Essential Writing Tools & Apps are tools that make writing easier and more efficient. With these apps, it is possible for writers to focus on their creativity and emotions.
The first essential writing tool is a computer. For creative work, the computer is essential because it allows you to use all the necessary tools such as editing software, graphics software, image editing software, etc.
The second essential writing tool is a pen and paper. This is because pen and paper help you think creatively by giving you something to write on. It also helps you brainstorm ideas by drawing diagrams or making lists of words or phrases that come up in your mind when you see them written down in front of you.
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10 Best Tools and Apps For Blogging
1. WordPress
WordPress is a highly flexible platform for blogging. With a drag-and-drop block editor and over 80,000 plugins and themes, you can create a customized blog with the exact look and feel that you want. Just make sure you have the time and resources to invest in purchasing, downloading, and maintaining third-party tools and templates. A better understanding of their functionality can lead to more successful execution that readers will enjoy navigating through in a professional blog.
We recommend WordPress for bloggers who want to create a highly customizable blog on both the front- and back-end of their website. It’s also ideal for you if you have the time, money, and experience to manage the design and maintenance process of a WordPress website. Once you make it work for you, WordPress is a great CMS.
2. Ghost
If you’re looking for a more lightweight CMS that’s dedicated to blogging, Ghost is an excellent WordPress alternative. It offers an intuitive editor, built-in SEO tools, responsive layouts, and an out-of-the-box email subscription so you can easily create and manage a blog.
We recommend Ghost for experienced bloggers and marketers who are looking for a customizable blogging platform. It’s especially a good fit for you if you want a built-in analytics tracker, although it’s worth noting that CMS Hub and WordPress both offer analytics tools. Whether you choose Ghost depends on your budget requirements and user interface preferences.
3. Semrush
You can take your blog planning to the next level with Semrush. Semrush is a premium tool for keyword research, keyword rank tracking, site audits, and traffic analysis. With Semrush, you can find long-tail keywords that have the best chance of ranking for organic traffic.
You can also use this tool to advance your search engine marketing efforts and out-rank your competitors on search engine results pages (SERPs). Semrush not only allows you to discover your main paid search competitors and figure out which keywords they’re bidding on — it also enables you to study their regional presence and composition of their ads. This information is essential to creating and managing your own paid strategy.
4. Keyword Planner
For a free and simpler alternative to Semrush, you can use Keyword Planner. This SEO tool can help you research keywords and plan your content strategy. You just have to enter a keyword and the tool will auto-generate the search volume of that keyword as well as related words and phrases.
While the tool is designed specifically for ads, many bloggers use Keyword Planner for their content as well. For example, Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, increased his site’s organic traffic from to around 300K visits per month with the help of this tool.
5. Quora
Quora isn’t just a site for engaging with and building an online community — it’s also a great place to find ideas for your blog.
Quora is a crowdsourced Q&A website, where users can post questions and get answers from anyone. Scanning this site will uncover questions that get asked most frequently by real people. This can be a great way to supplement your keyword research. Quora is free to use — you’ll just have to create an account.
6. Blog Ideas Generator
Now that you know your target audience and have some keywords that you’re targeting, you need to get started writing. If you need some help turning your keyword research into content, go to HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.
You can enter up to five words that represent topics you want to write about in the search bar. Then click “Give me Blog Ideas” to see an auto-generated list of five blog ideas.
You can also fill out a form to access a year’s worth of blog ideas and details on how to advance your SEO strategy. This tool is completely free to use, so it’s worth giving it a try if you’re not sure where to start.
7. Grammarly
In tandem with the Hemingway App, you can use Grammarly to write engaging and grammatically-correct blog posts. The premium version of Grammarly will not only check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but it will also recommend vocabulary enhancements and detect any instances of plagiarism.
You can choose to draft or copy and paste your blog posts into the Grammarly editor. You can also install Grammarly as a Google Chrome browser extension to offer suggestions as you write in Google Docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sites.
8. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is designed to improve your blog’s on-page SEO. Like the Hemingway App and Grammarly, Yoast SEO analyzes the readability of your text, offering suggestions to improve grammar, sentence structure, reading level, and more.
What sets Yoast SEO apart from other tools is its SEO analysis. This tool will offer suggestions for adding keywords, optimizing meta descriptions and URLS, and adding internal links.
While some platforms like CMS Hub will provide these SEO recommendations as you write, other platforms will require you to use Yoast SEO to optimize your blog. Yoast SEO is most frequently purchased and downloaded on WordPress websites, but it’s also compatible with Magento, Drupal, TYPO3, and Neos CMS.
9. Evernote
For super fast idea collecting, you can drop everything into Evernote—notes, snippets, photos, webpages, and more. The tagging system in Evernote is incredibly robust, so you can keep your ideas with a simple tag in a number of cool ways—by topic, by idea stage, and more.
10. Google Calendar
Calendar tools like Google Calendar can be repurposed as editorial calendars. If publishing one post per day, you can save your ideas as all-day events and move them around the calendar as needed. If you plan on scheduling multiple posts, add a calendar event to the specific publish time. Zoom in and out to see what you’ve got planned for a given day, week, or month.
The blogging tools we use at Buffer
I’ve had the privilege of trying out many of these tools while writing online. At Buffer, we’ve hone our blogging process into a pretty lean groove. These are the tools that I currently use to take posts from idea to publish.
- BuzzSumo, Quick Sprout, Feedly, and email newsletters to come up with ideas for blogposts
- Trello to collect ideas and plan blogposts for the week ahead
- Yoast SEO plugin for optimizing blogposts
- The WordPress Distraction-Free editor for writing
- Canva and Death to the Stock Photo for creating images
- Buffer, Digg Digg, and MailChimp for sharing the blogpost to social media and email lists
Over to you
What are your favorite blogging tools? Which ones did I not include here that you would add to the list?
I’m always keen to learn more about what tools are out there. Please do share in the comments if you have any tips or tools to talk about!