Becoming a blogger can be extremely challenging! There is so much to learn, so many options and usually not enough hours in the day. If you are a new blogger, I highly suggest reading part of our new blogger tutorial and start learning as much as you can! If you are not a new blogger, then you still might be able to learn a thing or two.
Once you have all the basics mastered, it’s time to start to figuring out what tools will best enable you to write your blogs. Most importantly, what tools will save you the most time and money! For those reasons here are a few tools that I personally use all of the time to find images, compress them, select keywords, and gain exposure!
Free Images
First up on the list of tools, we are going to focus on images. Although, why would you need images if you are blogging? Well, the thing is every blog post can have its own featured image! That means you are going to need a lot of images if you are going to blog daily.
There are a few important resources for images you are going to use if you are going to want high quality stuff for your blogs. The first is a well known tool called Canva.
Canva
Canva is probably the tool that is every bloggers dreams.
There is almost an unlimited number of stock photos on this site that are free! All you have to do is create a free account and search for the photos you need. They have content on just about anything and everything you could want. Not only that, but you can select the size of the photo you want to download it as, make edits, or even overlay the photo with texts and effects! There are so many tools at your disposal for free.
Some of the photos on the site do cost something, but the price is only $1 which means those photos are a steal! The best part is you can always choose the free photos if you didn’t want to pay for the ones that cost. So seriously, if you are not already using Canva then you are missing out!
Unsplash
Although if price is truly an issue then you need to go and check out Unsplash.
Unsplshed is a platform where people can post their photos for free and anyone can use them. Really anyone that goes on this site can download any of the photos and use them how ever they need. That is for personal use or commercial use these photos are yours to do with as you please.
It is really a great platform for anyone that is on a budget and needs to get photos for free. I would start your image search on Canva, and then if you can’t find what you need, then use Unsplash as a back up. Remember though, even if you find a photo on Unsplash that is almost perfect, you can throw it into Canva afterward to edit it and get it to the right size for your post! These tools work wonderfully together.
Compressor
Another great tool is an online compressor. You see, images can be very large in size and take up a lot of space.
If you are not careful you can seriously slow the page load speed of your site by uploading images that are too large. It is probably a good idea to keep any image you upload to a smaller size then 150 kb. With a compressor, you can easily upload any image and compress it to the size you need. be careful though, because as you compress an image you also comprise the quality on how it appears. Therefore, you want to do it just enough to decrease the size significantly, but not enough where the image looks blurry.
For most images I use anywhere between 80%-90% image quality and the A compression method selection on the compressor tool. This usually gets my image to a decent file size and allows me to upload it. By doing this for every photo on my site, it allows my site to run much smoother and consistently faster than competitors. You should be doing this to every photo or image before you upload it to your site.
I keep an image folder and a “compressed images” folder inside my main folder for my site on my desktop. Then I always pull images from the compressed images folder to make sure I upload the proper file while publishing my blogs. It would be smart to go ahead and get used to this to make sure you are not accidentally putting large images on your site and slowing it down!
Keyword Selection
If you know anything about websites, then you know something about SEO and keywords. You see, keywords are what your site ranks for when people search things in Google. Each header you put on your blogs is something your site typically ranks for in Google somewhere.
That is why choosing your blog titles and your section titles are vitally important. Although, it is extremely hard to know which keywords to rank for and how to phrase them. That means you need a tool to help you with it! I have just the tool, and it is easy to use and best of all it is free as well! That tool is called Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest
This is an amazing tool because it solves several problems. First, it allows you to search keywords and their ranking difficulty levels. In addition, it will suggest other keywords that you could target that are even easier to rank for. Other than that, you can search website rankings, back links, keywords other websites rank for, and other amazing features. It really is a tool that just gives you so much knowledge for free. It is an easy choice to say, you need to be using it.
To focus in, you want to type your keyword into the Ubersuggest search bar. Once you do that, it will tell your the traffic for this search word flowing through Google, the difficulty score for ranking for that keyword, the paid difficulty score, and the cost per click. If you look to the far left, you will see a menu that allows you to choose “keyword ideas”. You are going to want to click that and view all the similar keywords you should be targeting that go along with your main keyword.
With this tool, you can focus in on some longer-tail keywords to maximize your posts exposure and gain more traffic organically! Speaking of organic traffic, lets head to our last tool you should be using, Social Media.
Social Media
The last tool you should be using as a blogger or website owner is social media.
Not one in particular either, but all of them. There are a ton of useful platforms that you should be utilizing and posting on to gain more followers. Really, you should have an account on most of them and be posting links and excerpts from your blogs on them to attract discussion.
This is easier said then done, but if you do this daily after every single post you will see the benefit of doing so after some time. It takes a while to build your social following, but you can gain just as much traffic through these channels are you will through organic reach on Google.
Tools For Bloggers
Thanks for reading out top tools for bloggers and trying to further your blogging and website career! There are a ton of free tools to use online, and these are only a few that I personally use daily. Make sure to keep researching and never stop growing!
