54 Best Blogging Tools to Use in 2024for Better Marketing, AI, SEO, Writing, Research, Social Media & Growing Your Blog

Over the past 12 years of growing my blog from zero to 500,000+ monthly readers, one critical thing I’ve learned is just how important it is to utilize the best blogging tools from day one—and to also know when you’ve progressed enough and are ready to move on to the next level of tool. Regardless, be sure to check out my own stable of free blogging tools I made for bloggers like you.

When you employ the right tools for bloggers on your website (whether you’re a beginner or full-time blogger), it can literally save you hours of time that’d be otherwise spent on much more manual work. Especially if you’re employing some of the new, powerful AI content writing tools.

Not only will these blogging tools save you valuable time & effort, but they’ll also enable you to actually do things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without investing in hiring your own team of marketers, writers, virtual assistants or software engineers.

54 Best Blogging Tools in 2024 for Better Marketing, SEO, Writing, Social Media & Research

1. RightBlogger
2. Free Keyword Research Tool
3. Blog Title Generator Tool
4. Ahrefs
5. Google Analytics
6. MonsterInsights
7. Serprobot
8. Yoast SEO for WordPress
9. Buzzsumo
10. Twinword Ideas
11. SimilarWeb
12. Can I Rank?
13. SE Ranking
14. Hunter
15. Respona
16. Voila Norbert
17. Ninja Outreach
18. Clearbit
19. Wordable
20. FocusMe
21. Inbox When Ready for Gmail
22. ConvertKit
23. Sumo
24. OptinMonster
25. Jasper
26. SocialSnap
27. Click-to-Tweet
28. Teachable
29. Buffer
30. Wishpond
31. YouTube
32. Adobe Rush
33. Rev
34. Albacross
35. Prezi Video
36. LinkMiner
37. SEO Web Page Analyzer
38. Placeit
39. Sendspark
40. Loom
41. Crush Image
42. Adobe Photoshop
43. Visme
44. Logo.com
45. Logaster
46. Unsplash
47. Skimlinks
48. Affilimate
49. Paperform
50. Easelly
51. SurveySparrow
52. MightyShare
53. Missinglettr
54. Grammarly

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. Know that I only recommend tools, products and services I’ve personally used and stand behind. When you purchase a tool using my one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep all of my in-depth content free of charge for readers.

From keyword research to competitor analysis, writing blog headlines, email marketing, nailing your blogger outreach, scaling your social media promotion and much more—we’re breaking down all of the top blogging tools you need to be using on your blog today.

Now before we dig into today’s roundup—if you’re totally new to blogging, I’ve put together the ultimate guide to getting started with your blog. Actually getting your blog online and well-optimized (with the right tools) is the first step to laying a foundation that’ll eventually attracts readers. And my 25,000 word guide to starting a blog will position you best for going on to bring thousands of readers to your blog in the near future.

If you haven’t yet gotten your blog off the ground yet, then head over to my ultimate guide to starting a blog.

Try RightBlogger: My 70+ Hand-Crafted Tools for Bloggers

Join 1,000+ bloggers, marketers, writers, freelancers & creators in trying my very own kit of powerful tools for bloggers: RightBlogger. You’ll unlock 70+ blogging, SEO, marketing, sales and productivity-focused tools to blog faster & more effectively today.

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First up, we’re exploring AI-powered content generation tools, and the most effective research & analysis-related tools on the market today, so that you can take a more effective approach to how you’re growing your blog in the first place.

1. RightBlogger

RightBlogger was built to be the complete AI-powered content creation suite of tools for bloggers. It’s the toolbox I wish I had when I first started blogging. If you want to take your content creation process to the next level—RightBlogger will help you write faster & more SEO-friendly content for your blog.

By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, RightBlogger makes it easier than ever to craft engaging, high-quality content in the click of a button. Here are just a few the 70+ tools you’ll get unlimited access to inside RightBlogger:

• Article Writer, Listicle Writer, Introduction, Paragraph, Conclusion
• Smart Suggest (get blog post ideas based on your blog URL), Blog Post Idea Generator, Headline Generator
• Outline Generator, FAQ Writer, List Generator, Rewriter, Shortener, Expander
• Keyword Research Tool (unlimited), Meta Title, Meta Description, Keyword Cluster
• Video Title, Video Description, Video Script Outline, Tweet Ideas, LinkedIn Post, Facebook Post, Pinterest Pin
• Email Subject Line, Cold Email, Call-To-Action, Product Description, Ad Copy, AIDA, Feature/Benefit/Outcome
• Summarizer, Content Filler, Explain Like I’m Five

RightBlogger is adding new AI content tools into the platform every week—plus subscribers have the opportunity to suggest new tools & features, almost all of which get implemented within a few weeks.

2. Free Keyword Research Tool by RyRob

My very own keyword research tool is incredibly simple. Type in your keyword phrase and instantly get monthly search volume, difficulty & suggestions for other keyword phrases to target for your blog content. Give it a try, that’s why I made it a free tool!

I built this free AI-Powered Keyword Tool to solve a problem I’ve had in the blogging industry for nearly a decade. Anytime a new (free) keyword research tool comes out and gains popularity, a switch flips and it’s suddenly only a paid tool—or has dramatic limitations on usage. This keyword research tool was build to be forever free.

When you type in a keyword you’re considering blogging about, you’ll get dozens of research-backed ideas for keywords & topics to write about on your blog today. You’ll get insights like:

• Monthly Search Volume: A snapshot of how many people search for a particular keyword phrase each month on major search engines like Google.
• Difficulty Level: How hard it’ll be to rank for a particular keyword phrase, based on the amount of existing (and anticipated future) competition from established websites.
• Country Targeting: The default country view is for the US (United States), but you can select other countries from a dropdown menu to see what regional search volume & difficulty looks like for your target keyword phrases.
• Ideas: Use the ideas tab (or click the lightbulb) to get dozens of AI-powered blog topic ideas related to the keyword you’ve chosen.

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3. Blog Title Generator Tool by RyRob

Sitting at the top this list of free blogging tools, is my very own Free Blog Title Generator—an AI-powered SEO blog title idea generator that quickly comes up with dozens of headline ideas based on the keyword phrase you want your article to rank for.

Based on the artificial intelligence-powered headline ideas you’ll instantly generate from this tool, you can always tweak the wording, length and order of words to really hone in on a title that’ll boost your Google search rankings & get more clicks on social media. It’s important to note though, that even a title generator tool isn’t always perfect—it wants headlines to conform to a template that most best ranking content  is currently following, but you won’t always get perfect headlines right out of the box. That being said, a headline generator is an excellent user-friendly blogging tool for writers to get a feel for how they could cover a particular set of blog topics—and keep an eye out for an update soon, including a headline analyzer function.

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4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs has more than earned its reputation as one of the best blogging tools when it comes to nailing your blog SEO strategies, with a special emphasis on keyword research & competitor analysis. Though to be clear, if you’re brand new to blogging—this tool may be a little advanced (and it’s not free).

Having started out as just a backlink checker back in the day, many bloggers aren’t fully aware of how powerful Ahrefs has become as a blogging tool. Their most relevant features for bloggers, is that it quadruples as a content research and analysis juggernaut, keyword rank tracker (with historical SERP movements going as far back as when your blog began ranking for its first keyword), a competitor research tool and on-page SEO tools like their analyzer. I know, that’s a lot.

New features still come along quite often and they’re never released at the expense of their most loved features—they still boast the largest index of backlinks of any blogging tool in its class.

While their Keywords Explorer tool is my go-to (paid keyword tool) these days, Ahrefs really earns its stripes as a backlink analysis tool. When conducting an analysis of either your own backlink profile or that of a competitor you’re trying to learn from, you can choose to view columns like only new links, lost links, no follow, or do follow links. You also can group similar links, see just one link per domain name or view links by blogging platform. The flexibility lets you easily get to the bottom of your queries.

Here are a few of my daily searches on Ahrefs:

• Top Pages: This shows you a list of the highest traffic-grossing pages for the site you’re analyzing
• Best by Links: This view ranks the pages of a site based on the number of backlinks it’s received
• Content Explorer: Allows you to quickly generate blog post ideas that put the spotlight on trending topics in your space
• Competitor Research: This’ll quickly show the keywords a competitor site ranks for (along with traffic estimates)

Keep in mind that traffic estimates are calculated based on a site’s organic ranking positions, their number of featured snippets, search carousels and everything else in between. As such, organic traffic reports can be shockingly accurate, even for small blogs. And if you want another SEO tool to compare Ahrefs against, check out SEMRush.

5. Google Analytics

Since 2005, Google Analytics has been a (free) web analytics service built and offered by Google that allows blog and website owners to track and report on their website traffic. Today, it’s just one of the tools offered inside of the overall Google Marketing Platform brand, designed for marketers and advertisers to reach more readers.

In the screenshot above (from my own Google Analytics dashboard for this blog), you can see critical data points like how many readers come to my blog each month, the breakdown of new vs returning visitors, how many pages the average visitor views, how long they spend on a page, my blog’s bounce rate—and so much more. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Google on how to install Google Analytics on your blog.

6. MonsterInsights

To put it simply, MonsterInsights is a dead simple Google Analytics plugin for WordPress—that allows you to view your GA data directly within your WordPress dashboard.

This plugin makes our list of the best blogging tools because it allows you to easily connect your WordPress blog with your Google Analytics account (without hiring developer or writing any code yourself)—a task that can sometimes be a bit more complicated than most new bloggers bargain for, depending upon which of the best WordPress themes you’re using.

With the click of just a few buttons in MonsterInsights, you can set up relatively sophisticated event tracking, eCommerce tracking (depending upon the eCommerce website builder you’re using), form submissions and more features that’ll help you better understand your blog readers as you grow.

7. Serp Robot

Serp Robot is a free Google rank checker that tracks the position of your blog’s articles for the keywords you input.

It’s forte is accurate rankings—hilarious when you consider that’s the only job of a rank tracker… but not as hilarious if you’ve ever tried using a rank tracking blogging tool.

Most rank trackers miss the mark, big time. Accurate tracking is key to understanding your blog’s health (as it relates to your ability to deliver organic search traffic), as a heavy decline could hint at a potential manual penalty from Google.

8. Yoast SEO for WordPress Plugin

Quite possibly the most-installed WordPress plugin of all time (made by an independent company), Yoast SEO is indispensable amongst the best blogging tools.

Whether you’re running a personal blog or working in marketing and SEO for a company that’s put you in charge of managing their corporate blog, Yoast SEO is a powerful free plugin that’s been designed to help make your blog as search engine-friendly as possible. In fact, it’s been an essential part of optimizing my content on my side blog where I’m starting to rank for terms like the best gifts for hikers and the best hiking boots on the market today.

After installing the plugin, you’ll immediately see the above mini-SEO tools dashboard at the bottom of every post on your blog once you’re in editing mode. All you need to do is input your focus keyphrase (target keyword you want the article to rank for in organic search), and the plugin will give you a detailed analysis of how to write a better headline, meta description, alongside recommendations on the number of links your article should contain, the number of times your keyword phrase should be mentioned, article length and more.

If I had to go down to using just one of these tools on my site today, I’d choose Yoast SEO.

9. Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo’s Content Research blogging tool generates a list of the most popular blog posts on a given topic—and you get to view pre-validated ideas for blog posts.

With Buzzsumo, you can also monitor your blog’s mentions across the web as they happen in real-time. This makes them very useful amongst the best blogging tools specifically for marketers—since you can reach out to unlinked brand mentions and turn them into new links for your growing blog SEO strategy.

The question analyzer features the ability to search and lists out questions asked on a particular keyword phrase your readers may be searching for—which is important if you want to capture featured snippets.

10. Twinword Ideas

Miss the old (free) Google Keyword Planner or looking for another free alternative (aside from my own keyword research tool) to some of the more advanced tools like Ahrefs? Well, Twinword Ideas is another great one to try. It’s a free keyword research tool you can use to learn which phrases you should create targeted content for (in order to bring more of the right readers to your blog from search engines).

Twinword Ideas—a free blogging tool from the team at Twinword—gathers keyword data directly from Google, making it more accurate than most other completely free keyword research tools out there today. So, if you’re wondering… do people still read blogs? the answer is a resounding yes today.

In addition to just the basic search function, you can view “Popular Topics” together with data that calculates how much SEO competition there will be on the topic—suggesting how difficult it’ll be for your blog to rank high in organic search results. Unlike Google’s original Keyword Planner tool (no longer a completely free resource) that gives a range of monthly search volumes, Twinword Ideas lists exact search volumes you can count on. This tool helped me decide to pursue topics like the best hikes in Yosemite and the best time to visit Yosemite during the year—surprisingly not as competitive as you’d think.

11. SimilarWeb

What I like about SimilarWeb is their ability to turn the often inscrutable numbers into easy-to-understand colorful graphics. Insights that might take hours to glean elsewhere when relying entirely on numbers, can be drawn pretty quickly with the graphic presentations on SimilarWeb.

The free version of SimilarWeb makes our list of top tools because it lets you see everything that the paid account does—with the exception that your time range is restricted. With a free account, you can see a blog’s website traffic analytics for the past 3 months. With a paid account, you can see detailed traffic reports for six months. It also displays worldwide traffic, broken down by country. There’s also a category rank showing your own popularity within the niche you blog about—for example that could include food blogging, fashion blogging, travel blogging or otherwise.

You can analyze data on visitor locations, how much search traffic you’re getting, referring sites, social traffic, keywords you’re ranking for, paid advertising data and similar sites you’re competing with today. Traffic figures should be taken with a grain of salt though. SimilarWeb tends to underestimate traffic count for sites averaging below 50,000 visitors a month, while often overestimating traffic for others.

For example on my blog, SimilarWeb estimates the monthly pageviews for May at 960,587.

The actual pageviews for May? Only 736,679.

Laser sharp accuracy isn’t the purpose of a blogging tool like this, though.

SimilarWeb doles out what Ahrefs doesn’t—helping you to visualize every channel that sends your blog traffic (and take action to learn how to write blog posts that’ll repeat your successes).

12. Can I Rank?

Can I Rank? is one of the most exciting new blogging tools I’ve discovered this year. At the core of their product, is an AI-powered software engine that gives you actionable blogging tips and advice for how to improve your blog’s SEO rankings, get more traffic and even gather the best blog post ideas to pursue based on your existing content—and which opportunities will provide the most potential traffic value in the months to come.

Beyond just the SEO-focused recommendations you’ll get from Can I Rank?, their platform gives you detailed DIY instructions for how to best implement their advice—or the opportunity to delegate the task to an SEO consultant within their network. It’s pure genius, and I’ve already discovered several high-impact content opportunities I’m capitalizing on for my blog, so I recommend every serious blogger to give them a try.

13. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is another of my picks for exciting new blogging tools to burst onto the scene this year. With a very broad feature set ranging from keyword ranking tracking to research tools, competitor monitoring, advanced traffic analytics, marketing planning and more—this is one of the most robust new tools I’ve come across in some time, and it’s quickly become an essential part of my workflow whenever I update my blog business plan.

What I like most about SE Ranking, is that beyond just the keyword position monitoring function that sits at the center of the product, this blogging tool also provides a very extensive website audit function that’ll give you extremely actionable feedback on how to improve your blog’s technical SEO footprint, which is valuable for all small businesses. While this is amongst the paid tools here on this list, if you’re taking your blog growth seriously—then SE Ranking is well worth your while to consider weaving into your tech stack.

Outreach-Focused Blogging Tools to Scale Your Content Promotion

With the more research-heavy tools behind us, let’s dig into the best outreach-oriented ones.

These are designed with the express purpose to help you nail your blogger outreach, scale your content promotion, land high-quality guest posts and build partnerships with other bloggers in your industry.

14. Hunter

The premise of this free blogging tool is deceptively simple—Hunter scrapes the Internet for email addresses, and allows you to enter a domain and see all of the emails associated with that company (that have made their way into the Hunter database). It’s my go-to email finding tool today.

Whether you need the email address of a CEO, content manager or social media rep, Hunter’s email finder feature will return either their exact email address or their best guess based on other company emails they’ve uncovered. What ups the ante with this blogging tool, is the bulk feature, where you can upload a list of domains or contacts, in order to find or verify contacts for a larger scale outreach campaign.

The free plan limits you to 100 searches a month (which is more than enough for implementing a thoughtful blog SEO strategy).

15. Respona

Respona is an all-in-one blogger outreach platform with all of the necessary tools to set up and launch an email campaign of any kind, be it for link building, digital PR, marketing, or even sales (check out this round up of the best sales tools for more on that front).

It’s integrated with Google’s search engine for streamlined prospecting, and pulls metrics like Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank directly from Ahrefs. An easy-to-use email finder is also included, making it extremely easy to find the right person’s contact information without having to rely on any other tools. Their features include:

• Automated email outreach
• Great for prospecting and finding contact information
• Deep personalization of outreach campaigns
• Built-in analytics and reporting

Respona’s intuitive interface guides you through every step of creating and launching your outreach campaigns, keeps track of your performance, and also the status of your conversations with each prospect. The tool will be especially useful to link builders, as it was initially used to help Visme scale their link building outreach efforts, helping the website gain over 2 million organic visitors a month.

16. Voila Norbert

Voila Norbert’s remarkable in the way it’s able to process even hundreds of raw CSV files, and feed you highly accurate contact information for your blog outreach campaigns.

Primarily built to become one of the top lead validation tools, Voila Norbert also integrates with other tools like Drip and Pipedrive, making it particularly useful for sorting your leads and lining up campaigns to launch quickly.

17. Ninja Outreach

Ninja outreach is on this list of the best blogging tools because it’s an all-in-one outreach tool that you can use to connect with influencers, pitch guest posts and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche—at scale.

Its primary function as a link prospector can be accessed within the Outreach section. Enter a topic to find the top blogs you should connect with, with several columns highlighting social stats, SEO metrics, traffic figures and contact info for the people you should get in touch with and email with your collaboration idea.

The features column even shows whether or not the target website is currently accepting guest posts—making this amazing amongst the top tools for bloggers who want to land more guest posts and attract high quality links as a part of their SEO strategy. Consider whether or not this kind of outreach can fold into your greater blogging strategy & it may be worth the extra expense.

18. Clearbit

The stand-out feature that makes Clearbit one of the most useful tools for content creators, is its awesome integration with Gmail. Once Clearbit is installed, you can click on a contact you’re about to send an email to—and you’ll get a mini widget with a short bio about the person, their website and company they work at.

It’s useful for not only personalizing your emails during an outreach campaign, but for also testing & validating whether or not a particular email address you have is accurate 😉

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Productivity-Centric Blogging Tools to Get More Work Done (Faster)

Alright, shifting gears again—let’s talk about the productivity-related tools—which is something of an obsession of mine.

These are my picks for the most essential productivity-oriented blogging tools that’ll help you save time on tasks that can be done faster (and more effectively).

19. Wordable

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, and have ever gone through the (hilarious) process of trying to copy & paste a blog post you wrote as a draft in a Google Doc—and get it loaded into WordPress, then you know how much of a nightmare the re-formatting will be. Wordable is one of my favorite writing tools because it’s saved me literally hours of my life.

Once you’ve signed up for Wordable’s free trial, you’ll download their plugin and install it on your WordPress blog. Then, in literally one click, you’ll be able to instantly export Google Docs into a WordPress post or page on your blog—without any formatting challenges. Seriously. It’s incredible, and it’ll even import images using the titles you’ve given the files originally within your Google Doc. Keep an eye out for future functionality with other tools for bloggers, like Trello and Evernote to possibly come down the pipeline with Wordable one day.

20. FocusMe

FocusMe has a special place on my list of the best blogging tools because of how much it, well… helps me stay focused when I need to get critical work done.

As a website and app blocker, FocusMe aspires to help you kill energy-draining multitasking and limit the amount of time you spend on distracting websites. Its promise of efficiency is set on the belief that setting a daily 2-hour curfew for a specific website or app can translate to 25% higher levels of productivity.

21. Inbox When Ready for Gmail

The makers of this special Chrome extension for Gmail realized just how obsessed we’ve become with emails today—and sought to rein in that obsession, so you can spend more time on the tasks that’ll actually help grow your blog (rather than answering every single email as it comes in).

Once installed, the extension helps you batch process emails and minimize how long you spend on each email—by adding a “Show Inbox” button and alternatively a “Hide Inbox” button for when you’re ready to either dive into email or hide your email inbox from sight. Personally, it helps me think twice about opening up my email inbox.

Another great feature is that you can still compose new emails while the inbox remains hidden, so you don’t have to worry about new emails popping up and stealing your attention. You can also assign a frequency limit on how many times you want to check your email in a day—plus allocate specific time limits for each email.

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Marketing-Related Blogging Tools to Grow Your Traffic and Build an Audience

Marketing. Like it or not, recent blogging statistics illustrate that you’ve got to promote your blog content if you hope to build an engaged target audience—and the right tools can help you do that much more effectively than ever before.

These are my picks for the most essential tools that’ll specifically help you market your blog more effectively.

22. ConvertKit

While I’ll be the first to tell you stick with free email marketing tools like Mailchimp as you’re just getting started—that won’t be the best blogging tool for growing your email list in the long-term as your small business scales and you can afford invest in blogging tools like ConvertKit that’ll do more to create things like automations & sequences that can generate revenue from your email list while you sleep.

Your email subscribers are just a small step away from becoming paying customers of your online course, the eBook you wrote, or service you’re offering. For example, I’ve been able to set up completely automated sales emails that promote the purchase of either my blogging books or one of my premium blogging courses depending upon when and how a new subscriber signs up on my blog. ConvertKit’s functionality is designed specifically for bloggers, and is affordable (starting at $29/mo) for their jam-packed feature list including building your email list, making landing pages, setting up automated emails, messaging subscribers and templates to start with. They also integrate directly with WordPress and other top tools, making it a crucial dashboard for an experienced blogger.

If you’re still not convinced, take a peek at my recent comparison between ConvertKit vs AWeber vs Mailchimp.

23. Sumo

Sumo actually bundles together more than twenty different useful tools into one single package. Here, I’ll talk about their three social media optimization tools—and if you want some more guidance on this subject, check out this updated list of the top social media tools on the market today.

We all know that posts with images get shared more, right? What if your blog visitors also want to share the images they find in your blog posts? That’s easily done in just one click with Sumo’s Image Sharer tool. Beyond that, the Sumo Highlighter makes it easy for readers to share snippets they like from within a blog post by highlighting it (for other readers to notice) and tweet about it.

Sumo share is a slick, well-optimized set of social sharing buttons that you can embed within a blog post or along the side of your blog, so that readers are encouraged to spread the word about the content they like on your blog.

24. OptinMonster

As any new blogger will know, building an email list is essential to eventually learning how to make money blogging. And check out this guide if you want a firsthand look at how much bloggers can make.

OptinMonster lands on our list of the best blogging tools because of how effective it is at capturing the email addresses of your readers. It can be set up on any page of your blog (they have an incredibly easy-to-use WordPress plugin too) and their tools give you the ability to even A/B test different messages to learn the most effective ways to incentivize your readers to join your list or even complete a purchase. Not to mention the fact that their opt-ins can be designed to perfectly match your blog layout aesthetic.

25. Jasper

I won’t blame you for being skeptical about AI-generated copywriting software. After all, how can artificial intelligence replicate the intangible aspects of a human’s voice, style, and tone? Well, they can’t really (yet). But Jasper is shockingly effective at crafting copy for blog posts, as well as other short forms of copy like Facebook ads, tweets, headlines, video scripts and sales pages.

The way I see a tool like this being best used today, is as a complement to your own abilities and other proven blogging tools like Clearscope. Functionally, you can use it to speed up your blog writing process, eliminate writer’s block and start generating content—or to fill the gaps in when it comes to getting your content to the finish line. I’ve tried several of these tools, but they tend to produce incomprehensible copy. Not Jasper, though. Their AI-based writing assistant is trained by conversion and copywriting experts, which helped it learn credible and effective writing skills. When you sign up, you’ll get access to over 40 copywriting templates based on different use cases, ranging from marketing strategy to email marketing, Amazon product descriptions, blog content and more.

26. SocialSnap

SocialSnap is a WordPress plugin that adds beautiful social share buttons on your blog, with more customization options and faster loading than anyone else on the market.

Unlike other tools and plugins that add social buttons to your blog, SocialSnap is built to be lightning fast and won’t slow down your page load speeds one bit—an important factor in your overall blog SEO strategy. Plus, their share buttons are available in multiple formats as a floating bar, sticky widget, above or below blog posts and even as pop-ups.

27. Click-to-Tweet by CoSchedule

For how minimalist and straight forward this free WordPress plugin is, it’s become one of the highest return blogging tools I’ve installed on my site to amplify my content marketing results.

It’s as easy as it gets when it comes to embedding quick and easy tweetable quotes or content you want to encourage readers to share anywhere within your blog content.

28. Teachable

As your blogging business grows, making and selling online courses will be a natural evolution along the path to monetizing your blog. Teachable has long been one of the easiest-to-use online course delivery platforms that can not only serve content to your students—but also collect payments on your behalf.

All you need to do is create your course content, design a sales page using their simple builder, and then connect Teachable to your PayPal or Stripe account—then you’re ready to start selling courses to your readers. Check them out and sign up here to learn more.

29. Buffer

As one of the very first social media marketing tools I ever used as a blogger, Buffer will forever have a sweet spot in my heart. More than any other single feature of Buffer, their powerful scheduling functionality is what first attracted me to try this blogging tool—and they now offer scheduling of Twitter threads in addition to scheduling on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest & tools for Shopify, Google and more. Their easy to use, drag and drop functionality will help you schedule social media posts in a hurry.

Not only is the product great for full-time bloggers (and part-time bloggers) on a budget—hoping to grow a social media following & drive traffic from social media platforms, but the team behind the product is awesome.

30. Wishpond

Wishpond is actually a collection of tools built around helping you do one thing—effectively market and grow your business. It earns a place here on my list of useful tools for marketers, because of how many different features you get after signing up: an online advertising dashboard, social media tools, email marketing, lead management, referral campaigns, landing pages, forms, call tracking, chat bots and more. It’s a one-stop dashboard of tools once you’re focused on marketing your site.

The most unique feature about Wishpond, is that you get a dedicated marketing executive to join your team after signing up. It’s their job to  guide you through every step of what it takes to create (and execute) successful marketing campaigns for your blog and niche. They’ll help you stay in the loop with industry trends, look for specific optimizations you can make on your blog and provide ongoing actionable advice to help grow your site in the right direction. The best part? Pricing starts at just $49/mo.

31. YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (behind only their parent company Google)?

With many millions of people searching for answers to the pressing questions they have every single day on YouTube, that makes it one of the most useful blogging tools to help build your target audience, attract more viewers who want to learn from you and grow your influence. In their push to increase the watch time users spend on YouTube, bloggers that publish longer-form videos that keep viewers engaged, will be rewarded with climbing the organic rankings.

Here are a few YouTube video ideas (and formats) you can use to create engaging content for your readers:

• Turn your popular blog posts into videos
• Share stories from within your blog niche
• Create step-by-step videos that walk through a process readers want to learn about
• Discuss current events, news and industry happenings (by yourself or with a guest)

At the end of the day, the more you can publish quality YouTube videos and embed them into related posts on your blog, the higher your rewards will likely be from search engines like Google that value the close connection between YouTube video embeds and long-form written content.

32. Adobe Rush

Adobe Rush is the company’s most recent video editing product—a pared down version of their immensely popular Premier editing software—geared toward helping bloggers and creators to shoot, edit and share online videos as quickly as possible.

Rush makes my list of the best blogging tools because I’m far from a professional video editor. It helps me to take the simple videos I record (like my tutorial on how to start a blog) and edit them into visually appealing content for my blog and YouTube channel in a matter of minutes.

33. Rev

Whether it’s video or podcast transcriptions, captions to include with your YouTube videos, or even foreign subtitles on your content that starts to attract an international audience, Rev is my go-to destination for fast, high-quality services in this world—landing it squarely on my list of the best blogging tools. Side note: If you’re considering starting a podcast, check out my list of the best podcast hosting platforms on the market today.

34. Albacross

Albacross is a powerful B2B lead generation platform that gives bloggers (and small businesses) the ability to identify and monitor which companies are visiting their websites. You can also gather useful information on the organizations behind your readers—including size, revenue, industry, location and even contact details.

Having this kind of data about blog visitors at your disposal will allow you to do much more relevant email marketing campaigns to spread the word about your blog and build more partnerships. Their integration with Zapier gives users access to a wide range of applications to pass data to, including CRMs, email marketing tools and more.

35. Prezi Video

This new (free) tool by the team at Prezi, is designed to help you create remote presentations that bring people closer. At the core of the product is the ability to appear on camera, right alongside your content as you present over video to your audience, team or even friends. With the goal of fostering more meaningful face-to-face connection with teams (and audiences) that are increasingly located around the world, Prezi Video is a must-try for bloggers and marketers of all stripes.

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Broken Link and Optimization-Driven Blogging Tools

Now, one of my favorite aspects of blogging—working hard to get make sure your content is discovered by new audiences by tactics like… landing guest blog posts, finding broken links and coming up with creative ways to get your content mentioned in strategic outlets online.

These are my picks for the best blogging tools that’ll help you get your blog mentioned on other top websites.

36. LinkMiner

LinkMiner is an Google Chrome extension that identifies opportunities for you to build links to your blog content, by spotting broken links on the websites you’re viewing. Once installed, LinkMiner will highlight all 404 errors (broken links), so that you can then contact the blog owner with a similar resource you’ve already created and ask for your link to be placed where that broken one previously was.

37. SEO Web Page Analyzer

This blogging tool is a free SEO analyzer you can use to get actionable advice on improving the pages of your blog.

Just enter the URL of the page you want to analyze to get a free report. Based on the quick analysis, your page will get an overall SEO score, followed by a report with specific implementations you can quickly make to improve your page score and get it in better SEO shape.

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Image and Video-Related Blogging Tools to Nail Your Visual Identity

Without a coherent visual identity and well-designed blog layout on your blogging platform (like you can get from these WordPress themes), it’s going to be difficult to stick out in the minds of your readers (and convince them you’re worth coming back to). These will help you excel at that.

From optimizing your images in order to keep page load speeds down, to designing high quality featured images for your blog posts, these are the essential image and video-related tools you need to be using right now.

38. Placeit

If you’re looking for a platform where you can create all of your branding designs, Placeit is a seriously great tool for bloggers of all levels. With more than 94,000 templates and a growing library of designs made by professionals each day, it’s a fantastic hub for creating visuals. You can make everything from logos and videos—to your social campaign with branded images in minutes.

Just select your favorite video template, customize your text, change the color of backgrounds and shapes, and add your images or video clips. All their stock video footage is made by a professional team, so you can access some seriously eye-catching templates to get your video marketing off to a solid start.

Key features of this blogging tool to check out:

• Unlimited downloads: Keep creating, you get to have the unlimited downloads you need for your brand
• Fonts and audio selection: You can also customize the playback speed and quantity of slides to make a short or long video
• New templates every day: Designers are always in the loop for trends and they create beautiful assets every day
• Easy-to-use: You can create tons of designs, arts, videos, demos, Instagram stories, and social media marketing assets with no technical skills
• Professional graphics: All graphics are made by a professional team, so you can rely on them being eye-catching templates for your campaigns

Pricing: Basic is free / Unlimited is $12.70/user/mo (or $76.23/user/year)

39. Sendspark

Sendspark stands out as a super high value tool for bloggers that are aiming to create engaging videos, particularly when you’re planning to use the videos somewhere in your sales process for a product or service you’re offering. With its user-friendly Chrome extension, Sendspark allows for effortless one-click video recording, complemented by a range of features like filters to enhance your on-camera appearance.

Once your video is ready, Sendspark provides versatile sharing options, whether you want to share the link on platforms like Slack and LinkedIn or download the file for uploading to your preferred social media site.

40. Loom

I discovered Loom just a few years ago and am completely blown away by not only its versatility as a (free) useful blogging tool for recording high quality screen-share tutorials, but at just how effective it is at also capturing direct to camera videos from my computer.

Loom’s features also include the ability to quickly (and either privately or publicly) share the videos you record with just one click—pasting into your email, over Slack or otherwise. Colleagues or customers can even weigh in with comments on your videos, or you can export the videos and upload to a destination like YouTube.

41. Crush Image

This easy-to-use website lets you instantly compress images in just one click, making it essential as a blogging tool you’ll want to employ as your traffic grows and page speed becomes an important factor for you.

With Crush Image, you can achieve up to 95% compression without any noticeable drop in your image quality. Images will upload quickly and as a result, the pages of your blog will load faster. Every additional second in page load time can drop conversions and conversely signal to Google that your content shouldn’t be ranked as high in organic search results—so this is a good one.

42. Adobe Photoshop

For truly unrestricted image editing and customization, Adobe Photoshop reigns king amongst tools.

On the flip side though, it can be one of the most complex tools to learn from scratch if you’ve never experienced it before—the incredibly wide range of customization options to edit and even create visual content means there’s a steep learning curve.

43. Visme

Visme is a free online design blogging tool that lets bloggers create custom designs, blog images, infographics,  social posts and more for your blog—all without having to learn a complex set of tools or skills.

After signing up, you’ll be able to choose from hundreds of templates to hit the ground running, and you’ll be able to create visually appealing graphics in a matter of minutes.

44. Logo.com

Logo.com has a suite of design tools you can use to create beautiful, memorable brand to help your blog stand out from the sea of competition. What’s particularly great about Logo.com, is that you can get started by quickly typing in a details about your brand, your blogging goals, the color palette preferences you have (use a color palette generator if you need some inspiration)—and then watch their logo maker generate an unlimited number of logo designs. From there, you can customize your logo color, icon, design, font and more—resulting in an optimized logo file. You can even download social media and advertising images featuring your logo, to make promoting your blog that much easier.

45. Logaster

Logaster is one of the top online services for designing your brand assets (especially getting a logo designed) with a focus on both quality and cost. What’s particularly great about this blogging tool, is that you can create a logo in just a couple of clicks—with their online generator creating more than 1,000 creative logos each hour.

With a specific bend towards helping small and medium-sized businesses, their blogging tools offer the ability to quickly create high quality logos and other visual assets to fuel projects like a website redesign, new media kit, stationary and more.

46. Unsplash

Unsplash has a massive free stock photo library, making it a go-to amongst my favorite tools for bloggers when it comes to sourcing royalty-free stock images.

Studies have shown that blog posts that feature an image every 75-100 words get double the shares compared to those that don’t have regular visuals embedded throughout. Their powerful search function isn’t the only way to look for pictures either—you can also browse collections sorted into familiar themes. Their library boasts a collection of 810,000+ photos from photographers across every walk of life. You won’t be disappointed in your search for the right blog images.

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Project Management Blogging Tools to Keep Your Content on Track

Finally, we’ve got my favorite project management-related blogging tool you can use to stay on top of editorial calendars while keeping your remote contractors, partners and fellow bloggers in the loop.

47. Skimlinks

Skimlinks is a monetization platform for bloggers, which enables you to automatically affiliate and monetize product links in commerce-related content. There are 60,000 bloggers already using Skimlinks, as well as many of the top publishers in the world, including Conde Nast, Hearst, and Huffington Post.

Once approved by Skimlinks, bloggers can access up to 48,500 affiliate programs globally. Skimlinks also has many tools and resources to help you increase your affiliate revenue, such as the Editor Toolbar to automatically know the commission rate you’ll get from a merchant website you’re visiting, and several reports to track and optimize your performance.

Some of the useful reports you’ll gain access to include:

Performance by Merchant: This report shows you which merchants are paying you the most commissions, and how they are trending over time.

Performance by Page: This report shows you which articles in your blog are bringing in the most impressions, clicks, and commissions. You can also split the articles by links to see which merchants are performing best within each article.

Trending Products: This report shows you which products are currently bringing in a lot of revenue for publishers across the Skimlinks network.

Broken Links: This report shows you the number of clicks across your website that are broken. You can filter by broken links types, such as Out of Stock, 404 or Inactive merchants.

Skimlinks is an overall must have tool for any blogger looking to optimize their affiliate marketing efforts. You can sign up here, install the Javascript, and get approved within a few hours.

48. Affilimate Affiliate Dashboard

There are two main challenges that come with scaling your affiliate blog income—keeping track of lots of different affiliate programs to log into, and inconsistent or lackluster reporting. For example, let’s say you have a single article which links to products in 5 different affiliate networks. Trying to figure out how much that article is earning in total, and whether it’s trending up or down after your latest changes, is a time-consuming and manual process.

These are the two core problems that Affilimate solves. It aggregates your affiliate reports into one single dashboard, allows you to build detailed, cross-network reports and automatically attributes your conversions back to specific articles and links on the page (which saves a ton of time). This can be a game-changer both if you’re starting out and want to visualize what’s already working, as well as if you’re scaling up and managing several different websites.

49. Paperform

Surprisingly, the vast majority of free WordPress themes on the market today just don’t have a great interface for creating beautiful sign up forms—and that’s where Paperform comes into play.

Paperform is an online tool that allows bloggers and web publishers to (quickly) create beautiful online forms, insert payment forms or create easy-to-build product pages without any technical knowledge. From surveying your audience, to collecting email addresses, taking payments, booking appointments and more, Paperform gives you a short HTML code snippet that can be embedded directly into any page or post on your website.

50. Easelly

If you’re looking to increase your blog traffic (but you’re on a tight budget) creating infographics can improve your website authority and rankings. But how do you make infographics? Meet Easelly, a simple infographic maker tool with 4 million users worldwide. With the Pro version of Easelly, you even get unlimited access to beautiful infographic templates and more than 1.1 million free illustrations & images created by professional designers.

It’s also easy to embed an Easelly infographic directly on your blog. All you have to do is copy and paste a simple embed code from your Easelly canvas, into your content editor. If you’re pressed for time to make infographics from scratch, you can even ask the infographic design team behind Easelly to make custom infographics and animated graphics for you. Pricing for their paid plans start at just $49.

51. SurveySparrow

When it comes to positioning your product in an extremely crowded market, there are certain checkboxes you need to tick. The most important one being – thorough market research. And that’s where SurveySparrow can help you. 

SurveySparrow is an omni-channel experience management platform that enables you to perceive your competition, market and consumer trends, and collect valuable data through surveys, polls, and quizzes you can embed on your site.

52. MightyShare

MightyShare is an awesome free WordPress plugin (with some paid Pro upgrade features), that automatically generates beautiful social share images (effortlessly) for all of your blog posts from directly inside WordPress. Using automation behind-the-scenes, MightyShare takes the burden off your shoulders by streamlining the entire process, guaranteeing some fly new images for your content. Say goodbye to tediously creating images in Canva, this plugin empowers you to effortlessly optimize your social media presence with just a few clicks.

53. Missinglettr

Missinglettr is a social media scheduler with the power to detect new articles when they’re published to your site and automatically begin to develop a promotional campaign for social media. It also has a Curate feature that helps you find great content in your niche and add it to your publishing queue—all of which are great for beginners, because of how simple they’re laid out.

54. Grammarly

If you haven’t heard of Grammarly by now, you must be living under a rock. When it comes to AI-powered editing software, Grammarly is the leader by a mile for bloggers who want to boost the readability of their blog content. While Grammarly doesn’t have a native WordPress plugin (yet), I’ve still used this powerful proofreading tool during the writing & editing process within my Google Docs while I’m working with writers and editors on my team. It’s helped me avoid many an embarrassing typo over the years.

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Did I Miss Any of Your Picks for the Best Blogging Tools?

Ultimately, I’m a major advocate of getting by on as tight a budget as possible when it comes to purchasing blogging tools, especially in the beginning when you can make the painful blogging mistake of spending too much on paid tools—even though your tool expenses will be deductible on your blog taxes at the end of the year. With how many great free (and very inexpensive) tool options there are today—it’s easy to keep your blogging costs pretty low while still growing your site quickly.

If you’re not too sure about what’s actually worth spending some money on today—in the name of positioning your blog for long-term success, then use this check list:

• Get the best web hosting plan you can afford, so that your blog loads as quickly as possible (read these Bluehost reviews to make an informed decision and check out how it compares to Wix too)
• If you’re on a tight budget, opt for one of these cheap hosting plans, a month-to-month hosting plan or even a free hosting plan to get started (but if you have the budget, managed WordPress hosting will be your ticket)
• Grab an affordable, premium WordPress theme that’ll help you design a beautiful blog that impresses readers
• Invest time into utilizing the free blogging tools on this list (to the best of your ability) before opting into paid tools

Now, are there any essential tools I missed that should be added to the list?

Share with us in the comments below!