BLOGGING RESOURCES YOU NEED TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL BLOG
Today is going to be all about helping you get the most out of your blogging.
What are those things that have been helping me maximise my online presence? And as you know, there’s a lot that comes to running an online presence.
But from publishing content to managing social media to building an email list, helping my clients and everything in between, you’ve got to find the resources that work for you.
So these are my favourite blogging resources that help me get more done.
#1 | SQUARESPACE
The first tool I want to talk to you about is the one I use to manage my website and that is Squarespace.
What you see on my website right now? I’ve created all of this with Squarespace.
I absolutely love Squarespace because you have complete control over the design and layout of your website, but it’s so easy to do.
With Squarespace you can create a really professional looking website, even if you don’t know how to code. You can just drag and drop everything and arrange it until it looks how you want it to look.
I’ve also written a blog post on the different things I use Squarespace for which you can read here.
So it's super straightforward and there are so many customisation possibilities you can do to make your website look completely unique.
#2 | GOOGLE'S KEYWORD PLANNER
I’ve talked a lot about this tool on this channel but it’s basically the tool I use to do keyword research for my blog posts.
You input your keyword and it gives you loads of suggestions for other keywords you could try and rank for, along with search volume and competition.
If you really want to up your blogging game or you want more traffic, I’d really advise using keyword planner in your blog post process. It’s going to make such a difference to you.
#3 | CONVERTKIT
I’d also recommend having an email marketing software that you can use to communicate with your audience and deliver your opt-in freebie. For that I would use ConvertKit.
I started out with MailChimp and while that served a purpose for me as a blogger, now that I’ve sort of introduced content upgrades and my blog serves as part of my business, ConvertKit makes more sense for me.
All the features in ConvertKit are tailored to exactly what professional bloggers need, including:
- Broadcasts (one-off emails you send to your list)
- Sequences (this could be a welcome sequence or email series)
- Automations (you can tell ConvertKit if a subscriber does this, it triggers that)
I feel like ConvertKit is something I should’ve started using from the beginning, but now it’s well worth the investment.
#4 | CONTENTCAL
This is a tool I’ve discovered recently. I've been trying to find a new social scheduling platform to help all my clients and one I’ve found that I think is really great is ContentCal.
So this is a social scheduling tool that links with your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts and publishes content to those platforms for you.
But something else cool that I didn’t think about that I saw in a sort of review of this tool from Andrew & Pete is that you can use it as an editorial calendar.
And, you can also reuse content which is great and saves you loads of time, especially since Buffer removed their "rebuffer" feature.
#5 | BOARDBOOSTER
The final tool I want to talk to you about is Boardbooster and it is a Pinterest automaton tool.
This is one of the main tools that helps me get traffic to my blog, it’s SO good.
I use Pinterest to drive traffic to my blog and it’s consistently been one of my top sources of traffic for the past three years.
So a little side tip - if your audience is on Pinterest, you need to be pinning your blog posts my friend!
It should be a big focus of your marketing strategy.
I mainly use the looping feature on BoardBooster, so I’ve set up a schedule with all my boards, so my pins just keep going out all the time instead of having to do it manually.
Those are my favourite blogging resources that have been helping me so much with the things that other people want me to do and the things I'm prioritising for myself to do.
What blogging resources or tools can you not live without?
Remember to use the right blogging resources so you can get one step closer to a breakthrough.
