It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the right blogging tools will simplify your life.
The truth is, you need to work smarter and better if you want to stay ahead of your competitors.
It’s hard work finding the perfect keyword, and yet you have to write for hours and edit content while you’re reading trending topics.
You don’t have to labor like a horse trying to swim.
Save yourself some quality time and invest or get free tools that let you create amazing content consistently.
I have collected 22 of them, and they are grouped into:
- Generation of content ideas
- Content Development / SEO
- Writing, editing, and formatting
- Publishing Social sharing
- And a bonus: curating content for research
Free Blogging Tools for Finding Ideas
Every blog post starts with an idea. It is the seed that you need to create something helpful and relatable for your audience. But you don’t want to pick ideas off-hand, thinking your readers will like it. Instead, find ideas that are more likely to work.
So, these are the tools you can use to find your next idea
#1. Quora
Are you looking for a place where your audience searches for solutions to their questions? Try Quora.
People ask questions every day, and experts all around the globe try to answer them. You will find spaces related to your target and their problems. Check out what people want answers to and provide the solutions. Then, use those as topics for your blog posts.
#2. Reddit
Reddit consists of communities based on interests, passions, and hobbies. It is crowdsourced like Quora, but people don’t necessarily ask questions. You can create topics, join communities, and contribute your ideas as comments. People share their pain points, success stories, and hacks. You can use those to generate topics.
#3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo lets you analyze and share content. When you want to launch your marketing campaign, you need to see and learn about your industry. You will improve your content if you know what has worked for other people and what content brings the most traffic to your competitors. And that’s where BuzzSumo comes in.
If you input a keyword, the tool displays a list of topics from your competitors based on several factors, such as social shares. You can reset this if you wish and analyze the result.
You will find the posts or content generating the highest social shares. Therefore, you can learn what people love to read, engage and share.
Alternative: Similarweb.com, Feedly, and Ahref
#4. Twitter Topics
Twitter is a social media platform for sharing news and topics faster with friends. But we are not looking at another side of this social media channel today — twitter topics.
Twitter topics appear on your timeline, and you can choose to follow them. Anytime you log in, you will find tweets related to that topic.
Nice right?
You will find posts people engage in and what people are saying under each topic. Go deeper by clicking the topic and scrolling through. You are likely to find some content ideas.
#5. Answerthepublic
Answerthepublic is a tool for generating topics. If you have a keyword already or a topic, you can input it to Answerthepublic. The tool will create ideas using question tags like what, how, who, why, where, etc. You can also use it to collate or track the questions people are asking on the internet.
You can use the tool for free, but the feature is limited until you upgrade.
Planning for SEO
By now, you have collected some interesting topic ideas. If you are a freelance SEO writer, your next step might be to sort the topic or ideas into the different stages of marketing and then develop a content strategy. Maybe include the who, when, and the reference you need before writing on each topic.
However, you need to check if people truly care about this topic. You can tell when you know the average number of people seeking answers to that same query (keyword) per month, find the related topics, and how difficult it’s to rank for each case.
For clarity, you need to find:
- Related Keyword
- Keyword density Search volume
- Ranking difficulty
The tools below can help you do that. They all have free plans as well as premium plans. You can do a little homework to see the ones that work best for you:
#6. Moz/Ahref/Ubersuggest
You can carry out keyword research, link-building analysis, and SEO audit with the above tools. Both Moz and Ahref help you check your domain authority. You can use all three to study your competitors.
#7. Google Trend
Have you ever thought you need data on all the searches people do yearly? My dear marketer, what you need is Google Trend. It uses cookies to store data about searches and provide them based on region and topics. Every year, Google releases the trending topics, a summary of what people actively search about in each country, state, or city.
Study the data and learn how your audience is using Google search. Check the trends and patterns over the last five years, 12 months, or the last 30 days. You don’t want to write about a topic whose trend is dying or has died years ago.
Google Trends is also one of the blogging tools you can use to find related topics:
#8. Keyword.io
Keyword.io is a tool for generating keyword suggestions quickly. You can get up to 100 topic suggestions when you type a keyword and click search. It looks like an Answer The Public, but the suggestions aren’t necessarily questions.
Writing, Editing and Optimizing for Search
So now you have a topic and keywords you want to use. You have done your research. The fun part is the moment you start using those resources.
There are tools to help you:
#9. Google Doc
It doesn’t matter what word processing software you use to write if you can easily get the content on the page. But Google doc is so easy to use for freelance SEO writers.
It is free. You can share your work with other people easily. You can access your documents anywhere in the world. Most times, you have to be connected to the internet unless you set it to offline, but that way, each word you type is automatically saved into the cloud.
Even friendlier, if you use the Chrome browser to access Google Docs, you can easily work with all those Chrome extensions while typing.
10. Grammarly
Grammar mistakes can ruin what you have sweated to put down. But with Grammarly, you can easily edit content and fix errors. More than that, you can check readability (how easy it is to read for people of every age), plagiarism, and tone. If you want to sound confident or professional, you can adjust the setting, and it will give you word suggestions and ideas on what to type or do.
#11. Screen Reader
Screen Reader isn’t necessary, but reading your content is important when editing. So I have to include it. This tool reads your content back to you. If the reading doesn’t sound the way you want to present it, you can easily rephrase it. In summary, it is all about reading the content aloud so that it doesn’t sound different or awful to your readers.
#12. Hemmingway App
Sometimes, what you want to say comes out differently, leading to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Or, worse, the readers don’t get you. That isn’t good for business because they won’t read further or buy the product you are talking about.
Come in, Hemmingway app. It highlights your sentences based on the level of clarity and conciseness. Have you added words that aren’t needed? Will your readers understand what you write? These are the things the tool helps you do better.
Publishing and sharing
It’s time to share your content. This is the aim, after all. You want to build authority. The endgame is to attract potential buyers by creating and sharing helpful content.
Again, there are tools to help you:
#13. Canva
Images can strengthen your points. When I am writing, and I come across an idea, I see it like a short pause, a moment where the reader stops and cracks his knuckles. They adjust a little when they come across it.
A good image is what they need to save or understand your content better, or it could be the moment they need to relax.
You can create your images on Canva with little or no design knowledge. Get access to hundreds of templates that make marketing a little easier and cheaper.
#14. Buffer
You don’t want to go around each social media app and create content. Many marketers use about five or six of them (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest), and it’s a lot of work, to be honest. With Buffer, you can automate the content-sharing process. You create a schedule, and it automatically shares post content for you on those apps even if you are sleeping.
#15. Hootsuite
It is another version of a social media management tool. You can schedule your post and gain better insights into how your content engages your audience. The free plan has only one account and gives you access to 2 social accounts.
#16. Quora/Reddit
Oh, yes, I have to mention them again under this section. You can use both platforms to share your expertise and gain more traffic to your website. You can share an excerpt of your content and add links to your main content page.
But a word of advice: the users of those channels don’t want to be redirected to other places. Link sharing is prohibited in some threads or spaces. So you have a task: be extraordinarily useful. Maybe some people will check on your profile and click on the links you have if there are any.
#16. Yoast Plugin
Yoast is WordPress Plugin. It is the checklist-announcer of the best SEO practices for content writing. It is one of the important blogging tools for beginners. You don’t have to remember all the tips because Yoast reminds you of where to put keywords, images, and links to other sources.
The tool also comes with a headline analyzer that scores your headline. But I guess you will want to ignore it sometimes and work with copywriting tips for creating headlines.
Blogging Tools for Measuring Your Marketing Effort
After publishing, you want to know what you are doing right or wrong. You want to know if your content delivers or if people barely open it and leave. These details can help you improve or restrategize, and that’s why we are here.
These are some of the blogging tools to measure your marketing effort:
#17. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the tool for every business owner to measure their marketing effort. It is not for SEO alone but other forms of marketing, sales activity, or advertisement. You can use it to determine what’s working for you, the source of traffic, the type of audience, the device they are using, etc.
Check here to start using google analytics.
#18. Google Search Console
Sometimes, you stop getting traffic. This is a sad thing. But thanks to the Google Search Console, you can detect issues affecting your blog. In a word, the purpose of this tool is “maintenance.” Find out if the parts or features of your website that’s not working correctly and fix them.
#19. Ahref
Ahref (Like Moz, SEMrush, Ubbersuggest) can help you measure your link-building strategy and overall SEO strategy. Determine content gaps, find SEO issues and rectify them. The free plan has features such as link explorer and website authority checker. It is one of the best blogging tools out there.
Bonus: Blogging Tools for Curating or Storing Content (like this site, HackerNoon)
After writing content and sharing and monitoring your content engagement, what next?
You should start working on the next topic and monitor competitors.
So you want to stay updated in the industry, and you need tools for that, tools that can help you curate and collect trending topics and save articles for later. Bookmarking content on your browser enables you to keep content for later, but it is hard to go back to them.
So here are the tools you need:
#20. Pocket
Their product description says it all.
The app also has features to sort content with “tags.”
With “discover,” you will find new content from authority websites in your industry.
#21. Your industry newsletter
You can either be a freelance writer or an exceptional SEO writer. For the latter, you need to write like you are the most updated, knowledgeable, and helpful person in your industry. That means you need Insights, expert opinions, success stories, studies, research, remarkable ideas. The question is, how?
Subscribe to newsletters and read the good stuff consistently.
Let me correct that: subscribe to a helpful and specific newsletter to your industry.
So how?
You can find a niche-specific newsletter on
Substack Twitter (check the profiles of professionals with a large following)Ask around (social media, your coworkers, Reddit)Subscribes to blogs
For marketers, managers, and startups founders, you can check the newsletter on Thehustle.co and Hubspot.
Blow the Internet
Finally, you have the blogging tools, and I guess you have the skills. Now blow the internet with content that connects with your reader. You have all you need.
DO IT!
