These days, everyone is a blogger but not everyone knows how to drive traffic to their blog, generate ideas effectively and monetize their content.
Those who are struggling, may not be using the right tools. There are loads of great digital offerings you can use to improve your blog content, and to improve the experience of your visitors - all while creating monetization opportunities.
Let's take a look at our top seven picks for digital tools that all bloggers should try right now.
This is a tool that lets media outlets and pitches really connect. You can pitch your story to journalists all over the world, with just one upload. You can also use this tool to get all kinds of great story ideas to write about. As a blogger, the benefits are two-fold. Find story ideas and products to write about and also pitch your blog to journalists. Chat with journalists and get more press coverage for your blog (more eyes can mean more money).
Here is a great editing tool that will help you create the most amazing blogs. It will let you know if you have a sentence that is too long, too complicated, etc. It will then highlight that sentence, and the highlighting will be removed when the sentence is edited. Different things are highlighted in different colors, such as purple for words that are too long, blue for adverbs, green for phrases that are written in a passive voice, etc.
Sometimes, the most difficult thing about writing a blog is coming up with a catchy title. This tool will help you with that. Simply enter the topic, and check off whether the word is a noun or a verb, and you will be given a list of various title ideas you can use. A great title can increase traffic significantly. This tool also offers a Tweak Your Biz Thesaurus that you can use to get even more great ideas.
Marketing can take up a lot of time that could be better spent writing your blogs. This tool is one of the best you can use for planning your marketing, and you will save a lot of time. Features include a marketing calendar, social media scheduling, workflow management, WordPress, Google Docs, a headline analyzer, and more. Currently, more than 10,000 bloggers, editors and social marketers are using this tool, and loving it.
This tool gives you customized statuses, calendars, editorial comments and a whole lot more. It will make it a lot easier for you to collaborate with your team and others, all within WordPress. Features include a calendar, custom statuses, custom editorial comments, editorial metadata, notifications, story budgets and user groups. It is easy to install, and you can start using Edit Flow right away.
This is a social media queue that actually fills itself. You can use it to add updates to your library. Just tell Edgar what social networks you wish to post on, and it will do the updating for you. You can also create a posting schedule, so you have specific tweets or posts going out at specific times. Edgar takes the updates that are saved in your library, posts them, and then puts them at the bottom of the list so they can be posted again later. You never have to worry about making updates again.
In order to get engagement with others on social media, you need to be posting the right posts. This can often be hard to figure out, because trends seem to change at the drop of a hat. Post Planner helps you to find the best content, and posts it for you. You can find all of the content you need in one convenient location, rather than wasting many hours searching the web yourself. Add your favorite accounts from social media networks, along with your favorite hashtags, and then you can start cherry picking the best content.
Jane Hurst is a freelance writer from San Francisco. You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
