Blogging is both fun and exciting but it can become a tiring and time-consuming process at times while trying to offer a unique and interesting experience to your audience; however, it can be made much simpler and easier by using some blogging tools that have been created specifically for bloggers. Below I have collected some of the top blogging tools available from the internet.
1. Content Idea Generator
Content Idea Generator is a Google document which has been created by the guys at SEO Gadget. You can make a copy of the document here. This document gives you a wealth of information related to your niche/industry. It allows you to run keywords associated with your niche and returns top searches based on your keywords. The information returned is more than enough to give you an inspiration for your blog’s content. The search returns include top searches from Google news, Bing News, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and so on…
2. Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows you to bookmark and tag web pages. It is a great tool for all those bloggers who need to keep track of their desired articles for later reference. Not only that you are also able to add notes to your bookmarked content. It also supports mobile phone devices such as iphone, ipad etc.
3. Disqus
Disqus is one of the most powerful blogging tools. It provides you with everything you need to build a community around your blog, and to maintain a powerful commenting system with a much better threading in the latest version than in the older one. It also allows you to up-vote and down-vote comments. The posts and comments are connected with each other in a neat and clean manner; also, you can place related articles at the bottom of a post and have a look at the top commenters at a glance.
4. Focus Booster
Focus Booster is a tool that is used by many bloggers to gain focus and increase their productivity. They have both a desktop and a web application available. Based on the principles of the pomodoro technique , the application provides a simple timer with a sleek design to enhance your concentration and focus.
The principle behind the tool – the pomodoro principle – “uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals (referred to as “pomodoros”) separated by breaks and is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility”.
5. Alltop
Alltop lets you in on what is happening around you by collecting headlines from top sites and headlines. The site provides an insight into all the topics which can be of interest to us – all in one place.
6. Trapit
Trapit is “the world’s most advanced personalized content discovery application” – as they call themselves. The app lets you set up “traps” for various topics – from very broad categories to niche information – and then it aggregates articles related to your selected keywords from around the web.
Trapit “learns” from your explicit and implicit actions in order to deliver the most relevant content.
7. Photo Pin
Photo Pin is a source of free images for your blog; the photos come from creative commons. The tool makes it very easy to browse photos and to download them in multiple sizes.
One of the cool features of the app is that it gives you the attribution link to the image in HTML so that you can insert it into your blogging editor for attribution.
8. PopSurvey
One of the most important aspect of blogging is to keep your audience engaged and to understand their interests. As a blogger you need to get insights into what your target is talking about. PopSurvey is a great survey that lets you carry on surveys on your blog to help you better understand your customers. The tool also provides you with custom reports to help you understand and evaluate your audience’s responses.
9. After The Deadline
After The Deadline is a great tool that helps you avoid grammar and spelling mistakes. It is available as a browser extension as well as a WordPress plugin. It is a great language checker for the web that comes with contextual spell checking, advanced style checking and intelligent grammar checking. Say goodbye to all those ‘arghhhhhh’ moments when you see that you have made a mistake after you have published your blog post!
10. Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keyword Tool is a must for every blogger and their mother! It lets you enter search phrases and lets you see how much traffic that particular phrase gets for over a month. Also it gives suggestions on better search phrases based on the keywords that you have entered.
These are only some of the cool blogging tools; there are hundreds of such tools and apps available which will make blogging much simpler and
easier for you.
Are you a blogger? Are there any tools you are using that you would like to share?
