Are you setting your blog site up for success?
Creating a blog or new content and sharing amongst your social media can become overwhelming without the use of blog tools and resources. As a new blogger, the number of plugins available in your admin panel of WordPress can be confusing and stress-inducing.
Sometimes it’s necessary to pay for your success albeit, don’t go outside of your budget when it’s not necessary. There are free blog tools and resources that you can “test out” or use for absolutely free to achieve blog success.
Analytics and Tracking
Do you know how many visitors view your site? Where do they live? Do you know which posts they visit more than others? If you answer no to these questions, then you will need to sign in to your blog admin page and add Google analytics or any other analytics tool to your site. Without these statistics, you will find it difficult to create blogging content that relates to visitors to your site.
Google Search Console is another free blogging tool offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
Easily customize important SEO (search engine optimization) settings, control which pages are indexable, and how you want your website to appear in search with structured data.
Branding and Visual Marketing
Canva allows you to create free templates of graphics for your website and social media pages. Free pictures are a great resource available through Canva to be consistent throughout your site and social media pages when establishing a brand.
Gravatar provides a consistent image and profile bio for whenever you share your comment on another blog that links back to your site(s).
If you do not have a budget to hire a photographer, Unsplash provides free stock images you can use without content infringement issues. All you must do is give credit to the author of the image. When you download the image, you can upload it to Canva to create a blog and social media graphics.
Mailchimp is one of the marketing tools to reach potential customers, subscribers by email, social media, postcards, landing pages on your website all from one platform. WordPress has a plugin available to link your email subscribers to receive weekly, monthly, and promotional email content.
Productivity
Another gem from Google to organize your events or attended events to create content from. You can also utilize Google’s calendar to have a free resource for a visual blog post schedule.
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- Notes App
Notes app is the best free item on my phone that is also synced to my laptop, to jot down quick thoughts, or to save longer notes filled with checklists, images, weblinks, scanned documents, etc…
SEO & Keyword Research
A semi-free site that allows for keyword searching, site crawling of issues with your site, recommendations for SEO, link research, and analytics & reporting.
Keywords Everywhere pulls the “People Also Search For” and “Related” keywords from Google & Bing and shows them to you with the volume metrics right inside the search pages. Golden!
Ubersuggest is a free blogging tool to help find keywords suggestions to create more visible content.
Enter a keyword and the system provides a list of title suggestions for your content.
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- Broken Link Generator
No one wants to click on a link and it returns a page not found. Content changes include pages that are redesigned, images deleted, and updated, but each of these cases, if the content on the web is not updated, when someone clicks on the link, it returns a page not found. Broken links are not good for the SEO of your website and should be fixed.
Social Scheduling & Sharing
The free Hootsuite plan lets you schedule up to 30 messages at any given time across social media. Once you reach the limit of 30 messages, you won’t be able to schedule another message until one of your scheduled messages is published (or deleted).
Click to Tweet has a basic website that you can easily just enter what you want tweeted to promote your content or you can also use a WordPress plugin to create quotes or statements related to your content that your readers can tweet to their followers.
When you publish something new, this free blogging tool will automatically publish it onto multiple social networks. It is great to also recycle old posts to new followers to your social media.
Spelling and Grammar
“Great writing gets better results”. I have downloaded this app on my laptop and on my phone. Not only does the system capture spelling errors, but it also finds grammar issues as well.
Automatically capitalize the correct words in your blog or website titles. There are various title styles that you must use depending on your writing style.
Themes
Click on the link above. Great resource for viewing free themes for your website or blog. Be sure to view what your site would look like on the computer, tablet, or mobile devices.
Do you have a free blogging tool or resource that you use?
6 thoughts on “20 Free Tools and Resources to Create a Blog”
Really great list! I love ConvertKit Free Plan and use that for my email marketing, sign up forms and landing pages. I also use and recommend Updraftplus, a free backup plugin for WordPress.
Will look into ConvertKit to create better email marketing.
Great resource list! NextScripts is new to me, will definitely give it a try. Big fan of Grammarly and RankMath!
Thank you for sharing these free tools. I haven’t heard of some of these before so will definitley check them out!
This is such a good list! I use Yoast, Google Analytics, Canvas, Unsplash – it’s great to see them included.
I’m really enjoying using Canva, especially since they added the capability to make videos. Also Grammarly is a great help too.