One good thing about blogging is that there are no barriers to entry. If you want to start a blog, you can buy a domain right now and set up a website in one day if you wish to and there are free blogging tools you can use.
But what about after you create the website? There are other expenses that people don’t tell you about when you start. For example, networking events, email systems, e-courses, and designers. So the costs can really start to add up. Luckily, there are still tons of great, free tools out there for bloggers.
The Free Blogging Tools
I’m always looking for ways to save money and I’ve done some work to find the best blogging resources that won’t cost me a penny. Here are 15 of my favorite FREE blogging tools that you should start using today if you aren’t already.
1. Google Drive, Docs, Calendar
Your Gmail account comes with a Google Suite of products namely Google Drive, Docs, and Calendar. All of these free tools are useful when it comes to your blogging business.
Google Drive allows you to easily store, share, and upload information, pictures, documents, or downloads; Google Drive makes it easy to create and share Word Documents on their web-based platform.
Google Calendar can integrate seamlessly with your smartphone so you can always keep up to date. Definitely take advantage of these products with your account!
Read also: How to monetize a blog
2. License-Free Stock Photo Websites
It is important to note that using images from websites can lead to pretty serious repercussions if not done carefully.
Laws these days are pretty strict when it comes to intellectual property and it would be really sucky to find yourself in a situation where you’re dragged to a lawsuit because you grabbed a picture that someone else owned. So be careful when using free blogging tools and resources.
So how can you avoid such issues?
To avoid this issue, use license-free photos from websites like:
- StockSnap.io
- Pexels
- Pixabay
- Creative Commons
- PicJumbo
- LifeofPix
3. Skype
If you don’t have a Skype account right now, go sign up. Skype is a great way of connecting with people worldwide at any time. I have had job interviews, stayed in touch with friends, and even helped some of my blogging students via meetings on Skype. It’s a great communication tool to have as a blogger.
Read also: How to make money with affiliate marketing
4. Elementor
Using a page builder lets you visually build a blog post or a page. It’s a must if you’re creating sales pages or landing pages to get email subscribers.
5. Sitemeter
Sitemeter is another good analytics program used after Google Analytics. It comes in two versions: Free and Paid. You can simply use the free version as it offers almost all the tools a webmaster needs.
You can keep track of your visitors’ referral information and at the same time also find how many people are online on your blog.
Sitemeter allows you to see some of the most important information regarding your latest referring URLs, live visitors, and visitors from the last 1 hr, day, and week.
6. PicMonkey
If you are looking for a photo editing tool that will make your blog look attractive, then PicMonkey is the best tool to check out. You can use this fantastic photo editing tool without downloading it to your computer.
With its great photo edit, touch-up, design, and collage features, you have got everything that you need to make your ideas come to life.
PicMonkey also publishes awesome guides to help you create your own visually attractive images. Therefore, if you are an amateur designer and don’t have good experience with editing tools in blogging, then PicMonkey is what you need to have and it’s free.
7. Google Analytics
All bloggers who are serious about their blogs should have a Google Analytics account. It makes it easier to know your blog’s statistics, demographics, and analytics. It is easy to set up and is really important to know if you want to get partnerships of any sort down the road.
8. Open Live Writer
Open Live Writer is one of the most popular blog editors for the Windows platform. You can create new and edit previous blog posts, see what they’ll look like on your blog before publishing, and set up multiple blogs.
You can add things like images, videos, and Bing maps. There are also 100+ plugins that you can use with Open Live Writer in order to add more features and increase its functionality. Best of all, Open Live Writer is one of the free blogging tools.
9. MailerLite
You need to have several opt-in boxes and freebies on your site to collect email subscribers. These are your loyal fans, the ones you talk to, help, nurture, and communicate with. They trust you and will be the backbone of your blogging journey.
MailerLite is free for up to 1,000 subscribers, and once you surpass this mark, you have the choice to upgrade with them or move your list to another provider with more features. MailerLite offers free landing pages, tracking reports, and split A/B testing.
10. Google Keyword Planner
What’s a good way to improve SEO? Planning in advance. Google Keyword Planner is a great free tool that’s in your Google account and it allows you to see what words are receiving great traction on the internet.
If you’re writing a blog post about affiliate marketing, you can use the keyword planner to find out what your best combination of keywords should be according to Google’s stats. When you write your post, try to strategically include those keywords throughout your post for good results.
11. Dropbox
Dropbox is another alternative to Google Drive. It’s a great way to share and transfer files with other people. Their starting plan is free but you can upgrade your storage plan for a small monthly fee if you need to do so.
12. WP Super Cache
It makes your blog pages load faster by displaying static HTML copies to your readers instead of loading your PHP-heavy posts. Makes changes to speed up your blog like combining and minifying CSS and javascript files and lazy loading images.
13. Google Auto-Complete
Short on keyword ideas? Start typing a keyword and Google will auto-complete your results with the most-searched-for phrases.
Its purpose is to speed up the searches performed by users on Google but it’s also a fantastic place to generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic
14. Avada
Avada, created by the team at Theme Fusion, makes designing your blog a cinch. You can customize the fonts, menu, header and footer styles, and anything else you can think of in the WordPress customizer without a bit of coding on your part.
15. Gravatar
Do you have a little image that displays when you comment on a blog or are you stuck with the default grey man? If you’re a grey man, visit Gravatar – globally recognized avatars and spend a few minutes uploading a photo of yourself.
16. Google Reader
Once you have a Google email account you can use Google Reader to follow all your favorite blogs from one spot so you’ll be able to find out when they’re updated without actually visiting them
17. Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important pieces of blogging or website management. One of the best blogging tools for SEO is Yoast SEO, which makes sure you cover all the SEO basics and that all your pages and posts are properly optimized.
Yoast allows you to optimize your site for keywords and key phrases, provide readability checks, make it easy for bots to crawl your site, ability to work in every WordPress editor, and a whole lot more. Moreover, the plugin is regularly updated for efficiency.
18. Canva
Canva is a free graphic design tool that allows you to create beautiful images and designs all on their web-based platform. You can drag and drop images, add text overlays, create presentations, and produce infographics and the list is endless. They have templates with set dimensions for different types of graphics.
19. Keywordtool.io
This free keyword tool works by extracting keywords using Google’s autocomplete feature. You can generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic quickly.
20. Quicktime Player
QuickTime Player is a free tool that’s already included on Mac computers and is easy to download on other computers. It’s really easy to use and the quality of the image is great. It is used for making a simple video, a screen flow, or recording something from your mobile device.
21. WordPress.com
You can host your blog for free on WordPress.com. However, you won’t be able to monetize your blog, make design changes and you can’t install most plugins
22. Todoist
You can use the app’s intuitive dashboard to create a list of things that you want to work on along with their priority and schedule. Within these tasks, you can create subtasks, designate the person responsible, see the task’s progress, and keep a record of the tasks completed.
23. Desk
The desk is a wonderful little tool for writers and desktop publishing clients to work on writing, blogging, and note-taking. It is a simple yet intuitive app that helps you organize your thoughts and ready the content for publishing on your website or blog.
Desk supports different publishing platforms including WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, etc. The app offers an array of writing modes, visual styles, and shortcuts. There’s also a preview mode for real-time editing and a meta-information section.
24. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from one dashboard. I love it because it allows you to add RSS feeds so you can auto-tweet blog posts, both on your own and on other blogs.
The free version lets you add two RSS feeds and will give you an idea if it’s worth spending a small fee each month for the professional version.
25. Evernote
Do you need a place for taking notes and keeping track of your projects? Then check out Evernote as an option. A lot of people love Evernote because of its user-friendly interface and cloud integration. Their free plan offers a limited amount of storage but you can easily upgrade if you need more for your account.
26. Placeit
Placeit is a creative tool. It allows you to take an image and place it into a mockup on a smartphone, computer, or tablet. It’s great for people who have an e-book, a PDF download, an e-course, or anything else that you want to show off how it would look on a screen. You can download the smaller images for free, or purchase really large ones if you need them at an affordable fee.
27. Buffer
Buffer has to be one of the most efficient social media management tools ever. Even though Hootsuite has more supported networks and is bigger than Buffer, I feel Buffer is easier to use.
Just like any content scheduling tool, you can easily integrate your social media accounts and start scheduling your posts. It also gives you a brief analysis that lets you A/B test your headline versions.
28. Ahalogy
Pinterest is a great source of traffic for thousands of bloggers. However, if you aren’t using the paid version, it’s not possible to schedule Pinterest pins from Buffer.
But Ahalogy solves this problem. You can easily schedule all your pins to your personal and community boards. However, the catch is you have to get accepted by Ahalogy to start using it.
Once you get accepted, you have to place a code to track your results. If this is something you don’t want to do, you can download the Ahalogy plugin and it automatically pushes your content to your Pinterest account.
29. Click to tweet
Click to tweet are tweetable quotes that are used widely on numerous blogs. What it basically does is offer more traffic from Twitter and gives an easy one-click path for the user to share your content.
Working with click-to-tweet is really simple. All you need to do is sign up for a free account. On your dashboard, you can type in the message you would like to tweet. Then, it generates a new line of code.
Copy and paste it into the post that you want to display it. You can also see the engagement of your audience and click through the rate of that simple tweet button.
30. Mailchimp
Are you a beginner blogger living on a tight budget? If you want to start making an email list, I recommend you start using Mailchimp as you build your email list. The interface is pretty easy to use and set up, and it’s free up until a certain amount of subscribers.
Once you’re ready to take your blog to the next level, there are other email platforms that might suit your needs better, but Mailchimp is a good place to start so you at least have something in place without spending a lot of money.
31. Impact Blog Title Generator
Impact blog title generator is a good tool for coming up with blog ideas and titles quickly. To use it, you need to type in your primary keyword. It will then pull out hundreds of enticing title options that you can use.
Simply hit the heart button if you like any given titles. It will then be transferred to a notebook which you can email later.
32. Readable
Readable is one of the great free blogging tools which quickly analyzes your xt for readability. This tool takes your text and analyzes it by giving it a score for the most used readability indicators. So, your text is easier to understand.
It gives you flexible options to carry out a test; test by URL, test by directly entering your text, and test by entering a referral link.
33. Grammarly
Readers really hate to read content with grammatical errors. Posts with many grammar errors can make a reader lose interest in reading further. They might not even bother reading your future blog posts. Therefore, make sure to do grammar checks before publishing your blog.
Grammarly is one of the most used online grammar checkers. It checks for spelling, sentence structure, style, punctuation, and alternatives. All you need to do is copy your content and paste it into Grammarly’s online grammar checker.
You can add this tool to your chrome browser and easily use it whenever you need to.
34. SEOPressor Blog Title Generator
If you are a WordPress blogger, you will absolutely love this simple but highly effective tool. Yes, it comes with a WP plugin, but the web version is equally as useful.
You can simply type in your keyword and get a bunch of blog ideas (it has its own pre-decided keyword categories).
Then, it pulls out a list of easy-to-use headlines. You can also modify it so that it looks more convincing.
To get more blog ideas, you have to put them in your email. And, it will send the list directly to your inbox.
35. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is one of the best search query tools I have used in a while. This handy tool fetches and maps suggestions based on visualization after you type in a keyword.
It breaks down keyword listings into three different parts namely:
- Question: what, who, when, why?
- Preposition: for, like, with
- Alphabetical: keyword + a, keyword + b
With this tool, you can also get a host of LSI keywords that you can easily sprinkle throughout your post.
36. Link Bait Title Generator
As a marketer, we need a headline that entices users to click. If you are a blogger in an entertainment niche, you will fall in love with this tool. Some suggestions might be really insane but it gets the job done.
37. FireShot
FireShot is an extension for Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Internet Explorer. It lets you capture, edit, annotate, organize, export, upload, and print screenshots from the Web.
There are quite a few capture options: entire page, visible part of page, selection or browser window. One of the unique things about FireShot is the full set of editing and annotation tools that it provides. Plus, it can even allow you to capture flash content.
38. Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer
It is easy to use and works perfectly. All you have to do is plug in the headline and choose an appropriate category. You will receive an EMV score that defines the emotional credibility of your headline.
Add an image to make your blog attractive. Photos play an important role in making your blog visually stunning. If you have photography talent along with your writing skill then trust me you don’t need anything else.
The right post with the right photo is what audiences are looking for. But in many cases, a blogger ignores the fact that images are an important component of user engagement and messes up with cheap stock images.
39. Egg Timer
Egg Timer is a simple countdown timer. As a writer, you must know how easily time goes by once you start writing. You have no idea how much time you are spending on researching your work, editing, or writing.
With this free time tracking tool, you can find out how productive you are and manage time for each individual task.
To start, set the time for your task, and hit the “Go” button to start time tracking. When the time’s up, you will see a pop-up appearing on the screen with the timer sound.
40. Toggle
Toggle is a time-tracking tool that can help boost your productivity. This one-click time tracking tool allows you to add tasks, and after completing your work, check the dashboard to know how long you spent on each task.
If you are a writer who spends a lot of your time on research and writing and is looking for a tool that can help you manage your time, Toggle is definitely worth trying.
Wrap-Up – Free Blogging Tools
Content creation should be the top priority of any blogger. I wish I could tell you that tools alone will make you a better writer, but that’s not true at all.
In fact, there are other key elements and methodologies that you need to implement to produce quality content. However, tools offer additional support and help you get things done more efficiently.
I hope these 40 free blogging tools can help you get through some tough times as they did for me.
Read also:
Small business ideas to start in Zambia
How to make money online in Zambia
