7 Essential Blogging Tools You Need to Grow Your Blog

Do you want to grow your blog’s traffic and revenue from the ground up? Well, you need the right blogging tools to make that happen.

Whether you’re a blogger, new entrepreneur, or marketing professional, a blog is a fantastic way to build your brand’s affinity.

While it’s easy to get disheartened when you start a new blog, part of what makes it fun is trying out new tools to help you find the best software that will enable you to scale faster.

However, finding the best blogging tools can be a huge pain. You can imagine testing every tool under the sun to find out which fits your blogging needs. It’s time-consuming.

But you don’t have to do that. Because today, I’ll help choose the best tools that you need to supercharge your blogging career.

Blogging Tools to Grow Your Blog

Below we highlight seven tools you can use to grow your blog to success.

1: Grammarly

Let’s face it: we all want our writing to look professional. But you know what’s not cool? Writing a blog post, only to find it’s riddled with errors.

It’s frustrating and embarrassing, right? Of course, it’s hard to take the advice seriously from a piece with a ton of grammatical errors.

And if you are not a native English speaker you’ll agree that making your sentences pitch perfect is not an easy task either. This is where a tool like Grammarly comes in handy.

Grammarly is an online grammar checker that uses artificial intelligence to find errors in your writing. You just type in your post and the tool will check your spelling and grammar for any mistakes.

If there are any errors in your text, the words are highlighted and you can fix them before publishing your post.

The best part is that Grammarly won’t just identify spelling mistakes—it’ll also tell you if there are any issues with your sentence structure and readability. This is by detecting passive voice, overly complex words, and overused phrases.

In addition, the tool allows you to check your content for plagiarism. Copied content does not only harm your site’s credibility to readers but to search engines as well.

Google especially values the originality of content. Since plagiarized content cannot be deemed as quality your site is likely to get penalized.

The grammar checking software is available as a browser, web app, MS Word extension, and mobile app.

Grammarly has both a free and a paid plan. The free plan only allows you to edit for basic grammatical errors.

If you want to unlock more awesome features I would recommend that you subscribe to their premium plan which costs $12 per month.

2: Google Analytics

Other than crafting quality blog content, you need to know your audience better if you want your blog to receive more eyeballs. And that means understanding the way people read and respond to your blog content.

If you’re like me, you have a million ideas for blog posts—but what if nobody reads them? What if no one cares about clicking a link to your published piece? To help you eliminate guesswork, Google Analytics helps you to gather data about your audience.

Using the tool you can know:

• The number of readers that visited each of your blog posts and pages
• The average time they spent reading your blog content
• The pages on your blog driving the most traffic
• The source traffic for your top-performing pages
• Your audience’s geographical location
• And the devices they are using to access your website

Recently, Google Analytics has undergone huge improvements to make the tool more robust.

Using the analytics tool you can set up new funnel goals on the go and track your visitor’s conversion journey.

What you need is to integrate the tool with your website. After that, you can segment your traffic and track down their conversion path. Let’s say you want to know how much of your organic traffic from the US made a conversion.

Just hop into the tool then click on exploration ⇒ funnel exploration ⇒segments. From there you can drag the segments “organic traffic” and “US” to the segments comparison. You’ll see the pathway your audience followed until they made a conversion.

This allows you to understand your audience’s journey map and where they dropped off in your conversion funnel.

You can then combine the tool with heat maps tools like CrazyEgg or Hotjar to get more visual presentations on users’ behavior on your blog. This will help you to know what’s preventing them from converting and understand the steps you should take to boost your blog conversions.

The best part is that the tool is completely free.

If you are looking for a great blogging tool to help you track the performance of your blog, you’ll love Google Analytics.

3: Rank Math SEO

SEO can be daunting, especially for beginners. There are a lot of technicalities that go behind the scenes. And if you barely know anything about coding (like me), optimizing a website for search engines can be an overwhelming task.

What if I tell you there is a tool that will handle all the technical SEO aspects for you if you own a self-hosted WordPress site? That’s right. You don’t need to add any code to make sure your site is SEO friendly.

That’s where RankMath comes into play.

RankMath is a swiss army knife WordPress SEO plugin you can use to optimize your site for search engines.

Unlike most WordPress SEO plugins, RankMath comes with a lot of features that are mostly free.

The plugin allows you to optimize your content for the right keywords and readability and follows SEO best practices.

RankMath also allows you to monitor your 404 pages, redirect broken links, and create an XML sitemap for your site just to mention a few.

In short, the plugin makes sure you have polished up the on-page and off-page SEO aspects of your site. This means more people will find your blog when looking for your products or services online.

Another benefit of the RankMath SEO plugin is that you can use it to eliminate duplicated content on your site by automatically canonicalizing the default page URL. This helps search engines know exactly what page they should rank for particular keywords.

If you are looking for a great SEO blogging tool, RankMath wins the race due to its robust features, most of which come free.

And if you need access to advanced features such as tracking your blog’s keyword rankings, more Content AI credits, and a powerful schema generator, you can upgrade to a premium package that costs $59 a year. You also get to use the premium version on unlimited personal websites.

4: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO software that offers all the tools that you need to rank higher on search engines such as Google.

The tool started as a backlink checker. But since then they have added a ton of features you can use to effectively run your SEO campaigns and outrank your competitors.

Ahrefs’ main selling point is its “site explorer” feature.

It’s a feature you can use to spy on your competitor’s SEO performance.

This includes understanding their backlink profile, how much organic traffic they get, and the keywords that drive the most traffic.

Unlike most SEO tools, Ahrefs wins when it comes to backlink analysis. In fact, most SEO geeks dubbed it the second most powerful web crawler after Google.

Not only are you able to uncover backlinks a particular page has but their powerful filters allow you to sort out links based on the link type (nofollow, dofollow, UGC).

For example, let’s say you want to steal your competitor’s link-building strategy. The first step would be to know which pages have a high number of backlinks.

And not just any backlinks but the “do-follow” links. With Ahrefs it’s easy to achieve that using their link filter feature.

From that, you’ll have a list of potential websites that are pretty much likely to link to you (because they are already linking to your competitors).

Other amazing features you can unlock using Ahrefs include:

• Keywords suggestions and research from 10 search engines
• Analyze a website authority for free
• Perform a site audit to identify errors preventing your site from ranking
• Measure keyword trends by analyzing its CTR trajectory over time
• Getting an estimation of the total search traffic for the top 10 ranking pages on SERP
• Analyzing content gaps between you and your competitors

Now the problem with Ahrefs is that it does not offer a free nor a freemium plan. If you want a free alternative then you would want to consider a tool like Ubersuggest. Although not as powerful as Ahrefs or its main rival SEMrush, it will do the trick for a new blog.

On the other hand, Ahrefs is a great blogging tool for all bloggers, no matter their SEO experience level. It helps you identify opportunities for growth by showing you which sites link to your competitors’ content most often.

5: Sumo

After driving traffic to your blog, the biggest goal is to convert those visitors into leads.

Besides, what’s the need of having massive traffic when you can’t make them convert.

Enter Sumo.

Sumo is a lead generation tool that helps you convert visitors into leads using popups.

You can create popups in minutes without knowing how to code; all for free.

I know what you are thinking. Popups are annoying. Yeah, they are but only when poorly used.

Popups perform incredibly well in lead generation.  According to Optimonk’s study, the average conversion rate of a popup is 11.09%.

That means, if your blog receives 30,000 visits a month, you are likely to generate 3,327 conversions. That’s way higher than a Facebook ad which has an average conversion rate of 9.21%.

And considering that popups are free to create with Sumo, that’s an impressive conversion rate.

Sumo is a great blogging tool you can exploit to generate conversions to your website.

Using this tool, you can create a popup form and customize it how you want it displayed to your visitor. You can set the popup to display in a specific URL, device, or use cookies or location to personalize the experience.

This way, you can create a popup form engineered toward the right audience. The results, I guess you know—higher conversions.

You can also integrate it with your favorite email marketing provider or autoresponder to nurture your leads.

Sumo includes its branding in its forms for its free plan. But considering the vast features that it offers I bet you wouldn’t mind having their small logo on your forms.

However, if you would want to unlock more features you’d have to upgrade to their paid plan. Other alternatives worth checking out include OptinMonster and Bloom.

6: Aweber

Aweber is an email marketing tool that makes it easy to build relationships with your readers and email subscribers. The software is also one of the best autoresponders of all time.

What I love most about the tool is its simplicity. The platform is simple to use yet packed with powerful features.

The ability to create simple, plain, and minimalistic newsletters avoids distractions in your emails and allows your recipient to concentrate on what is important in the emails you send them.

You can create automated drip campaigns to nurture your leads, send targeted emails based on what the reader does on your site (like clicking on particular links), and segment lists into smaller groups so that only relevant content is sent out to each person or group.

Aweber provides free, easy-to-customize templates and opt-in forms, using their drag and drop builder.

It integrates with many other tools most bloggers use—so if you’re using WordPress or Google Analytics, for example, you can connect them together so that when someone subscribes to your website, they automatically get added as part of those other services’ databases too!

Aweber offers both a free and a paid plan. For a free plan, you can create a list of up to 500 email subscribers where you can send a maximum of 3000 emails per month. This is beneficial for a new blog considering the vast features it offers.

7: Trello

Trello is an amazing blogging tool that enables you to create and keep track of your blog’s projects.

You can use Trello to manage your blog’s content calendar, which will help you stay on track with writing posts and taking care of the rest of your business.

Trello also helps you to break down your blog into smaller tasks that are easier to manage. For example, if you want to create an infographic for your blog, you can use Trello to organize the different steps involved in creating it.

This way, when it’s time for you or someone else on your team to work on each step, everyone will know exactly what needs to be done.

Trello is an essential blogging tool for anyone who wants to manage their content with ease, and it’s really easy to get started. Its drag-and-drop Kanban-style task management interface is intuitive, allowing everyone on the team to see task progress throughout the pipeline.

In addition to creating boards, there are several other things that you can do with Trello:

• You can assign tasks to other members of your team without having to create separate accounts for them (or even communicating with them directly)
• Add comments and attachments to individual cards so that everyone on your team knows exactly what’s needed by looking at each card’s comments section
• And while using their paid plan you can automate workflows in your projects and run most repetitive tasks on autopilot

If you want to create an effective content calendar and keep track of every step of your content production, Trello is an essential blogging tool to have. Alternatives you can consider include Asana and Monday.com.

Other blogging tools to consider

• Canva: a handy tool for graphic design
• Buffer: best social media management tool
• BuzzSumo: best content research software
• Demio: an ideal webinar hosting platform
• Evernote: best for taking notes online
• HubSpot CRM: best free software for managing your customer’s information
• LeadPages: best landing page builder

Wrap up

Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or new to blogging, using the right blogging tools will help scale your business faster.

In order to maintain a constant stream of traffic and leads it’s nice to have options of reliable and flexible tools to fall back on. There’re plenty of great blogging tools to help you build, manage, and market your blog.

Although there’s no perfect tool that will guarantee your success, I hope this article has helped you uncover some options to consider when finding the best blogging tools.

Over to you.

Do you have any blogging tools you think I should have included? Feel free to drop the option down in the comments section.