9 Killer Content Tools for Bloggers

Did you know there are over 31 million active bloggers posting at least one article per month? Yep, that’s a lot of people to compete with. It’s time to step up your game!

However, contrary to what many people believe, the blogging life isn’t as easy as it looks. There are many moving parts that you have to deal with, and if you want to be successful in this hyper-competitive world you need to be proficient in quite a few different fields. Unfortunately, it’s not just as simple as writing a killer piece of content and hoping it hits the mark. There are layers to this game.

With that said, despite all of the researching, editing, promoting, networking, and other obligations that come with the territory, by far the most difficult thing to keep consistent is the organisation and scheduling of your content, especially if you have a team of people you need to collaborate with.

But luckily for you, we’ve got you covered, so turn that frown upside down.

Here’s seven invaluable tools designed to help you stay on top of your content marketing game, from content calendars to ingenious “hacks” that will save you a ton of time when writing. Let’s dive into it, shall we?

1 EverNote

If you’re the kind of person that loves to take notes, you need to look no further than EverNote. It’s by far the best app for super-fast idea collecting, making it a great place for jotting down your keyword ideas when they come to mind.

You can install the app on all of your devices, keeping everything perfectly in sync at all times. It even allows you to save search engine pages, add notes to various images, and set tags for all of your saved notes that you can then share with your writer/editor/team for easy collaboration.

Check out their guide on how to create more effective blog posts with their app.

2 Trello

Trello is a stellar collaboration tool that lets you organise your projects into easily viewable boards. It uses a Kanban system which means it’s designed to be lean, minimal, and functional. In other words, it does the basic stuff really well and doesn’t overcomplicate things with all the unnecessary bells and whistles you see on other platforms.

On Trello, you can upload your documented content strategy and organize each of your blog ideas into individual cards. You can then go into each one and write down your thoughts and ideas for each piece that other people can view and edit. And as a bonus, it all works using a simple drag and drop tool, so there won’t be any steep learning curves trying to figure this one out.

Additionally, Trello is a great place to set up a content calendar, making it a perfect all-in-one solution for scheduling your editorial calendar workflow.

3 Basecamp

Basecamp is another wildly popular project management tool that’s great for organising your blog or business. When using the app, you can set up various tasks, deadlines, files, discussions, and ideas that can be shared with your editors and writers if need be.

Even if you’re riding solo on your blogging journey, it’s still super helpful to lay down your blog ideas into different categories that you can see visually. It takes a lot of the stress out of organising your blog, which is always nice.

Basecamp also allows you to create a content calendar where you can organise what you want to post for the month, schedule when to post it, and you can even sync it to your Google Drive to make your life just that little bit easier.

4 CoSchedule

CoSchedule is an all-in-one tool for everything content marketing-related. Whether you’re working solo or managing a team, there are plenty of tools you can make use of to boost your productivity and stay on top of your blogging game.

It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop calendar interface so you can schedule all your projects in one place, which is great for all the technophobes out there. It’s a perfect solution for people who want to keep their content calendars organised all within a single dashboard. Of course, it’s also super easy to add in anybody with whom you want to collaborate.

5 Buffer

Let’s face it - after you’ve spent hours writing and editing a blog post, the last thing you want to do is spend even more time promoting it across the different social channels. But don’t you worry, Buffer is here to ease your pain.

This handy little “freemium” social sharing tool allows you to schedule up to ten posts across a handful of different social profiles, including your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles.

You choose what snippet you want to share on each channel, and you can even alter the headline, image, caption, and hashtags for each of them too. It saves tons of time logging in and carefully crafting each of your posts, and the icing on the cake is that you can schedule each post to be staggered throughout the day/week, so you can give your content the most exposure possible.

6 Grammarly

Let’s be real. You can’t really consider yourself a blogger unless you’ve got yourself a premium subscription with Grammarly. It’s by far one of the most useful blogging tools around as it can somehow turn mediocre writing into a literary classic in a matter of minutes.

All you have to do is paste your written article into Grammarly’s online tool where it will perform checks against your grammar, spelling, vocabulary, clarity, and writing style while offering you constructive criticism and suggestions for readability improvements.

Even if you aren’t writing the content yourself, it’s worth picking it up so you can upload your writer’s work in there and see how it fares. Not only that, but it also comes with a plagiarism checker that will go a long way to keeping you out of trouble with Google.

*TIP - Grammarly has a browser extension for Chrome that edits your writing as you go along. It even syncs with Google Docs so you can do all of your writing and editing in one place.

Dictation software

Why are you still typing your content? Didn’t you know it’s 2021?

Research has found that speaking is around seven times faster than typing, and with the recent advancements in dictation software, that’s a whole lot of time you could be saving while crafting your articles.

Think about it. You could be sitting back on your chair with your feet in the sky while speaking aloud your blog content as if you were some high-flying celebrity revealing past trauma to their autobiography ghostwriter.

Fortunately, recent improvements in cloud-based speech recognition technology have really opened the door to new possibilities, so if you can get your head around articulating your blog content verbally, you could be on to a winner.

We’ve tried a few so far. 

7 Google Docs

Clicking the microphone and speaking to Google Docs was reasonable quality but took some serious editing. It’s free and it’s pretty good, I’m sure it will improve in time.

8 Otter

We’ve had more success with Otter. If you want just awesome dictation or the ability to have an audio file translated into text, Otter is the place. Its free to a point but once you clock up some more serious time you need to jump into a paid plan. It’s worth it though.

9 Descript

Descript is Otter with way more bells and whistles. It’s really targeted to podcasters and gives you the ability to record, transcribe, edit, and mix spoken audio. If you want a simple program to record your thoughts this is probably overkill unless of course you're a budding podcaster and a blogger and you want to keep everything in the one place. Like Otter, Descript is freemium, with various paid options for the more professional users.

The only real drawback with these platforms is that the costs start to add up and the only software worth getting will set you back between $100- $500, but there are some free options out there that do a decent job, just do some experimenting and see what works for you. 

  Author: Ian Hopkinson 

    Digital Madman, Founder of Terminology and Mad Scientist Digital

    Socials: Instagram / / LinkedIn 

    Websites: Terminology / / Mad Scientist / / Hopkinson Creative