Maybe you just started your own blog, or are 3 months into it. Knowing what to do, and how to help yourself grow your blog can be overwhelming.
And not to mention scary!
As a beginning blogger, you probably have little-to-no budget for investment and with a long list of activities you need to keep up with, you may be short on time as well.
Thankfully, there are blog-building tools out there to make your work easier!
Before you do any more work on your blog, grab these 5 must-have tools for beginning bloggers to amplify your blog growth and make your work easier.
Blog tool #1: Canva
As a newbie blogger you most likely don’t have the extra funds for a graphic designer. But the good news is with a tool like Canva, you don’t need one!
Canva is a design resource online that helps amateurs like you and me look like pros. You can easily create your own graphic designs with their drag and drop feature and pre-made templates.
This is basically an essential blogging tool for beginners.
With tons of templates, free pictures, fonts and more, you can quickly, and more importantly, cheaply start creating your very own blogging graphics. Pinterest pins and social media graphics are a must-have for your blog and this allows you to do-it-yourself.
Here are a couple examples of designs you can create yourself with Canva:
When you start your blog, the look and feel of everything you do needs to look as beautiful and professional as possible so Canva is a must-have blogging tool for beginners.
While the basic plan is free, the pro plan is only $9.95 per month and gives you even more access to fonts. Plus, you can create and save your own blog branding for a consistent look.
With the pro plan, you can actually create video snippets which is SUPER cool! Canva is one of the best blogging tools out there since there are so many ways you can use graphic design for your blog.
I also recommend looking at Creative Market for pre-built Canva templates to amplify your designs. They have literally thousands of templates for every kind of design you might want.
You can purchase a package of Pinterest design templates for example, upload them to your Canva account, and easily create new and cool pins to promote your blog.
Blog tool #2: Constant Contact for email subscriptions
An essential blog traffic builder is an email subscriber list. The more readers you have signed up for your emails, the more traffic you can send to your blog.
When you have email subscribers, you can send regular communications to your readers to keep them coming back.
With a platform like Constant Contact, you can build an email template and send out a promotion of your latest blog post with the click of a button. It is an essential blog management tool.
Plus, once you have products to sell, you can use it to promote and sell more products. Cha-Ching!
The reason this is a must-have for beginning bloggers, is because you want to capitalize on every single visitor you get.
It can be challenging when you first start a blog to gain traffic. So make the most of the traffic you are getting, and offer them a way to sign up for future posts and communications.
They may read and love a blog post from you. But chances are they will forget your site and not return UNLESS you get their email address before they go.
Give them the chance to sign up for reminders so they won’t miss the next blog post you write that they may love!
And of course, offering a “freebie” in exchange for their email is essential.
Readers will be more inclined to sign up if they get a free pdf, financial planner or ebook for doing so. (Remember Canva in step #1? You can use it to create your freebie giveaway!)
With Constant Contact, you can easily integrate it with sign up forms on your blog. So when someone enters their email address, it automatically gets added to your blog subscriber list.
You can also use Constant Contact to create custom sign up forms like the one below for your blog, your Facebook and more.
They have a ton of form options, and you can customize them with your brand colors and fonts, or include an image of your freebie give-away.
Constant Contact also lets you set up a Welcome email that automatically sends to anyone new who signs up. So basically it does the work for you, so you can spend your time creating awesome new blog content instead!
And their drag and drop templates make building your own visually stunning email with your blog logo and colors easy!
Plus, in addition to all your email marketing needs, they also have other tools for google ads, social media ads, and more. So I highly recommend signing up for one of their plans.
As your blog and your blog revenue grows, this can be a one-stop shop for help and traffic generation. Learn more.
Blog tool #3: Tailwind for Pinterest
This is an absolute, must-have tool for beginning bloggers! With Tailwind, you can submit each blog post Pinterest pin you create to something called a ‘Tribe.”
Each tribe is made up of many other website and blog owners who are also trying to promote their pins. You share one of their pins, and you get to submit one of yours for them to share.
So when you submit your Pinterest pin to a tribe made up of 200 people, that’s 200 people who may share your pin! And all their followers will see, and potentially re-share your pin.
If you’ve ever wondered how a Pinterest pin can go viral, this is the first step to getting there.
Plus, every time you share pins within the Tribes, Tailwind schedules them out for you. The more active your Pinterest profile is with sharing, the more engagement you will get.
So not only are you getting the opportunity to amplify sharing of your pins, you are also getting to easily schedule a month of pins to your boards in one 10 minute session!
Check out this image of the growth of www.mommakescents.com Pinterest viewers within a month and half of starting Tailwind:
Tailwind will also show you analytics for your boards and pins, so you can see what is working and what isn’t.
The Smart Loop function lets you schedule automatic resharing of popular pins, to help drive even more traffic. And Tailwind is an official Pinterest partner, so you won’t get dinged for bad activity.
The more active your Pinterest account is, the more followers you will get. And the more followers you have, the more your pins will get shared! So I can tell you that getting started with Tailwind today is crucial for the growth of your blog.
Check out just a few of the stats on Tailwind averages with six months of use for beginning bloggers:
Not only is Tailwind ideal for Pinterest, it also now provides the same help for your Instagram account!
Use this link to try Tailwind for free for 30 days!
Blog tool #4: Yoast SEO Plugin
Do not write a single blog post until you have the Yoast SEO plugin! It is completely free. They of course have a premium upgrade if you want, but I’m still using the freebie and it is great!
This tool will help you start optimizing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from the get-go. It helps guide how you write your blog posts in a way that will improve the SEO of your blog.
Which of course, improves your ranking in search, your domain authority, your traffic and more!
SEO may sound scary and as a newbie blogger you may feel inclined to wait on learning about it or using it in your blog.
But do not wait! It is super important and an essential part of blogging for beginners. And the great thing about the Yoast plugin is it gets you started with SEO optimization but makes is SUPER easy.
So you can literally know nothing about SEO, but still be writing your first few blog posts like you are an SEO pro. Do not skip this must-have tool for beginning bloggers!
Blog tool #5: NeilPatel.com and Ubersuggest
There is a reason why I have two blogging tools in this post that are related to SEO!
You may be thinking mostly about social media as a way to grow your blog and build your blog traffic.
But you also need to think about SEO. It is just, if not more, important.
Search Engine Optimization of your blog will help it rank higher in internet searches, which in turn will get your more traffic. And that can mean making more money from blogging.
Neil Patel’s blog has a ton of great articles and helpful tips to guide your SEO tactics. So even though it is a website and not so much a tool, I’m putting this on my list of must-have tools for beginning bloggers!
One of the best tools for a beginning blogger is information. As you work on your blog, make sure you are reading and learning from other successful bloggers like Neil Patel.
Within Neil’s website, there is however a tool called Ubersuggest. This tool gives you the ability to do keyword research, backlink opportunity research and more.
You can use the tool to see what your competitors are doing and use tactics to grow the traffic to your blog.
I suggest you learn about SEO first through Neil’s website, and then try the Ubersuggest tool out for yourself!
So wherever you are on your blogging journey, make sure you have these 5 must-have tools for beginning bloggers in your tool box!
Not started your blog yet? Walk through these steps and start it today!
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Tailwind sounds great – new to me, and excited to try it; ubersuggest I have seen before but I keep hearing about it so I guess I owe it a revisit. Thanks!
Thanks Eric! Ubersuggest has been helpful for me!