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Starting a blog is an exciting adventure.
If you’re like me, you dream of the possibility of being your own boss. No more meetings, no more feeling undervalued and underpaid for all the hard work you do.
You dream of finally being financially free and being able to quit that 9-5 job. A dream to finally being able to pay off all the credit card debt, student loans and hopefully the mortgage.
You hope of being able to stay home with your little ones and to spend more time with your family.
I’ve been there. When my little one was born, I tried everything I could think of to make money from home, but nothing took.
I finally turned to blogging and have enjoyed the journey since. I started my blog in 2023, and I must say, I’ve learned a lot.
Sure, it’s a lot of work on the front end, and it is definite not easy.
It takes time and a whole lot of patience.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching the ins and outs of blogging and trying to find ways to Increase productivity, while still staying budget friendly.
Because the whole point is to try to save time, and make money right?
Here I’ve complied of a list of 7 blogging tools that I’ve discovered that has helped save time.
1. Get Legal
My first blogging for beginners tip is to get legal.
What does this mean?
It means that your website needs to comply with the law and is essential to keep you from getting sued.
When you start a blog its crucial to make it legally compliant and protect yourself and your readers
At the bare minimum you need 3 legal pages: Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer. You also should ensure your website is ADA compliant as well.
Let’s take a quick moment and delve into each of these pages and their importance.
Terms and Conditions
A terms and conditions page, also known as Terms of Service or Terms of use, outlines the rules and guidelines that govern your blog. This is crucial for many reasons including:
- User agreement: By including a terms and condition, you establish an agreement with any users of your blog by clearly defining the rules and expectations they must abide by when accessing your blog. This helps prevent misuse and unauthorized activities .
- Intellectual property protection: You can use this page to assert your ownership rights over your articles or other creative work and protect it from unauthorized use.
- Limiting liability: Terms and Conditions can also contain disclaimer that limit your liability for any inaccuracies or errors due to use of information provided on your blog. This can help protect you legally if someone faces adverse consequences as a result of your content.
Privacy Policy
A Privacy Policy outlines how you collect, use , store and protect the personal information of your blog visitors/ users. This is crucial to have because:
- data protection compliance: A privacy policy demonstrates your commitment to protecting the personal information of users and help you comply with laws and regulations.
- Transparency and Trust- By including information of how you use someone’s personal information, you are being transparent and telling them they can trust you. This transparency enhances trust and can protect you from potential legal issues.
Disclaimer
A disclaimer, as mentioned earlier, is a statement that clarifies and limits responsibilities associated with your blog. This is essential to have as well because:
- Non-professional advice- A disclaimer empathizes that the information shared on your blog is for informational purposes only and should not constitute as professional advice. This protects you from legal claims in case something arises and a reader faces negative outcomes as a result.
- Content accuracy- By including a disclaimer, you acknowledge that while you strive for accuracy in the information you provide, there may be errors in your content. This protects you from misinformation.
There are plenty of free resources you can use online; however, there’s no guarantee that’s enough for you to be completely compliant.
And, if you get these legal pages drafted by most lawyers, it’ll cost you A TON of serious cash.
By doing a lot of research online to ensure my website compliance, I have found another way.
Amira, from A Self Guru, is a lawyers/blogger, who helps entrepreneurs ensure their online business is legal by providing legal templates. She has several different bundles available for purchase that’ll fit your needs.
The reason this is number 1 on my list of blogging tools is because of the urgency of website compliance. The last thing you want is a lawsuit.
Rather than searching for and obsessing over whether your website is compliant or not, you can be assured that it is compliant through her legal done-for-you templates.
After all there’s no better way of ensuring website compliance than from an affordable lawyer, right?
Go check out Amira’s legal documents by clicking on the image below. She can explain all the legalese much better than I can!
2. Get Organized
When starting a business, blogging or otherwise, it’s essential to get organized.
In the beginning, there is so much to do initially, that if you don’t organize your thoughts and plan things out, you’ll think you’re a chicken running around with its head cut off. At least that’s how I have felt.
I’m the type of person who likes to plan. I do not function well in chaos and I have to find my own system that works for me.
Therefore, I will use a planner to organize my thoughts and ideas. And, a blogging for beginners tip, is to use as many free resources as you can, and spend money where you have to.
Another blogging tool that I use and is a great tool to increase productivity is ClickUp.
I’ve discovered this after I started my blog and I have found it really helpful in my organization.
I use Click Up to organize my blog posts ideas for several months at a time. This not only helps me stay organized, but it helps increase productivity because I can also create to do lists and check off what I’ve completed.
The best part is that you can sign up for ClickUp totally free and try it out. They have a free plan, so no purchase is necessary. I’m currently running that free plan.
Additionally, you can also use a physical planner as well if that’s your preference. Whatever helps you get organize and plan your content, is the route you should take.
Sign up below to get my free planner bundle. It comes with monthly, weekly and daily planners to help you get organized.
3. Research Your Content
Before you start writing your content, it is important to know what you’re going to write about.
When doing a lot of research in blogging for beginners, when I started, I spent sooo many hours reading and watching YouTube videos about SEO, and the different blogging tools to help you find the best keyword research.
While many of these resources are paid, I was on a search to find something free.
After all, you have to try to save money where you can.
Now, some people may disagree with me that SEO is not the place where you want to save money; and I can understand that to a point.
But here me out…if I am able to find free blogging tools that gets the job done, for the time being, then I can use it, while gaining my traffic.
After all, I don’t have tons of money to spend a month on this blogging endeavor in the beginning. I told myself that once when I make money, I’ll start upgrading my blogging tools. But if free works right now, then why not?!
OK, now since that is out of the way…let’s talk about what SEO is and the free SEO blogging tools that I have found during my countless hours of researching blogging for beginners.
What is SEO?
SEO means “Search Engine Optimization”. This is where you find keywords, preferably long tail keywords that your audience is searching for and incorporating those words in your blog posts to help you rank higher in Google.
Finding optimal keywords prior to writing your keywords save so much time and increases productivity because, as I stated earlier, gives you a higher chance of ranking for what people are searching for. To do SEO research, you have to get into the minds of your reader.
Now, there are a TON of SEO blogging tools; however, I am only going to talk about the ones that I have the most experience with, which are mainly the free ones…for now.
One of the first blogging tools for SEO that you should try out is Google Keyword Planner, as this offers insights into keyword search volume, competition level and related keywords.
One of the key to make money blogging is to write what people are actually searching for….not just the topic, but the literal words that they are searching for. And, to do that, you need to research words that are searched for a lot, but have a relatively low competition rate.
Another one of the free blogging tools that I have started trying out, is WordStream. WordStream is an online advertising platform that also assist with SEO research. Their Keyword Research tool allows you to explore and discover relevant keywords for your SEO strategy. It as well provides insights into search volume, competition, and suggested bid data for keywords if you were planning on running ads.
Another really neat feature of this blogging tools is that WordStream enables you to analyze the SEO performance of your competitors. This allows you to gain insights into their top ranking keywords. This information helps you understand their strategies and identify areas of improvement for your own SEO efforts.
4. Write Your Content
To make money blogging, there are lots of blogging tools in writing your content to help increase productivity.
A recent trend is using AI to help facilitate blog post writing. This has been such a game changer for boosting productivity and increasing the level of your content creation.
AI power tools like Jasper, which I have personally used, have the uncanny ability to generate ideas, provide suggestions, and help you develop a draft in your writing. By leveraging AI, you can overcome writer’s block, save valuable time and enhance your writing skills.
Not only can you use it to help facilitate blog post writing, but another way that it can help blogging for beginners and improve productivity is to use it for email marketing (we’ll take more about that in a few minutes).
5. Design Your Content
Once you’ve make your blog legal with Amira’s legal templates, planned your content with ClickUP, completed the SEO research with Google KeyWord Planner or Wordstream, and written your blog post with your personal AI assistant such as Jasper, it is now time to design your content so that you can start marketing your blog posts or selling products.
One of my ABSOLUTELY FAVORITE tools to use for this is Canva. Now, I’m no stranger to Canva. Before I started my blogging endeavor, I tried my hand at creating an Etsy Shop and I used Canva to create my digital products as well as to create my listing photos.
Now, I use Canva to still create my digital products and freebies that I offer on my website, but I also use it for my Pinterest Pins.
You may be thinking, why do I need to create Pinterest Pins?
In order to make money blogging, you need to market your content. And, Pinterest is a great platform to use. Personally, I’m not much of a social media user- I don’t really use Facebook, Instagram, and didn’t really know how Pinterest worked until about a year ago. But, after learning more about blogging for beginners, I have come to really appreciate and enjoy Pinterest.
In case you are like I was, and are confused about Pinterest let me give a brief introduction to it.
Pinterest is a popular online platform where users can discover and save visual content. When logging into Pinterest, you’ll see “pins” that people created, which then, when clicked, links to their content-whether it be a blog, online store, etc.
This is where Canva comes in. Now, I can talk about Canva all day, as this is easily one of my favorite blogging tools, but I’ll keep it short.
So, what is Canva?
Canva is an incredibly versatile graphic design platform that empowers users to create visual content with no graphic design background. It offers a wide range of tools, template and resources to assist both beginners and professionals.
They have both a free and a paid plan; however, you can totally get by with the free plan- at least at the beginning. Canva offers free graphics, photos and fonts that you can use; however, depending on what you use Canva for, make sure to check out their Terms and Conditions for use.
As I mentioned earlier, I use Canva to create my digital products to sell as well as to offer for free on my website. I also use it to create Pinterest Pins, to post on Pinterest, which will help drive traffic to my blog.
Canva is an amazing blogging tool and will help you increase productivity because you can use it to not only design products to sell to make money blogging, but also to promote your products.
6. Market your Content
After you designed your pins, it’s not time to market them.
I talked a little bit earlier about Pinterest, and while you can market your content on many other social media platforms, in my search for blogging for beginners, I’ve found that its best to, initially, market on one at a time. So, this is what I’ve done. I can’t really speak to marketing on Facebook, or Instagram, but only on Pinterest.
However, I have just recently created a TikTok page, but haven’t created any content yet.
I know the struggle- it’s hard to balance family and work time, and I’ve been doing the best I can as well to manage everything. But marketing is a step you definitely don’t want to skip. After all that hard work on your blog, you need people to visit!
Anyways, you have two ways you can pin on Pinterest.
First, you can pin manually from the social platform itself, or you can use a marketing tool scheduler like TailWind.
There are other marketing tool schedulers on the market, and I encourage you to do your due diligence to find the one that works best for you, however, Tailwind is the only one that I personally have experience with, so this is the one I’ll be talking about in this blog post.
Tailwind is specifically designed to help users optimize their presence on Pinterest. It offers a comprehensive suite of features and functionalities that will help you streamline the process of managing and growing your Pinterest account. With Tailwind, you can schedule and post the pins you created at the most strategic times when your audience is searching, to ensure consistent and targeted content distribution.
In my opinion, Tailwind is one of the essential blogging tools, because it also provides analytics and insight, allowing you to track the performance of your pins.
Another benefit to Tailwind is that it also offers something called Tailwind communities, which is similar to Pinterest Group Boards, but so much easier.
Here you can find and join communities within your niche. The reason why Tailwind communities are so great is that you can share your pins within these groups to get more exposure to your content. Many of these communities have regulations between the number of pins you submit and the number of pins you share. This means that, in many communities, for every pin you submit, you save someone else’s pin to one of your boards as well. This way everyone has a chance to gain optimal reach.
Tailwind has many different plans available to choose from. They do have a free forever plan to sign up with give it a try; however, I personally opted to go with one of the advanced plans. Personally, this is an area that I did not want to cut, and while I have tried pinning manually from Pinterest, I have found that Tailwind to be one of the best blogging tools to increase productivity. It truly saves a lot of time.
With taking care of a family and starting a new business, I need to manage my time effectively and I have found this to work best for me. I encourage you to try different avenues to find what works best for you.
7. Email Marketing
When you launch your blog, it’s a good idea to go ahead and get your email marketing set up. You might think…but, I don’t have any visitors to my website yet. How can I send them emails if no one visits my blog?
It’s a good idea to go ahead and set it up early in the process, so that when you start writing blog posts, you can immediately offer an incentive for people to sign up to your weekly newsletter.
I use freebies that I design in Canva, as an incentive. Freebies such as a planner printables, a weekly goal planner, evoke, etc are great to offer and provide value.
After you market your content on Pinterest or another social media platform, and you start gaining traction to your website, people will be interested in your incentive (aka lead magnet) and sign up for your newsletter.
I use ConvertKit for my email marketing and my lead magnets.
With ConvertKit, you can create forms to embed in your blog posts. You can also create landing pages where you can sell digital products as well.
And by creating these forms to gain subscribers, you are building your email list.
ConvertKit has many different features depending on your plan. There’s the free plan, but with the paid plans, you also have the option for automation, where you can set an email sequence when someone signs up for something, so that you don’t have to manually go in and email…it’s sent automatically.
However, with the free plan, you still have access to emails, and landing pages/ forms for your lead magnets.
Check out ConvertKit. They have a risk free trial and you can always downgrade to the free plan after the trial if it isn’t right for you.
Conclusion
Wow, I had no idea that, when starting this blog post, it would be so long!
Thanks for sticking with me to the end.
And while, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a super detailed blueprint of starting a blog, I hope this post has given you a good starting point in blogging for beginners and the different blogging tools that can help increase productivity. After all the goal is to help you make money blogging.
There are stilll so many blogging tools out there that are so beneficial, and, again, this by no means is a comprehensive list- these are just a few blogging tools that I personally use to increase productivity and save time.
After all, my goal is to spend more time with my family- so why wouldn’t I work smarter, not harder, right?
If you’re like me and you tend to skim blog posts, here’s a recap of the best blogging tools and tips that I have found to increase productivity:
- Get legal – Amira’s legal templates. She offers a wide variety of legal templates and offers them in a bundle to save money. Check it out here:
- Get organized- Use planners to organize your thoughts and plan your content. ClickUp is a great blogging tool to increase productivity. They offer a free plan to start getting organized. You can also sign up for my email list here and get a free planner bundle as well.
- Prepare For Writing Your Content– Use SEO tools to help you find the best keywords for your blog post. Do your due diligence to find the ones that work for you, but the blogging tools that I use are Google Keyword Research and WordStream.
- Write Your Content– Leverage the secret of AI to help facilitate your writing and improve productivity. Tools like Jasper, can help you push through writer’s block and give you blog post ideas. Did I mention that Tailwind, also has a built in AI tool to help as well with the paid plans?
- Design Your Content– Use a graphic design tool like Canva to create digital products to offer for free or sell on on your blog as well as to create Pinterest Pins and other social media graphics to promote your content. This will help drive organic traffic to to your blog.
- Market Your Content– Use Pinterest or other social media platforms to market your content. Blogging tools such as Tailwind will not only increase productivity but will increase efficiency as well because you’re able to schedule pins for days or weeks at a time. This is a huge time saver. Check out their free forever plan and try it out yourself.
- Email Marketing- Check out ConvertKit’s email marketing platform so that you can start building your email list. With ConvertKit, you can also create landing and sign up forms for incentives to gain subscribers
There you go, this is a recap of my blogging for beginners, best blogging tools to increase productivity. In doing research for best blogging tools, I have found these to work well for me, and I hope these work well for you as well!
Leave me a comment below which of these blogging tools you have found to increase productivity the most.
And, don’t forget to check out my best tips to increase productivity blog post here.
Until next time,
Tonia
