Free tools! Who does not love these? And when you are a newbie blogger working hard to establish your blog, you will always look for something to ease your task and if that is free of cost, then nothing like it! So let me tell you a bit about 10 free blogging tools for newbie bloggers.
Free blogging tools for the newbie blogger and not free trials
We are looking for free blogging tools and not an app or software which gives you a 7 days or 10 days free trial and then asks you to upgrade to a paid version.
Does this sound familiar to you? And you get frustrated looking for that perfect app which answers your requirements?
Here are 10 free blogging tools that I have listed and for your convenience, I have arranged these in a particular order.
Check these out!
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Email Marketing Service
You have been writing awesome blog posts, with beautiful graphics and doing everything possible to promote your blog but still, there are no takers! What do you do?
You look for an email marketing service to help you build an email list.Take a look at MailChimp. This one is not just a marketing platform, but it helps in building a subscriber list, send scheduled emails, and keeps track of your marketing activities.
MailChimp helps in email subscription and is a free tool to stay connected with your subscribers till you attain 2000 subscribers.
Learn how to integrate MailChimp with your WordPress blog.
2. Editing Tool
Last time we met, I told you about Grammarly and ProwritingAid. Did you miss my last post? No worries. Catch it here again.
But today I am going to talk to you about some other editing tool, an excellent free blogging tool for you.
Hemingway Editor: this online app allows you to paste your content and then analyzes it as a word for word.
This one is a complete analysis tool and even suggests improvements by pointing out sentences which are too long and need improvement. It helps you to keep your content simple and readable so that your readers do not struggle.
It applies different colors to identify how to make your post easier to read and understand, so you get to know what and where changes are required.
This is an excellent tool which helps you to improve the readability of your blog post.
3. Social Media Management
You have written a rocking blog post and published it. Now is the time to get people to notice your post.
This means making your blog post visible on various social media platforms. Experts say 20% your time should be spent on writing your post and the rest 80% in promoting it.
This is a tedious task and requires you to spend a considerable amount of time. And if you have multiple social media accounts, you need to be at it almost every waking minute.
You can take help of automated social media management tools to take care of your blog post promotion.
Hootsuite is one such tool which helps you to schedule your social posts thereby saving time and effort. Its free plan includes three social media profiles. All you have to do is write the posts, schedule, and leave the rest to Hootsuite.
4. Image Optimizer
Creating image for your blog post is as essential as writing great content. To do that we search for awesome images all the time. You must have noted most of the images are heavy, i.e. occupy a lot of space.
So you need to optimize (compress) these because heavy images tend to slow your blog upload speed. There are many online free services available to help you do this.
Here are two:
These help in compressing the images without losing the quality. Always compress your image before you start editing it.
Have you ever thought of making use of free blogging tools? Here is a list of 10 such free blogging tools to help the blogger in you. #bloggingtools #freetools #blogginghelp #newbieblogger Click To Tweet
5. File Access and Sharing
As a blogger, you work with multiple files. Photos, videos, documents, spreadsheets and some more! Over the months, these files start accumulating and you look for space where you can store these.
Moreover, you also need a centrally located place where these files can be kept and be accessed on multiple devices.
There are a number of file access and sharing options available to you. Here are two:
Google Drive: Google drive provides you 15GB of free space to keep all kinds of files and access these at any time, anywhere.
Zippyshare: this site helps you to upload a file up to 500mb. Once you have uploaded a file you will receive a unique link to the download site.
Now you can share this link on your blog, in an email campaign to your subscribers, or give the link in a document for your readers to download. So convenient and easy to use!
Read about other file sharing options here:
6. URL Shortener
This one comes handy when you need to shorten any URL. I use it to shorten the URLs of my blog posts when I share these on Twitter to save precious character counts.
Here are two:
Bit.ly: A very popular tool to shorten any URL. This tool is convenient and user-friendly. Their site also has a blog section where you can read great informative posts on blogging.
Tinyurl: A great tool to shorten the URL and prevent the breaking. The tiny URL created never expires, which is an added advantage.
7. Note-Taking
Too much information can be overwhelming at times. As a blogger, you want to stay organized and try to keep your notes, to-do lists, memos, and a piece of text in one place. This helps in keeping your blogging schedule clutter free. If you are looking for a free blogging tool to take care of this, I have one for you here.
Evernote: this app answers your needs of staying organized and keeping all tasks in one place. Your stuff is available across all devices through your Evernote account. This is a cloud-based service to design, store, and update your files. It is safe, secure, and keeps your files private.
8. Content Idea Generator
“I do not know what to write.” “I have written on almost all topics under the Sun.” Do these thoughts cross your mind? I am just asking because they cross my mind.
Finding a fresh topic to write on every week (if you publish one blog post per week) can be daunting for any blogger.
If you are looking for a free blogging tool which will take care of the thinking part, trot over to this one:
Portent.com: I stumbled upon this one when I was searching for a blog idea generator which actually worked. I mean, it should come up with some unique ideas on which you can work.
You supply with your keyword and let it generate content ideas for you. I have found this very useful. Give it a try! Here is the complete link
9. Free Photos
Having awesome photos on your blog is an essential part of your blog promotion. Most of the times, your blog gets noticed by the kind of images it has. And if you are active on Pinterest, stunning images are required to get those clicks and visits to your blog.
To create awesome images you require high-resolution photos having CC0 license. Picking up photos from various search engines is not a good idea, as it leads to copyright infringement.
So where to find free stock photos? Here are few sites:
- Unsplash.com
- Pexels.com
- Pixabay.com
- Pixistock.com (you get free photos every month)
- Gratisography.com
You have a good list of free stock photo sites here
10. Video Creation/editing software
It is a good idea to post a few small video clips on your blog to entice the viewers. If you are only posting images with your content, try taking a different course.
Readers always look for something new, something different from what you have been offering them until now. Think differently and upload a small video clip on a particular idea.
The video clip that I have uploaded here is about creating a video from PowerPoint slides. I have used PowerPoint 2007 for this.
If you have an idea and a bunch of related images (.jpg format) try creating a video clip from that.
Here is one online video maker. Create a free account here and you can create stunning videos in minutes.
Check this out:
Which free blogging tools do you use?
I have outlined a few free blogging tools which I use myself. What are the blogging tools which have helped you in your blogging journey? Name a few and let us have a discussion on that! Let us check those out.
16 Comments
Yes! Love this. I needed that video info a few weeks ago. All new information and glad to have it.
Thank you so much 🙂
These are such great tips – I’ll definitely have to check out the editing tool app!
The url shortener is something that lots of people are not aware of and it makes such a huge difference!!
Amazing post Sukanya, well crafted. Worth pinning and bookmarking. Point#3 was unknown to me.
And for the photo parts, you can add CANVA somewhere in your post. I swear by Canva for my cover photo editing for my stories.
Thank you so much. I had written about Canva in a previous post of mine. here it is:
https://sukanyaonline.com/6-steps-to-create-awesome-blog-post-images/
We’ve been blogging for nearly 2 years now and I thought I knew all the tools you were going to cover, but your video on making a video out of PowerPoint slides gave me some ideas of how I can enhance some of our blog posts. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for these awesome resources 😊
This is so helpful!!! Thank you. I’m Pinning this too. I’ve been looking for some way to compress my images. I never knew about the Hemingway editor either.
THANK YOU!
Rach / https://rachaelhope.co.uk
Thank you so much, Rachael. Use the Hemingway editor, it will be of much help to you.
Ive never tried hoot suite but I hear about it everywhere I guess I’ll have to give it a try
Youre a saviour
Oh..but why so? 🙂
Thanks for sharing these! I didn’t know half of them existed! Will defo check them out now 😀
Great post! I’m definitely going to look into the social media app! I had no idea it was a 20/80 ratio!
Good post!