword, it could change with seasonal trends and how it performs in certain regions. It lists top searches and by category. So you know what topics people might want to read on. Using this information you can use the keyword planner to find the right keyword.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console - This tool shows how search engines see your blog. It helps monitor, troubleshoot, and gives great details of any errors during crawl and details of click through rates, backlinks, top-performing pages, etc. It shows how your site is performing on Google and helps maintain it.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics - Again another great tool to show detailed analytics and demographics of your blog. It helps give detailed information of website traffic, visitors to your blog, and insights so this information can be strategically used to improve your website, blog, or business.
Fotojet
Fotojet a free tool to make collages. Although there are many free collage tools to create collages, I use this for step-by-step recipe pictures a quite happy with it. It has a paid version as well.
Free Stock Photo Websites
Free Stock Photo websites - When you are focusing on writing content you may not have the bandwidth to capture all photos to go along with it. The license-free stock photos are very handy. Here are a few free stock photo websites. Do read carefully if they require attribution or credits and mention so in your posts. A good featured photo is essential for attracting the reader to visit and read your post. I often use stock photos from Pixabay, Pexels for my posts.
MailChimp
It is a free email management system to create lists and send emails to your subscribers and tracks them as well. It is free for up to about 2000 subscribers.
InvoiceHome
A great tool to create invoices. As you start to monetize from your blog, you may need to create invoices for your services.
Dropbox
This tool can be used to back up your content and they have storage of up to 2GB of free space
Evernote
A great tool that helps arrange and organize. It can capture images, text, a webpage, or ideas and can be installed on your desktop or phone. It can also be installed as a chrome extension . You just need to click on the green elephant icon and snip the part of the webpage into the notes. You can later on easily search through and get your snipped and saved content.
Blog Title Generator
It is a known fact that an appealing and attractive blog title is essential to make the readers click on your post. This blog title generator generates possible titles when you input the subject of the title you want to use.
SERPROBOT
This tool helps find and track your SERP (search engine ranking position) by entering your keyword and domain name .This is especially useful to know how you rank for the keywords you use and to check if you are listed in the top 100 .Using this information , you can improvise further on your keyword and SEO strategies.
In addition to these tools mentioned , there are many free WordPress plugins and some of them that I use or have used in the past and would like to mention Smush to reduce file size images, Succuri and Word fence for website security, W3 Total Cache to improve speed and user experience, Updraft plus for backup and restore, Wp recipe maker which is an easy and user-friendly recipe plugin, it's automatic JSON-LD metadata helps with SEO as well.
Hope you find this list of free blogging tools useful . If you have any favorite ones that you would like to add to this list , please add on in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
Great list of tools for blogging. I think you should add Google Docs in it.
These are really helpful. I am not really familiar with the other tools you mentioned such as Fotojet and Blog Title Generator but will definitely check them out. Thank you for sharing.
Glad to hear this post is useful .Thank you for stopping by!
Thank you so much for this informative post Dear!
You are very welcome my friend! Glad to share.
Thank you so much for these tips. I haven't heard of a few things here, namely... Fotojet, Evernote & SERP. I will need to check it out. soon!
My pleasure to share Su. Hope you find them useful as well. Thank you for stopping by!