5 Tools to Help You Run a Better Blog

Running a blog is a great way to polish your writing skills and even earn a bit of extra cash; in fact some people even a living out of it. But running a successful blog takes a lot of work. Here are five tools you can use to help streamline the blogging process and help keep you on track.

1. Trello

Trello is a great tool for managing workflows and will allow you to keep track of your content plan. You can assign tasks to individuals, making it especially useful for multiuser blogs, while the ability to implement deadlines and reminders will help you make sure your content always goes up on time.

It’s not a tool that will offer you divine inspiration, but it will help you manage your ideas and make the process of getting content live on your site a lot smoother than it has been in the past.

2. Yoast

When it comes to search engine optimisation, there are very few shortcuts you can take that do not involve cutting corners in a way that could be detrimental to your site. That makes it even more important to make use of all the tools at your disposal. Yoast reduces the amount of hassle involved in optimising specific blog posts. A WordPress plugin, it helps you with pretty much every aspect of on-page optimisation, from meta descriptions to video SEO. By reducing the amount of technical knowledge required to fully optimise a blog, Yoast can help you make sure the content you create is easy to find.

3. Buffer

Tweeting your blog content is obviously a great idea, but tweeting it when you know people will be looking out for it is an even better one. If you subscribe to Moz Analytics, you can use its Followerwonk programme to find out when your Twitter followers are most active – that information will let you tweet the time that will have the most impact in terms of engagement. If you don’t have access to that kind of data, then studies have shown that Twitter users tend to be most engaged between 11am and 3pm.

But what happens if you’re not around to tweet at the optimal time? That’s where Buffer comes in – Buffer allows you to schedule tweets to be sent whenever you want. That means you can launch a big piece of content at the right time, even if you’re on holiday on the other side of the world – all you need to do is cue up the Tweet in Buffer and it will do the rest.

4. Pippity

An email list is one of the most powerful ways a blog can generate repeat traffic – the problem is getting people to sign up in the first place. Pippity helps solve that issue by allowing you to create bespoke pop-up boxes that encourage people to give you their email address. It’s so customisable you can even craft specific messages to target people based on how they found your site, making it an incredibly powerful way to get people to sign up for your email newsletter.

5. Google Analytics

Although most blogging platforms will provide you with some sort of analytics package, you really need something more professional. Google Analytics, which is free, will allow you to measure a huge range of information and see how visitors to your site behave. This information can then be used to help you decide what kind of content you should be creating to have the biggest impact on your visitors.

So there you have it, five tools that can help you improve your blogging. What would you have included in the list? Let us know in the comments section.