If you’re a blogger there’s a few blog writing tools which I’ve found helpful both in blog writing and promotion. No matter how good your blogs are, or how many you write, you can still struggle to get traffic to your blog. Why is this? In some particular niches, there’s a huge amount of competition. This means if you’re not specifically targeting your blog posts deliberately, they can get caught up in the masses.
Also you need to actively promote your blog posts. They don’t automatically jump into the first page of Google and give you a bunch of traffic, although that would be nice! No you need to work hard at both blog writing and blog promotion if you’re to get a good amount of traffic to your blog. Here’s a few of the tools I recommend.
Blog Writing Tools – Keyword Planner
Google’s free keyword planner is one of the first stop shops every blogger should know about. While there’s many other keyword tools available, I’ve always mostly just used Google’s planner. It’s free and it shows you the traffic for keywords related to your topic of interest. There’s also another tool called keywords everywhere which is a useful addition.
One strategy you can use with Google’s keyword planner is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Why do this? Simple, most keywords are hugely competitive so if you write an article titled “affiliate marketing” for example, you have a snowball in hell’s chance of it ranking anywhere on the search engines. However, if you find a longer tail derivative of that keyword, you have a much better chance. For example using the keyword “step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf“, you’ll find much less competition, and potentially rank your article on Google and/or Bing, Yahoo etc.
You can also find many other keywords which people are searching for in your niche; even those you had never thought of. By targeting these keywords with your content deliberately you give yourself a better chance of traffic because you know people are already searching for that particular phrase/keyword. You can also check on Google to see the relative competition for the phrase before you start creating your content.
Blog Writing Tools – SEO Plugin
An SEO plugin is another essential tool in the kitbag of a blogger. I use Yoast SEO and it’s one of the most popular SEO plugins. SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and the tool helps you write content in an SEO friendly way. This means writing your article around a specific keyword or phrase and making sure that keyword is in your:
- Headers
- Copy
- Image alt attributes
- SEO title
- Meta description
Knowing how to do all this without a plugin is much more difficult. But the plugin shows you with a simple interface what aspects of your blog post need attention to bring it up to speed.
Blog Writing Tools – Syndication Tools
Once you have finished writing each blog post your job isn’t over. It’s important for bloggers to get the most out of each post they write. This can seem a laborious task but content promotion is as important as writing your blog in the first place. If no one sees your posts, you may as well not be writing them! As you make a habit out of blog sharing, you should see more people visiting your content over time.
A simple way to automate this process is with a WordPress plugin called Revive Old Posts. Revive Old Posts does what it says on the tin! You use the plugin to automatically syndicate older blog posts you’ve written already across your social media presence. It also lets you automatically post your content as you publish it too. This can save a huge amount of time and effort and is especially useful if you’re not good at self promotion!
If This Then That
IFTTT (If This Then That) is another tool you can use in conjunction with the Revive Old Posts plugin. It lets you automatically connect other social media platforms to Twitter, and use the free Twitter share from Revive Old Posts to trigger other shares across your social media platforms. While Revive Old Posts does this with the upgraded version, you need to pay for this service. So by using IFTTT you can do it all for free! (Sorry Revive Team!! Love you!)
Email Marketing Autoresponder
Another vital blogger tool is an email marketing service. Email marketing is a great way to connect more regularly with your blog visitors through a subscription newsletter or email list. By offering something on your blog as a free giveaway, you can encourage your blog visitors to subscribe to your email list.
Once on your list you can send subscribers useful information and links back to your blog posts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can also use a list to promote affiliate products and monetise your blog (see also affiliate tools).
Most people won’t revisit your blog so by capturing their email details you can generate repeat visits more easily. Over time as your email list grows in numbers, you should find your blog traffic will grow too if you let your subscribers know about your latest posts.
Push Engage
Push Engage is a free plugin which lets you notify subscribers of your latest posts. As visitors come to your site the push notification offers the option of opting in to your notifications. If they do, they will receive a popup on their web browser when you next publish something on that particular blog.
I’ve been using Push Engage for some time now and it’s given me a huge boost in returning visitors to my blogs.
Social Media Share Icons
Social Media Share Icons give your visitors the opportunity to share and like your content. So it’s well worth getting a plugin which encourages this as it will help get your content seen and only takes a minute to set up.
There’s many social media share icon plugins you can use on WordPress both free and paid for. Just do a search on Google or your WordPress blog for social media share plugin.
