15 Must-Have Tools For Better Blogging

What if you could increase the engagement of your blog readers ten-fold in 2 minutes? How about adding relevant photography to your posts without having to go out and find them? You can do both of those things and much more with free tools that most bloggers don’t even know about.

Image via Wikipedia

We use the following sites and plugins every day to enhance our own and our clients’ blog content. We see serious results because of it. Here are 15 resources no serious blogger should be without:

Enhancing Content

A little bit of visual flair and a pinch of optimization can help your posts outperform just a straight block of text, in terms of sharing and engagement. These tools are our favorites: 

Zemanta – Easily insert related links and free photos

Shutterstock – Inexpensive, exhaustive, and high quality stock photos

ScribeSEO – Optimize your on-page text without having to think about it

Increasing Engagement

Keeping your readers on your site longer and getting them to interact with you is extremely valuable. These tools are our favorites: 

Urtak – Social polling for posts; 10x more engagement than comments

SimpleReach – Hook people in with “recommended stories” slider

OrangeSoda – Remind people to share with social media slider (WordPress plugin)

Identifying Influencers

Who do you wish would reblog or retweet your content? If you want to find the influencial nodes in your industry, try these tools: 

Wefollow – Find top Twitterers by category

MuckRack – Find top journalists in social media by category

Technorati – Track top blogs by category

Tracking Your Content

You won’t know just how much progress you’re making unless you keep track from the beginning. These analytics and social tracking tools are our favorites: 

Chartbeat / Newsbeat – Real time traffic analytics

AddThis – Easy social media analytics

Google Analytics – Industry standard site analytics

CrowdBooster – Track the reach of your headlines on Twitter

Klout – Track your influence in social media

Content Distribution

If a blog with zero traffic publishes a post, does that post really exist? Pretty much, no. If you want to kick start your traffic and get instant distribution for your content, here’s our favorite shortcut: 

Outbrain – Easily get paid distribution on major industry sites

15 Tools for Blogging Q&A