Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Needs
Running a blog can be a pretty challenging prospect. There are a lot of things to think about apart from writing the article itself. There’s the outreach, the functionality of your website, marketing on social media and so on. It takes a lot of time and patience to get the hang of all of this, and it can be really frustrating at first, when all you want is to be able to create the perfect blog post and be done with it.
Fortunately, there are some really powerful tools every blogger needs that you can use to help you out with all of this, and today we’re going to be discussing a few of them, and how to utilize them in order to drastically improve the quality of your articles.
1. BuzzSumo
One of the most important things that you need to do once your article is over is to give it a good title that will draw readers in. It’s even better to come up with a title that includes some of the keywords you’ve used throughout your article.
BuzzSumo can be a really big help with this; all you have to do is type in the current title of your article, and is one of the tools every blogger needs that locates blog posts with a large number of shares across social media and displays their titles, so you can see what you’re doing wrong and what you need to change, based on some excellent examples. This lets you create an even better title and hopefully catapult your article to the top of Google’s search pages.
2. Yoast SEO Plugin
SEO is the practice of altering your article in such a way to increase its visibility on web searches and having it show up closer to the top, thus increasing the chances of people actually clicking on it. The Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress can aid you in optimizing your article in terms of SEO by influencing some of the most important factors about your page’s visibility, such as meta titles, backlinks, and even the structure of the page itself. If you’re using a WordPress-based website, be sure to check this one out, as it will save you a lot of grief and make your job a whole lot easier.
3. Virtual Private Networks
Every blog owner that’s ever had their blog targeted by a DDoS attack will tell you that it’s not one of the most pleasant experiences they’ve ever had in their lives. The fact remains that the Internet is full of dangers from cyber attacks and security breaches, and if you’re planning to run a blog or any Internet-based business, you should get yourself some protection.
A good VPN provider is the best way to achieve that with the least amount of effort. With a VPN, you can encrypt your connection with a secure tunneling protocol and hide your IP address, minimizing the chances of a third party getting their hands on your data. A lot of people underestimate the consequences of a successful cyber attack, but they can be quite serious indeed – so why risk it?
4. Sprout Social
What about social media marketing? No matter how good your blog post is, if you don’t get it out on social media so people can actually see and read it, you aren’t going to accomplish much. This whole process can be made quicker and more efficient with Sprout Social, a social media management tool that allows you to post directly to social networks and even schedule your articles for automatic posting at a later time. A really cool tool if you share your posts on a large number of social media websites, as this can get pretty time consuming if you have to do it manually all the time.
5. Google
Alright, so you’ve finished your article, you’ve optimized it to the best of your ability and shared it on social media. The next thing to do is to track its progress, and try to learn something from it so you can improve your future posts. Google is a great tool for this purpose, as it gives you answer to some of the most important questions regarding your blog, such as who your audience is, how do they come across your blog, and what they do on your blog.
When first opening up this as one of the tools every blogger needs, you might get the impression that it’s really complicated, but it’s really not if you know exactly what you’re looking for; and once you get a hang of it, we guarantee that the visibility of your blog will improve drastically.
Author Bio:
Michael Conley is a 27-year-old digital security specialist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and one of the finest writers here at 9to5alternatives.com. When he’s not working, he enjoys watching old movies and shooting pool with his friends.
