You’re thinking about blogging or already doing it, but sometimes it feels like a bit of a hard slog. Lets look at how we can make blogging easier for you.
Perhaps you started blogging because a little birdy told you that it would be good for your business, but you are starting to feel that it’s just a mammoth time suck.
Well, it doesn’t have to be. These six free tools will make structuring and beginning writing your blog posts easy peasy lemon squeezy.
And, they’ll help make sure that your blogs are also written in a way that maximises your chances of Search Engine Optimisation – that’s helping people find you on Google for all the non-techy’s in the crowd.
What’s the point of a blog?
Before we dig into the tools that are going to streamline your blogging and make the process smooth and easy for you. Let’s first quickly and simply consider why you’re blogging in the first place.
Your blog:
- Helps give you a reason to bring people to your website.
- Helps establish you as an expert in your field.
- Enables your audience to get to know you better, which in time will lead to greater trust in you and your brand.
- Enhances how you can answer your audiences most asked questions
- Allows you to add more keywords and phrases to your website than you can on your standard web pages
Blogging lets you add more keywords and phrases to your website
You’ll have the broader search terms you want to rank for on your standard web pages, the typical words and phrases that someone would type into Google to find you.
There’s a limit to how many of these you can slip into the copy on your standard web pages. But with each blog you publish, you have an opportunity to target more niche and varied keywords and phrases to help people find your website, and ergo your products or services.
The first three of my recommended tools to hack your blogging strategy aim to help you with this. You can use these tools to plan your blog topics and titles and help you structure your blog and create great subheaders.
So, let’s dive in!
Google – ‘People also ask’ and ‘Searches related’
When I first start writing a blog, one of the things I do is head over to Google and search for the topic. There are three simple ways to get some hints about the related questions that are being asked, which will enable you to tailor your content to match.
First, the suggestions which pop up in the search bar as you type. Second, the ‘people also ask’ box and lastly, the box at the bottom of the page which shows you ‘searches related to.’
If you google a few related questions or queries, then you should wind up with a pretty good idea of the types of questions people are searching for content on.
Keywords everywhere free plugin
Keywords Everywhere is a great tool to help you with your keyword research. Simply download the free plug-in for your Chrome or Firefox browser.
To get the full benefit of Keywords Everywhere, you need to purchase credits, which will allow you to drill down and find which keywords are more competitive and which are easier to rank for.
But as a basic tool I still find it very useful to help me research keywords and phrases to consider.
Here’s a quick video showing you how I use Google and Keywords Everywhere for research when writing my blogs. It’s super simple!
Answer the public
Answer the public is another great free tool that helps you find out what people are searching for on Google. It uses question formats, which incidentally are a great way to title your blogs for reader engagement. Using a question for the title encourages readers that they will find the answers in your post!
I’ve stuck with the blog example I used in my video here and simply typed in ‘bath my dog,’ and here is the wealth of questions Answer the Public gave me. I find the image a bit tricky, probably because I’m a word’s gal. On the website, you can simply hit the data tab, and it gives it to you in a word format, which I find easier to digest.
Grammarly
You don’t want to put all this effort into penning your blog and then find it full of typos or grammatical errors. Grammarly is an easy free tool that goes a step beyond the standard spell checker on your Word document.
Canva blog banner
Canva is brilliant for creating graphics for your social media accounts and updating them with your brand colours and fonts. It’s pretty simple to use, I’m pants at anything designny, and even I can use it!
If you search the templates for blogs, you will find plenty of blog banners that you can edit, making your blog even more enticing to read!
Unsplash, Pexels, and Freepik
To make your blog engaging and attractive to read, you need to split it up with attractive, relevant images.
If you don’t have many of your own images that fit the topic or if they’re not very good quality, then these three websites are a great place to get free stock images that you can use in your blog post and on your social media.
So there you go, six simple and free tools to help make blogging easier and more effective to boot!
I hope this is helpful for you, do let me know. If you found this useful then you may like to read ‘How to format your blogs so that people want to read them.’
Read Next:
5 easy steps to writing SEO friendly blogs
0 Comments