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By allysa on September 2, 2015
[Updated 6/15/2016]
If you’re a content marketer or blogger like me, you probably spend a huge chunk of your time looking for good resources to use for your blog.
However, the problem we often face is not scarcity, but overabundance. There are just too many SEO tools, too many stock photo websites to choose from, too many writing tools, too many plugins or extensions to install.
There are just too much of everything!
And this has made our lives difficult because if we had to spend our time reviewing and comparing each and every tool available or waste our time looking for stock photos in bad quality websites, we wouldn’t have enough time to finish our blog posts.
This is why I have rounded up a huge list of blogging resources you can use to help you with the creation of your blog, from beginning to end.
I’ve only included resources that are high-quality (consensus from other content marketers) and a brief summary of it so that you can easily pick the one best suited for you and your blog.
Design Resources
– WordPress Premium Themes – Web Based Design Tools – Stock Photos – Typography – Icons – Patterns – Color
Writing Resources
– Writing Tools – Outsourcing Sites
Outreaching Resources
– Guest Blogging and Blogging Outreach Networks – Email Marketing Tools
SEO Resources
– SEO Tools – SEO Browser Extensions – Analytic Tools
Other Resources
– Social Sharing Buttons – Social Engagement Tools – Statistics and Tables
If you have not set up your website yet and you’re planning to do so, here are the few things you should be looking at:
The first thing you’re going to need to choose is the CMS you plan on using to host your blog. A CMS will allow you to publish, edit, organize and modify your blog content. The following are some of the CMS services that you can choose from:
In addition to choosing a CMS, you’re also going to need to find a place that will host your blog. The following are a few server hosts worth checking out:
Although these backup products do cost money, it’s much better to be safe than sorry. All of the following plugins are very effective at backing up your blog:
Even though they say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, your visitors are most certainly going to judge the look of your blog page. If it looks hideous, they’re going to assume that your content isn’t going to be much better. The following are the different design elements you’ll want to consider and numerous sources where you can obtain them:
You’re going to need access to numerous design tools in order to design and tweak the layout of your blog as well as edit your photos, build your charts and infographics, and more. The following are all excellent design tools that you should make use of:
Visual content, such as images, not only helps to draw the eye of your blog’s visitors and to help break up the text of your content, it also helps to give readers a clear idea of what the blog content is about when they glance over it. Taking your own photos can be time-consuming and hiring a professional to take photos specifically for your blog is typically way too expensive. Instead, you can nab free stock photos from one of these sources:
While you don’t want to go overboard with the font you use for your blog (please stay away from Comic Sans or Papyrus!), you can find fonts that are unique without being unreadable or distracting at some of these sites:
Adding icons is a good idea for a number of reasons. They help to provide information via a small picture, summing up what your text is about (an icon of a house directs visitors to the homepage, the icon of a magnifying glass indicates the search box, etc.), it helps draw attention since it differs from your website’s text and can help increase the readability of your blog.
Don’t forget about the background of your blog pages. You’ll want something that adds visual interest and depth without detracting the reader from your actual content. You can also use these patterns to design the cover photos of your blog posts.
You’ll want to use colors for your blog’s design that are representative of your brand. The following site allows you to download colors for your text, icons, dividers, backgrounds and status bars:
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So now that you’ve got all your design elements, you’ll actually want to get to what your blog is all about – the content. The following are some of the best resources for writing your blog:
One of the toughest parts of writing content is making sure that you’ve used proper grammar and that you’ve spelled everything right. Additionally, you’ll need to worry about things such as whether the content reads naturally, if your title is effective and more. These tools will do just that:
Not every marketer has the resources available to them to write their own content. Writing content is a difficult task, and one you may not have the time or resources to do yourself. Fortunately, there are plenty of sites – often referred to as content mills – that allow you to outsource your content to writers, such as:
Guest blogging is an excellent way to reach a new audience, strengthen your brand authority and create a strong and beneficial relationship with other companies within your industry. The following are a number of sites that can help you find relevant blogs on which you can contribute guest posts:
You can use the content you create for your blog to nurture the leads that have opted into your email list as well. Or you can simply alert leads on your email list about new blog content they might find beneficial. The following are some of the more highly regarded email marketing tools you can use:
SEO is a big part of content marketing. You’ll want to optimize your content in order to make it easy for Google’s algorithm to identify, thereby increasing your chances of boosting your page ranking, which in turn brings in more readers.
As a WordPress plugin for SEO ourselves, of course we’re going to recommend using SEOPressor. But aside from SEOPressor, there are plenty more useful tools that I will (try to) recommend without being biased. The following tools in order to optimize your blog effectively:
Make it easier to keep an eye on your blog’s search engine ranking by downloading some of the following SEO plugins, thereby allowing you to have instant access to a number of SEO-related metrics:
You won’t know if your blog is performing the way you want it to unless you are using analytics. Analytics will allow you to judge your blog’s performance and determine how you can adjust your content strategy to make your blog more successful. The following are a number of analytics tools well worth using:
Making sure that your readers engage with your content should be an important priority. The following are a few tools that will help you do this:
Including charts and statistics into your content is a great way to back up your statements using hard data. The following are great tools for this:
These are all the resources that I recommend and I hope you find them useful as well. If there are any other resources that you think should be on the list, let me know in the comment section below.
Updated: 3 December 2024
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Social Sharing Buttons
Social share buttons will help you to gain exposure for your blog content by basically allowing readers to promote it for you. By clicking on a social share button, they’ll share your blog post on their personal social media pages where their friends and family can see it. Use these two sites to obtain social share buttons for your blog: