Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.
When you have just started out as a blogger, there is a lot of information and blogging resources to sort through. Some of them will help you a lot, and some of them will be just a waste of time and money. How to choose the right tools and resources for you?
One way how to do it is to rely on other bloggers, who already have tried these tools and recommend blogging resources for others. However, the majority of blog posts and resource pages will try to sell you these tools in order to gain a small commission for themselves, when you buy the tool (including me and this post). I can say that I’ll share only the tools that I believe are useful, but that’s probably not enough as a good business reason to pay for the tools.
So what is a good way to know if a blogging resource will be worth the money?
Many tools are so confident that you will like to use them that they offer a free trial or a sample of the service that they provide. This way you can try the tool at no cost to you and see if it is a good fit for your blog.
Below is a list of tools that I would recommend for bloggers, and you can try them all for free.
Social media automatization resources
Tailwind is a scheduling tool for Pinterest. To drive more traffic to your blog posts you can use Pinterest, as this is like a large visual search engine. There are several tips how to increase the traffic that a blog can gain from Pinterest, but the main idea is that you have to be active and pin constantly. Tailwind comes to help here, as it can help you automate the pinning, distribute it to several times a day and even give an opportunity to get your pins added to Pinterest by other people to their followers. Try Tailwind’s free trial of 200 pins today!
Traffic growth resources
Jasper – AI writing assistant that can help you to write blog posts multiple times faster. You can try it for free for 5 days and it includes 10 000 words that Jasper automatically generates for you. If you usually write around 2k words in a blog post then you can publish 5 posts this week written with the help of Jasper.
Convertkit is an email marketing tool, which is popular for building an email list. If you want to convert new visitors to your blog to returning visitors, you have to provide them with a way to receive the newest information from your blog. Click here to claim a free 14-day trial and check this tool for yourself.
MailerLite is another tool for email list building. I’ve chosen to use this tool on my blog because it is completely free until your mailing list has grown to 1000 subscribers. For the moment my sign-up forms with this tool don’t look as pretty as I’ve seen Convertkit forms look. But I would blame myself for this, as I haven’t had a chance to investigate, how to create a proper sign-up form.
KW finder will let you research keywords for your blog posts. When you start writing a blog post, try searching for the related keywords in the KW finder. It will offer you different variations of other keywords that you could use to rank higher in the search results. Having posts that rank high in Google is essential if you want to have visitors coming to your blog from search engines. KW finder offers a free account, where you can do 5 searches a day, which should be enough for beginner-level bloggers.
Design resources
Canva is a free tool that a lot of bloggers use to add graphic images to their blog posts. In Canva you can choose different templates in the right size for the most popular social networks. I like to create designs specifically for Pinterest, as it is a big visual search engine. Having my blog posts promoted with professional-looking images on Pinterest will lead increasingly more readers to my blog posts. If you are interested in other Pinterest tips and tricks, you can read more here.
Unsplash offers images that you can use on your blog for free. So there is no need to pay for stock photos if you are just starting out.
Your turn
What tools are you using on your blog? What would you recommend for other bloggers?
Canva is one of my fav apps to use! Thanks for all of the tips & tricks!
Perfect post. Just started out 3 months ago, I’ll be pinning this for later:)
I’m just starting out, so am still finding out what works best. Though I do love Squirrley for WordPress SEO, and Pexels is another awesome free stock photography site. Cheers for the tips 🙂
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve not tried these before, so I’ll need to look them up and investigate 🙂
Your article offers some great advice. I’ve not heard of any of these resources so I pinned this post so that I’ll be sure to be able to look back at it again and investigate which ones will work for me. I’ll be back to read some of your other blogging help posts as well.
This is super informative! I appreciate the links and tips. I am a newer blogger and like many, felt that writing was the crux of blogging. I had no idea what all went into it.
Thanks for the great suggestions! As a newbie there is definitely a lot of information out there however it gets overwhelming. This is very helpful!
Thanks for the informative blog. We will be trying out Convertkit and MailerLite for email marketing.
I am also starting my own blog. I have bought hosting and all, your blog literally helped me in understanding where to start. Will update more here, well done for the effort.
This post helped me learn more about blogging. I have one year experience in blogging. We expect more info from you