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Maybe you just started your own blog, or are 3 months into it your blogging journey. 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, I can tell you about the best blogging tools for beginners out there that will make your work easier! Plus, they will keep you from making amateur blogger mistakes that can prevent you from real success.
Before you do any more work on your blog, grab these 5 blogging tools for beginners to quickly amplify your blog growth and make your work easier.
5 Best Blogging Tools for Beginners
Blogging tool #1: Canva
Canva is one of the best free blogging tools for beginners.
As a newbie blogger you most likely don’t have the extra funds for a graphic designer. And, you may not be a trained graphic designer yourself. But the good news is with a free tool like Canva, you don’t need either!
Canva is a design resource online that helps amateur bloggers 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. But, best of all, it is a free blogging tool! They have a pro, paid version you can opt for if you want but the free version works well.
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.
You can create all the images you need for your blog the easy way with Canva. You can even use it to create an infographic!
Here are a couple examples of designs you can create for your blog or website with Canva:
When you start your blog, the look and feel of everything you do needs to look as beautiful and professional as possible which makes Canva one of the best free blogging tools out there.
While the basic plan is free, the pro plan is only $9.95 per month and gives you even more access to fonts and pictures. Plus, you can create and save your own blog branding and graphic styling for a consistent look which is why I recommend the pro plan.
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.
Pinterest has started to give a lot of play and search rankings to video pins, so this is something you should make use of in your social media strategy.
Stock Image and Template Tools for Your Blog
I also recommend looking at Creative Market for pre-built Canva templates to amplify your blog 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.
Another blogging tool you need is nice stock photography. There are some free stock photography sites out there like Unsplash and Pixabay.
However, if you have a little budget I would opt for one of these paid options:
Both of the above stock photo tools include images, graphic templates, social media post images and more. HauteStock is probably my favorite, they have beautiful photos that will amplify the look and feel of your blog.
beginner’s Blogging 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 or affiliate links. Cha-Ching!
The reason this is a best tool for beginning bloggers, is because you want to capitalize on every single visitor you get. From the very beginning!
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! Constant Contact makes it easy to do this.
And of course, offering a “freebie” in exchange for their email is essential.
Your blog readers will be more inclined to sign up if they get a free pdf, financial planner or ebook for doing so. (Remember Canva in blogging tool #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 page 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.
Blogging tool #3: Tailwind for Pinterest
This is another excellent 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 blog post 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!
Since you are going to use some blogging tools to help grow your traffic, getting signed up with affiliate programs that increase with your traffic is a good idea.
It can be hard as a beginner to get approved for pay-per-click and pay-per-impressions advertising programs. But Media.net is perfect for that! It is not difficult to get accepted to their program and start making money right away. Use this link to sign up!
Blogging tool #4: Yoast SEO Plugin
Do not write a single blog post until you have the Yoast SEO plugin! It is a completely free blogging tool. They of course have a premium upgrade if you want, but I’m still using the freebie and it is great!
This SEO blogging 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! I can’t emphasize enough that SEO should be a part of everything you do on your blog from day 1.
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 blogging tool!
blogging tool #5 Keysearch
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.
Keysearch is another SEO blogging tool you need.
If not, you will only realize later you wasted a lot of time and effort! I know because I made this mistake.
Before we get into the benefits of Keysearch, I have an even more important recommended blogging tool!
Well, it is not so much a tool as it is an educational asset. If is a little pricier but if you plan on making your blog into a money-making business, you should consider investing in it. It is a course called Stupid Simple SEO and it is the ultimate SEO blogging tool for sucess.
It details all the tactics you need to adopt to get your blog ranking in Google and getting the traffic you need in order to make money.
Here are just two screenshots from people who have taken the course and see a huge increase in their Google rankings and their traffic. There are many more though!
For this reason, I think this may actually be one of the best blogging tools a beginner should have! It honestly is worth the price tag. If you use this link, you can sign up for a free Masterclass that is given as the first step towards the full course!
If you absolutely can’t afford the main plan, they do offer a smaller, less expensive one here.
So, back to Keysearch lol. One of the tools that you learn how to use in the Stupid Simple SEO course is Keysearch. Most of the course uses Ahrefs, but Keysearch is a more affordable option than Ahrefs.
It is a keyword research tool that you can use to find the best keywords to use when writing blog posts that will bring your blog traffic.
Here are just a few features of Keysearch:
- In-depth keyword research
- Keyword difficulty scoring
- Backlink checker
- Competition analysis
- Content assistant
- Brainstorm niche ideas
Another keyword research tool for your blog that I recommend is Long Tail Pro. Long tail keywords can be very helpful in google rankings.
With Long Tail Pro, you can find find long tail keyword phrases with high volume and low competition that are ideal for your blog posts.
If you sign up with this link, you get 30% off their plan!
Another free blogging tool for beginners
Neil Patel and Ubersuggest
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 in my list of best 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 only do a set amount of searches each month for free though.
To do more searches requires signing up for a paid plan, but I NOT recommend the paid plan with Ubersuggest. If you are going to pay for keyword research, opt for Keysearch instead as they have better data and features.
However, you can use the Ubersuggest tool for free a little bit in order to see what your competitors are doing and use tactics they use 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!
final thoughts on blogging tools
Wherever you are on your blogging journey, make sure you have the right blogging tools in your toolbox. These tools can help you start the right way and maximize your blog growth and blog success.
Not started your blog yet? Walk through these steps and start it today!
Next beginner blogging tips posts:
Learn How 3 Bloggers Went from Part-time to Pro
8 Ways to Get More Views On Your Blog Posts
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!