8 tools for better blogging

When it comes to the power of business blogs, the stats come thick and fast. Companies that blog are believed to get 97 per cent more links to their websites and 67 per cent more leads than those that do not.

Having said that, the number of blogs that exist in the world is on the rise. Statistics suggest that the number of blogs in the US alone will reach 31.7 million by 2020.

So how do you get your content to stand out from the crowd? We’ve already offered a guide to blogging best practice on the tsoHost blog.

Now, we’ll look at a few free tools that can help boost your blogging efforts.

Google Trends

The editorial calendar can be a harsh master. Coming up with ideas for new blogs week-in and week-out can be taxing. Google Trends is a great resource for blog topic inspiration.

For starters, it allows you to see which search terms are the most popular, either globally or in a specific region, at any given time. At the time of writing this post, the top three search terms in the UK were Rocky Fielding, Juventus and Katie Taylor.

The site also lets you enter a search topic keyword and it will return a list of the most popular search terms linked to that topic.

So, at the time of writing, we searched for the word ‘sandwich’ and the most popular terms linked to that topic, as returned by Google Trends, were club sandwich, pesto, vegetable sandwich and lunchbox.

Answer the public

This site is another tool that can help you develop ideas for blog posts. It allows you to enter a keyword relating to your business and it will return a list of dozens of questions that the public are asking regarding that word or topic on the internet.

Let’s take the sandwich example, again. When you type in the word sandwich to Answer the Public you’ll get more than 150 questions returned to you – ranging from ‘which sandwich goes with chicken soup?’ to ‘how did sandwich get its name’.

Share Through

Headlines can make or break a blog post. Get them wrong and readers won’t bother reading your article. Share Through is a tool that helps you critic the quality of your blog’s headline. You simply type your headline into the website and it will analyse it for you.

It will give you a score out of 100 for the quality, it will tell you the strengths of the headline, and it will suggest ways you can improve it – for example by making it longer, adding a brand reference or adding alert words.

Grammarly

It’s not always easy to edit your own work and, if you’re running a small business, the chances are you haven’t got an editorial team with sub-editors who can help you make sure your company blog pieces are flawless when it comes to spelling and grammar.

This is where Grammarly comes in. This tool can be added to Chrome and it will analyse everything you write for your blog and it will highlight any errors.

Pixabay

It’s no secret that images are the glue that keeps readers on your blog pages. In fact, blogs with images are thought to receive 94 per cent more views than those without them.

Sourcing images isn’t always easy, though. You can’t pull them off Google due to copyright law and subscriptions to many photo sites cost an arm and a leg. Pixabay allows you to download royalty free images for use on your blogs. There are more than 1.6 million images in the database.

Canva

Canva is another handy tool for adding imagery to your blog posts. There are more than 50,000 graphic templates on this site. However, to save you time, Canva will ask you when you sign up what sort of business you are and which industry you’re involved in. It then uses this information to help show you the most relevant graphics.

The software allows you to create banners, logos and in-post images such as quotes on attractive backgrounds. Plus, you can share your account with other team members, so everyone is kept in the creative loop.

RescueTime

Struggling to focus on your blog content? RescueTime can help you identify where you are being distracted when you sit down at your computer to write.

Running securely on computers and mobile devices, it tracks the time you spend on various websites and applications during the day and gives you a report based on this activity, so you can identify where you might be wasting your time.

You can also ask the tool to ban you from accessing certain sites like social media websites at certain times of day so you can keep your focus.

YMYL

Your money, your life aka YMYL is less a physical too and more a mental tool for appraising blog ideas. In its summer 2018 updates, Google tweaked the way it dealt with blog content relating to certain sensitive issues – for example, finance and health.

Its aim was to ensure that websites without the correct level of authority were not able to offer advice to internet users on issues that could significantly affect their lives.

Therefore, if you’re considering writing an article linked to a sensitive issue, you need to make sure you have an authoritative or informed viewpoint within this article. Top tips are to include an interview or even to get an expert to write a guest post for you.

If your company are the experts, then make sure your credentials are explained in the blog post and elsewhere on your website.