Best Blogging Tools All Successful Bloggers Use

Attention bloggers, I have rounded up the best blogging tools to use in the market.

If you are just starting your blogging journey or an established blogger looking into monetising and growing your website even faster, I recommend the following tools for you.

The best part is these tools do not have to burn holes in your pocket. From web hosting to themes, to page-builders and WordPress plugins – I have it ALL covered.

TLDR:

• Best web hosting – Lyrical Host
• Best keyword research tool – Keysearch
• Best Email Service Provider (ESP) – ActiveCampaign
• Best social media scheduler – Missinglettr
• Best graphic design tool – Canva
• Best photo editing tool – Adobe Lightroom
• Best video editing tool – Adobe Premiere Pro
• Best transcription tool – Descript
• Best affiliate network – Skimlinks

 

Web Hosting

Web hosting is the place where all the files and data of your website is contained. Think of it as a house where your website lives while the domain name is the house’s address. All websites on the internet need web hosting. All your website’s website’s images, content, codes, and text are secured in this web hosting.

Choosing a good web hosting company can be a daunting task, especially since hundreds of companies are already there. 

The main factors to consider are speed, stability, security, and costs. You should be able to focus on growing your online blog without having to worry too much about your website crashing or slowing down. And when the unfortunate happens, the company must have a reliable customer support system. 

Lastly, you shouldn’t have to pay hidden fees or surprise price increases when signing up with a web hosting company.

I recommend the following Web Hosting sites as some of the Best Blogging Tools to use. 

Lyrical Host

As my current hosting provider, I have nothing but a great experience with Lyrical Host.

Lyrical Host is an independent web hosting company founded by a fellow blogger, Jenni Brown, in the UK. It’s a relatively small and new company that has recently gained popularity. Lyrical Host promises super-fast, reliable, and powerful hosting that’s easy to use. They also offer honest pricing and straightforward payment schemes.

Lyrical Hosting is a great hosting tool that has been constantly rated 5/5 by many users in Trustpilot mainly for its very competent customer service and transparent pricing schemes.

What we love about it

• We love their social media groups that offer informative content and discussions.
• Website migration can be a pain, but Lyrical Hosting makes it easy and free for you! They’ll move your website for free from any hosts, WordPress Blogger and WordPress.
• The reviewers have constantly praised customer service. They’ve competent tech support for all your website needs. They’re friendly and reliable anytime and anywhere.
• When it comes to pricing, many web hosting companies offer amazing sign-up bonuses and discounts. But after a year or a couple of months, you may be surprised by a sudden increase in the annual fees that were not apparent before. Lyrical, on the other hand, is transparent with its pricing. There are no hidden costs, no junk add-ons. There’s no need to worry about a surprise increase in the next billing period.
• I love their resources page too, where they offer guides on taking your blogs to the next level. They even offer free stock photos for you to download and use!

Siteground

Siteground is the first hosting company I’ve used since taking my blog seriously. I was first attracted by its first-year pricing for its premium

Siteground is a hosting company founded by university friends in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Siteground is hosting more than 2 million domains. The company developed software that optimises speeds and monitors and isolates your accounts for a reliable user experience.

What we love about it

• Siteground has one of the best customer support services of all the web hosting sites that WordPress even recommends.
• Siteground uses the Google Cloud platform, the fastest on the internet, to ensure fast servers for all their new customers.
• Their customer service support is also highly rated. They give live chat and phone support very quickly. Email-based tickets might take 10 minutes to be answered. Otherwise, if you want to fix your own site, they have detailed guides complete with screenshots and step-by-step instructions to help you sort out your issue.

Namecheap

Namecheap started with domain names, and they are successful in that area. 3 million domains have made Namecheap their homes since it launched in 2000.

Recently, Namecheap included web hosting into their services. They guarantee 100% uptime, fast and reliable service. Their packages are packed with features for a reasonable price.

I use it for my secondary site which requires low maintenance but if your blog requires more complex set up or requires more resources, I wouldn’t recommend it. Their support drives me CRAZY (not in a good way), and they often have many undisclosed hidden fees when you need more resources/ support for your site.

What we love about it

• They have an easy-to-follow and free website builder.
• Their 30-day money-back guarantee is great for anyone who is just trying out their service. Not all web hosting companies do that.
• Their cheapest plan can give you loads of services. Their basic plan can get you a free SSL, unmetered bandwidth, the ability to host 3 domain websites, and biweekly back-ups.

Theme

There are literally thousands of themes out there, and it can be daunting to choose from these beautiful themes. Themes are files that dictate how you want your website to look. 

A good theme is easy to the eyes with many different layout options, easy to navigate and use by the visitor, and are well-supported by the developers.

Blossom Themes

Blossom Themes gives a wide variety of feminine themes in WordPress. These themes and their simple UI are great for whatever industry you are in – whether you are in e-commerce, fashion, travel, lifestyle, etc.

What we love about it 

• The themes are easy to use and designed for different niches such as fashion, travel, e-commerce, food, health, fitness and many more.
• SEO-friendly
• Feminine colour schemes and designs that are fit for women bloggers, entrepreneurs and the like.
• Translation-ready
• Social Media integration available

Page Builder

Page builders are plug-ins that allow you to create layouts for your pages and implement designs and customisations by simply executing drag and drop into the backend of your website. There’s no need to do complex codes when you use a Page Builder. 

Elementor

With 5 million users worldwide, Elementor is one of the most popular Page Builders in the world. It allows users to create beautiful and easy-to-use websites by using the simple live drag-and-drop editor. No need for coding skills as you will be shown how your website would look like your audience. You can make easy adjustments along the way.

What we love about it

• Beginner-friendly with its intuitive user interface
• Hundreds of templates to choose from that will fit your visuals for your business or your blog
• The free version is jam-packed with necessary features already
• Create functional and pretty designs with their live edit drag and drop
• Large online support

Essential WordPress Plugins

Plugins are software that can be added to the backend of your website to expand its functionality.

There are basically plugins for every function that you want your website to do and they integrate smoothly with your WordPress website.

They are easy to install, and most plugins come in with beginner-friendly instructions for you to execute the functions you want them to do.

Rank Math SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is essential in blogging. It helps your content to be seen by your target audiences. With billions of content on the internet, it’s vital to rank in search engines.

Rank Math SEO is one of the easiest SEO plugins to help you configure your blog and get to the top of search engines. It’s the one reason why I switched over from Yoast to Rank Math.

Recently, as if Rank Math isn’t already overflowing with features already, this amazing plugin just added their much-awaited SEO Email reporting feature! Rank Math will send detailed SEO reports right into your email so you can track traffic in your website, total keywords, impressions and average position in search engines.

This feature isn’t available in any other SEO plugins so far, and only premium SEO tools offer this functionality that often costs hundreds of dollars to access.

What we love about it

• Setup Wizard that is easy to follow, perfect for beginners
• Simple User Interface
• Runs a detailed SEO analysis
• Built-in measurement and tracking of keyword rankings errors in search engine
• Google Analytics integration

WP Rocket

A website that takes so long to load is a turn off to many audiences. According to Google, it only takes 3 seconds of page loading time before the audiences give up and go to a faster webpage. Therefore, a fast page speed is a must. 

WP Rocket instantly improves the performance of your website and boosts the loading speed of your pages by caching. Improved page speeds lead to better SEO and better ranking in the search engines. 

What we love about it

• It loads pages 50%+ faster than competitors.
• They offer a user-friendly interface that is perfect for beginners. This is not very common in other free caching plugins.
• While WP Rocket is mainly a caching plugin, it also gives tons of other performance optimizations.

Autoptimize

Autoptimize is a free WordPress plug-in that optimises your page by linking CSS and javascript together, putting them in the correct order, minifying HTML, and caching files. 

The result is a website with reduced file and pages sizes and subsequently faster website loading times. Autoptimize already has already over 1 million installs in WordPress.

What we love about it

• Autoptimize has a clean interface with clear instruction guides on using the plug-in to optimise your website.
• Autoptimize provides many option settings for optimising your website according to your specific needs.
• The customer support for Autoptimize is impeccable. Many users report quick and friendly responses from the support team.
• It also optimises images and Google Fonts to make the website even faster.

ShortPixel

Images are the heaviest files in a website, and they are most often the cause of slow page loading. Remember that page loading speeds are crucial to retaining visitors to the page, and slow speeds lead to fewer visits and conversion. 

Hence, an image optimiser is a must. Shortpixel is a plug-in that compresses images into smaller sizes, leading to improved SEO and loading speed of your website.

What we love about it

• It’s basically an install-and-forget plug-in. Super easy to install, and it only takes a couple of minutes to set up according to your preferred image optimisation settings. After setting it up, every image you upload will be optimised automatically. Simply uninstall if you want your photos to revert to original uploads.
• They have a highly responsive, capable, and friendly support group.
• They have a free plan package which is perfect for small websites. 
• For bigger websites, their packages are still cheaper relative to other products with the same services.

Lazy Load

Lazy Load is a plug-in in which the images are not loaded when they are not on the view screen of the audience. The photos will only be loaded if the user scrolls onto them. The number of HTTP request mechanisms thus decreases. Because there are only a few elements to load at a time, it helps your website load faster. 

This is great for websites that are heavy on images, like photography websites. 

What we love about it

• Improvement in performance when the number of images that need to be loaded is reduced. This means lesser competition in bandwidth by the user and faster download of the webpage.
• Improves site speed and user experience, thus delivering more SEO-friendly pages.

WebP Express

WebP Express is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to create and publish images in WebP files. This means your post will be saved as an image file instead of HTML, which speeds up loading time on mobile devices. It also works with all popular browsers and even supports retina display.

WebP Express is useful for bloggers who want their posts to load faster or have high-quality images without paying anything extra.

What we love about it

• Speed – The speed at which the blog loads is significant, especially if your audience uses slow connections like 3G/4G data. Using this plugin can save users precious bandwidth and make them happy!

• Retina Display Support – If your user has a retina screen, then the picture will look great when they view your site from their phone.

• Works With All Browsers – You don’t need any special software. Just download and install this plugin on your website.

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

This awesome plugin helps you track visitor statistics within your Google Analytics account. MonsterInsights provides its interface where you can easily set up tracking codes and see reports instantly. 

In addition, you can export detailed stats such as country, source, referrer, etc., directly through the admin panel. 

What’s more, you can segment visitors based on various criteria, so you get better insight into what people do once they arrive on your page.

What we love about it

• It lets you add custom code snippets and import existing ones.
• You can integrate Social media sharing buttons inside your content.
• The Dashboard gives you full access to the information you need.
• Monster Insights was explicitly designed to work with our other products but don’t require additional coding knowledge.

Pretty Links

This handy little tool takes care of those pesky links. Once activated on your site, Pretty Links will convert ugly affiliate URLs into clean-looking hyperlinks.

With the upgraded version, you get to auto-link keywords and the tool helps to auto-create pretty links.

What we like about it:

• It converts links regardless of how deep they are nested and makes it extremely simple to build beautiful URLs on your site.
• Pretty Links allow you to create an unlimited number of links.
• The ability to make all affiliate links nofollow by default.

Table Of Contents Plus

Table of Contents Plus is a powerful yet easy way to organise sections in your posts. TOC+ creates dynamic tables of contents for each post type without writing a single line of code. Just categorize your headings in your articles and let TOC+ take care of everything else!

When enabled on your front-end editor, TOC+ generates a nice Table Of Content listing straight out of the box. No longer will you be stuck trying to remember what you’ve written in which section of your posts.

What we love about it:

• Makes the organization of long articles easy. 
• Allows readers to navigate to exactly the section they want to read
• Tables are generated dynamically, which means they’ll adjust themselves depending upon the size of your browser window.

OptinMonster

If you’re looking to grow your email list, this is an extremely powerful tool for creating high converting opt-ins from your blog. This software allows you to create an unlimited number of options without writing a single line of code.

It comes bundled with various ready-made templates and premium themes so that you can start building your opt-in forms immediately after installation.

Once installed, OptinMonster creates a unique ID. Then whenever someone subscribes to your email list, OptinMonster sends out a confirmation link via email. When they click on that link, only then will his details appear on your site along with the subscription status.

What we love about it

• Multiple designs for opt-in forms, including exit intent pop up boxes. 
• Automatic email subscription form generation; now, there is zero chance of losing subscribers because of technical glitches.
• You can convert any link or image into an optin form., which is proven to boost conversions by 785%.

Favourite Blogging Courses

So you love sharing your thoughts on the internet, and you think you have great content to show to the audience and make a difference to their lives, even better than those that you see in Google searches.

But, you can’t seem to get your target audience on your website. Without traffic, your dream of getting paid to do what you love goes down the drain.

If you haven’t yet mastered SEO, that’s probably the problem. SEO can be complicated, and there’s just so much to consider to get that perfect formula to get traffic that converts. You need a blogging course that makes SEO fun to learn and, more importantly, gives you excellent results with your website.

Skyrocket With SEO

Skyrocket With SEO was founded by a digital nomad who started travelling as a hobby but has turned blogging into a full-time career. Nowadays, she travels to several countries and earns money while skiing the Alps or crossing the Salt Flats in Bolivia. 

Skyrocket with SEO offers a targeted course focused on SEO for blogging. The step-by-step guide to reach your specific traffic goals is easy to follow with the help of recommended cost-effective tools.

The course teaches you how to make your website SEO-friendly, get ranking keywords, be on top of search engines, and ultimately get you to start earning from your blog that you worked so hard for.

The Skyrocket with SEO Blogging course comprises 5 modules: SEO Audit, Ranking Old Content,  Promoting Posts, Growing Your Domain Authority, and Advanced SEO Audit.

What we love about it

• Skyrocket with SEO is for anyone who has a blog and is looking to monetise it. There are no long intros to basic stuff that most of the bloggers already know about. The course immediately starts with actionable and helpful strategies to quickly boost your traffic.
• You can take the course at your own pace, whenever and wherever you are in the world.
• The courses are accompanied by video guides that are easy to follow. Downloadable cheatsheets, checklists and templates are also accessed in the course.
• Isabel, the founder of Skyrocket SEO, is professional and communicates well with her learners.
• The course is reasonably priced with lots of bonuses that can cost several hundred dollars, which you’ll get for free when you sign up.

Keyword Research

Keywords are one of the most essential elements in SEO. They play a vital role in attracting visitors to your website and ranking higher in search engines. So choosing keywords wisely helps increase traffic and ultimately sales.

While doing keyword research, you should keep a few things in mind:

• Keywords must be relevant but at the same time popular enough to attract a targeted audience. It’s a challenging task, which requires a lot of hard work. There is no shortcut or magic formula available online.
• Longer phrases carry more weightage than shorter ones. Try to pick 3 – 4 words per phrase.
•  Make sure all the key phrases have a good volume of searches. The best way to check this is by checking the top positions in SERPs.
• Choose specific keywords rather than broad match types like “best blog management system,” etc. Broad matching attracts irrelevant traffic, whereas targeting exact terms brings desired clicks.
• Use synonyms carefully. Just adding synonym variants won’t help much. Instead, add variations around the main keywords.
• Avoid duplicate content. While it might sound counterintuitive, some websites end up earning money due to their presence. Hence don’t just copy other sites’ content. Always ensure that your unique ideas are correctly reflected.
•  Focus on user experience while optimising your web page.

Some of the keywords tools that we will highly recommend you to use include:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is our favourite free tool for finding keywords. Ahrefs offers both basic & advanced versions of their product, and it caters more to agencies or specialists in SEO.

Ahrefs has really comprehensive research tools and SEO reports including daily, weekly, monthly, yearly stats, backlinks analysis, social shares, competition, rankings, top organic pages, etc.

Ahrefs offer paid plans ranging between USD 99 to USD 399/month. 

What we love about it

• Their Content Explorer tool is great for uncovering keywords that have the highest potential and lowest competition, allowing you to brainstorm.
• I like to use it for analysing the top pages of my site and what pages to include backlinks on to maximize page authority.
• They make it easy to know where your competitors rank for for similar queries and how they compare with yours.
• Results can be filtered based on location.
• You can easily export your report directly into Excel, and there are plenty of filters included within the excel sheet to make your life easy.

Keysearch

If you’re just starting out on SEO/ keyword research, then I definitely 100% recommend getting Keysearch.

Keysearch is an entry-level useful keyword research tool, although not quite as powerful as Ahrefs. However, they provide detailed insights regarding search volumes, CPC, Top Positions, AdWords Competition, Competitors Backlink profile, Social Shares, Alexa Rank, etc.

These are good enough if you’re just a blogger managing one blog account.

Watch my video tutorial on how to use Keysearch.

What we love about it

• It gives you access to over 20 different metrics. With the premium plan, one gets an unlimited number of keywords added and saved.
• Shows the difficulty level of keywords for easy filtering of which keywords to use.
• The tool has an option to create custom lists for you to track their rankings individually.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another must-have tool for those who blog or run online businesses. This tool is essential to analyse all aspects of your website, including SEO, SMM campaigns, link building, competitor analysis, analytics, traffic sources, conversions, conversion rates, bounce rate, time spent on site, average session duration, referring domains, referral tracking, redirections, mobile optimisation, etc.

In short, everything relevant to running your business should be covered by SEMRush. It does cost around USD 200 per month but is worth every penny!

What we love about it:

• With SEMrush, not only can optimise your website, you can also manage multiple accounts at once. Also, it provides real-time data, so you always stay ahead of your competitors.
• The key difference between SEMrush and other solutions is its ability to do email outreach from within the tool itself, combining external outreach parties like Hunter and Buzzstream into one handy SEO tool

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is still a relatively new player in the market, having just launched last year. However, since then, it has gained a lot of traction thanks to their team’s dedication towards providing value to users.

In addition to that, they have built several features like autosuggestion, keyword extraction, ad copywriting, and much more.

All these features come together to give complete control to marketers. If you wish to see why they’re called ‘ubersuggest,’ take a look below.

What we love about it:

• The best part about Ubersuggest is that they don’t require registration before using their services. Once you sign up, you’ll get instant access to their entire suite of tools right away without needing to wait for activation.
• They have all the essential SEO tools required to conduct keyword research.
• They offer free trials, too, if you want to test out their product first-hand.

Email Service Provider (ESP)

Email marketing is and indispensable form of marketing used by many websites and blogs today. It helps collect and retain your audiences and prospect customers interested in learning more about you/ your service/ product. When you have their email information, you’re better able to nurture and engage them, eventually turning them into your customers. That’s the power of email marketing!

You can even customise each template as per your requirement, such as adding images, videos, links, etc. This makes creating newsletters and promotional emails easier, faster and less error-prone.

It allows you to schedule automated emails sent daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your preference. You can even track the open rates, click-through rates and unsubscribe rates of your subscribers.

ActiveCampaign 

After a LONG consideration, I’ve finally switched my ESP from Mailchimp, Birdsend and ConvertKit to ActiveCampaign.

This email marketing solution offers a wide range of features, including drag & drop editor, data management, segmentation, etc. It’s a really professional ESP that’s suited especially if you’re running a business. It offers a wide range of integrations which makes it very easy to connect different services.

ActiveCampaign has been recommended by many email copywriters in my network. They rave about its ability to segment targeted groups to send hyper-relevant emails, which would result in higher engagement.

If you find yourself struggling with setting up your email marketing strategy, this tool may be worth checking out.

The only caveat is that with the lowest Lite plan, you’re unable to customise opt-in forms nor create landing pages.

With the higher-tiered plans, they have even more options for you to provide highly personalized support to your subscribers. You can engage with customers through web chat, email, and Facebook Messenger.

What we like about it

• ActiveCampaign has been designed with user privacy in mind. Your subscriber list is kept secure and private.
• The support is EXCELLENT. Not only are there live chats, they also have a dedicated Migration team to migrate all of your information from previous ESPs to ActiveCampaign, while also offering a dedicated Onboarding Specialist to walk you through how you can achieve your business goals with ActiveCampaign via a series of virtual calls.
• Plenty of Automation Recipes as they call it to give you ideas to help automate your email sequences.

ConvertKit

Email marketing is one of the ways to build relationships with prospects and turn them into buying customers. One of the best blogging tools to use for email marketing is ConvertKit.

This tool allows easy email marketing, landing page creation, and selling products and services over email.

ConvertKit helps increase your email list easily and enhance email marketing by offering customisable opt-in forms, templates for landing pages, workflow automation rules, and many more.

What we like about it

• The editor is well integrated with WordPress and Joomla, making it much easier to develop new content. There’s no technical knowledge required to start creating landing pages with them.
• It’s built with the latest design trends and technology that is easy to use.
• The ConvertKit Knowledgebase videos provide helpful information in setting up ConvertKit. Otherwise, you can call their very responsive customer service.
• Their editor provides drag & drop capabilities, allowing you to create stunning landing pages quickly.  Organisations make all the elements of a traditional landing page like forms, buttons, and a call to action.

BirdSend

It’s an all-in-one solution for sending newsletters, transactional emails, and more. It’s great if you’re just starting out with a ESP and not want to invest heavily in a ESP yet.

BirdSend also allows you to add custom fields to each contact record. This means you can personalise your message based on what information you already know about your subscribers.

I eventually grew out of Birdsend as I found their interface not optimised for studying your email metrics i.e. you can’t analyse the email metrics in one single dashboard, which makes segmenting and sending hyper-targeted emails difficult.

What we love about it:

• Bridsend’s pricing plan works perfectly fine if you’re just starting out with email. Birdsend’s free version allows you to work with automation sequences that neither ConvertKit nor ActiveCampaign allows.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one integrated marketing platform that helps you create, send, track, measure, and manage email campaigns. 

With Mailchimp, you can create dynamic, personalised emails, automate drip campaign delivery, set up autoresponders, build beautiful HTML + CSS emails, and so much more.

What we like about it

• MailChimp offers several helpful templates. The basic template is great for beginners because it doesn’t require any prior experience or technical skills. 
• It has a vast personalised library of pre-built email layouts, giving you endless possibilities to customise your design. If you’re looking to create a unique look for your website, MailChimp gives you the chance to do it.
• It comes with a drag & drop editor, and you can easily add images, videos, and links using their intuitive interface.
• Mailchimp is highly customisable, and you can upload your fonts or stylesheets if you wish. However, it’s important to note that this feature only applies when using a premium account.

Social Media Scheduler

Social Media Scheduler is a blogging tool that every blogger and content creator must have. This is a tool that allows you to schedule posts across multiple social networks in advance. Scheduled content gets published at specific times, days, or weeks later. The main thing for this is to have enough application memory on your device.

This software is perfect for those people working as freelancers as well. You can simply select the content from your computer, and it will automatically be posted to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and lots of other platforms.

You can even set reminders for certain types of posts so that they won’t be forgotten.

The best part of Social Scheduler is its ability to integrate directly with popular CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Infusionsoft.

In addition, you can share your scheduling data between different users. It works great if you have a VA or team where you can delegate social media scheduling to.

Types of social media schedulers include:

Missinglettr

Missinglettr is a social media scheduler specifically designed for bloggers. This application enables you to schedule posts on different social media platforms very quickly and efficiently. 

I’ve tested many different social media schedulers, and none of them made me want to purchase a subscription with them until I met MissingLettr. They were either too complicated or I don’t see my time being shaved off much by using those tools. UNTIL I came to know about MissingLettr.

This tool runs an AI that curates social media posts from your blog posts and content from other websites in your niche. Thanks to Missinglettr, I’m now able to keep up my social media posting schedule while also repurposing my old posts into bite-sized social pieces easily.

In short, it makes posting content on various social networks easy and fun for you. There are no complex steps involved, and everything happens right inside the app.

What we love about it

• With Missinglettr, you can schedule posts to several online destinations, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium, even Facebook groups!
• They optimise the best times to post, so you don’t have to set the time to upload content manually. But you also have complete control over the publishing process should you choose to do so. 
• Missinglettr also provides analytics and real-time reporting to help you keep tabs on how each content post affects your blog posts’ performance.
• Their ability to pull out quotes from the actual blog post that I’m creating social posts for. This saves me the time of coming up with copies from scratch and summarising my posts with different messaging.

https://youtu.be/RyPLOPyCHH0

Tailwind

This is a highly user-friendly program to manage your Instagram and Pinterest accounts, with greater emphasis on state-of-the-art scheduling and metrics for Pinterest, both on desktop and mobile devices.

The app allows you to track all your activity related to your accounts using a single dashboard.  For instance, if you want to know how many engagements you had yesterday, Tailwind will tell you exactly that. 

What we love about it

• Tailwind also comes bundled with other essential tools such as Tailwind Analytics and Tailwind Notifications. These tools offer extensive Pinterest reports and analysis so you can keep your posts organised and perform thorough research on your audience.
• Features Tailwind Tribes that encourage a collaborative environment where bloggers with the same interests can share their content. 
• Tailwind Create allows you to transform your regular photos into attractive Pins. Just upload the image (or choose from their stock photos) and then choose from hundreds of pre-designed layouts and designs so you never have to design Pins from scratch or hire expensive designers again.

Adobe Creatives

You probably heard of the expression “First impression lasts”, which is especially true in blogging.

According to a study, it takes only 50 milliseconds for your audience to decide if your website is worth exploring or not. Every audience unimpressed by your site is a potential customer lost. Hence, an excellent visual for your website is necessary.

In addition to a beautifully crafted website design, stunning images and beautiful graphics, excellent videos should also accompany your content to make your website stand out and make your audience come back for more. 

Creative Cloud has a collection of software that will help bloggers elevate their websites’ visuals, such as images and videos. The entire suite has more than 20 apps, but many of them are aimed at professional designers and photographers.

For bloggers who’re looking into editing their photos and videos for their websites easily, the apps that would be most useful are Premiere Pro and Lightroom CC. These are the 2 software I use frequently.

I do very minimal edits. And when I do, I use Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro to edit my pictures and videos.

What we like about it

• I use Lightroom to quickly apply edits to a bunch of photos in one go. Basic colour adjustments are easily made in straightforward software. 
• For serious video editing, Premiere Pro is my choice software.

To make editing more efficient, you might want to consider purchasing presets. I’ve been using a couple of presets – some I love and some I don’t. Lightroom presets are available to edit your photos to a certain colour theme quickly.

Descript

Descript is one of the best blogging tools to use, especially if you also make podcasts and video content.

A multitasker, Descript is a video and audio editor that features transcription, publishing, screen recording, multitrack editing, and many more.

As an audio editor, it does not only allow for recording and mixing audio, but it also transcribes accurately in seconds.

An impressive AI also allows converting written text into audio based on your voice!

For video, Descript has tools that let you do screen recordings or videos and then edit them with various layouts, create titles, transitions, overlays, images, subtitles, and many more.

The free version offers enough functionality for a creator who does audio and video transcription sparingly. You’re only allowed 3 hours worth of recording of your transcribed content.

What we like about it

• Editing video is HEAPS easier, especially when you can just delete the text from the transcription and it’s automatically deleted from the video itself
• The interface is easy to navigate, and the instructions are straightforward. Apparently, audio and video editing with Descript does not take any more effort than editing a Microsoft Document!
• Because files in Descript are stored in the cloud, team members can work on an audio or video project simultaneously and share comments much like you would a Google Doc.

Canva

Canva is one of the most popular graphic design apps available. With it, you can create impressive designs in just minutes. It’s also super simple to use, even if you’re not very tech-savvy or don’t have a background in design.

Plenty of bloggers use Canva in place of more professional (but complicated) tools like Adobe to create their social media graphics, promo graphics, Pinterest pins and many more.

Canva offers plenty of options to help you get started. For example, you can choose from thousands of templates in various categories: business, fashion, food, home decor, kids, etc. You can then customise them by changing their background image, adding text and adjusting based on your brand elements.

What we like about Canva

• It’s free to download and use.
• The free version offers over 8000 high-quality templates, hundreds of design types, and hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics, so you don’t have to start from scrath. This is great for bloggers who make 10-15 designs every month. 
• The drag-and-drop editor allows for effortless and quick design creation.
• It features photo effects to improve the appearance of your images.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are websites where you can earn money by promoting other people’s products and services. Most affiliate programs reward you for each visitor you send to another site. This means that there’s potential to earn lots of money from these sites. 

If you decide to join an affiliate network, you’ll need to promote their product or service. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to browse through the list of companies they work with. Clicking on a link takes you directly to the company’s company’s page. 

Here’s our selection of the best affiliate networks.

Skimlinks

One of the largest affiliate networks, Skimlinks connects 60,000 publishers to 48,500 merchants around the world, generating $2.5m of sales every day.

The easiest way to transform links into affiliate links that will generate revenue is to install the Skimlinks Javascript on their site. Links you create are then automatically affiliated.

Skimlinks Editor Toolbar is a Chrome Extension that after you install it, whenever you’re on a merchant’s site, you’ll see if they they pay commission rates, what the average rates are and you’ll be able to quickly and easily create affiliate links from the page itself.

What we like about it

• If there’s any merchants/ brands that has an affiliate program, usually it’ll be on Skimlinks. It’s easier to consolidate all your earnings with one single affiliate network than accumulating different affilate networks and having to work your way up to the minimum payment threshold in order to be paid for your affiliate marketing work.
• Skimlinks Chrome Extension makes choosing brands to partner easily as you can tell from Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) right away which have affiliate programs and which don’t.
• One-step button to create affiliate links to share, whereas most other networks require you to go into the advertiser page, then create a link from there.

CJ

They offer a wide range of products, including ebooks, courses, software, and much more. Their payout rate is higher than some others, but it still falls within the range of $0.50-$5.00 per sale.

AWIN

Amazon

ShareASale

With ShareASale, you can earn commissions by sharing other people’s products. As long as you follow their terms and conditions, you can make between 5%-20% of the sales generated by your referrals.

What we like about it

• It’s easy to get started.
• There are no minimum requirements to join.
• It has a large number of products to choose from.

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HOLY MOLY! This is one really comprehensive resource post for bloggers! Good thing there’s Table Of Contents so you can easily navigate to the section that interests you most.

If you did complete reading this 6000-word article, kudos to you! I really hope this gives you an all-in-one resource for bloggers who’re confused over which tools are best to use.

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