Every Resource You Need To Run A Kickass Blog: 75 Must Have Tools

Blogging sounds ideal. In a fantasy world, you grab a cup of coffee, draft a perfect post, and hit publish. In reality, you’re fixing headline typos, battling images, filtering comments, and losing your mind over broken social buttons. Running a successful blog is a never-ending game of chess, but occasionally you can cheat. With some helpful tools, blog resources, and hacks, you can manage every part of your mini-empire—without so much frustration. From editorial calendars and headline helpers to grammar checks and SEO optimization, here are 66 blogging tools to help you run the blog of your dreams.

Editorial Calendars/Organization

1) Basecamp: Basecamp gives you a private and secure space to talk about and organize projects with team members. You can track, discuss, and act on various tasks, discussions, deadlines, and files all in one dashboard. Communication is simple and intuitive with options such as message/discussion boards, real-time chat, and automatic check-ins to ensure that tasks get done effectively.

2) CoSchedule: This is the perfect editorial management tool if you’re focused on social media and content marketing. It seamlessly integrates a large library of external content marketing tools, such as Google Docs, WordPress, Google Analytics, and a long list of social media platforms. You have access to marketing workflow tools, a marketing calendar, and a social media content calendar to keep track of what’s getting posted, when, and across which sites.

3) Divvy HQ: The dashboard gives you a snapshot of what’s due, what’s done, and what the rest of your team is working on. Like Google or Outlook, you have access to unlimited calendar shares, but Divvy allows you to customize each individual calendar to suit your content strategy. You can set up calendars based on individual departments, markets, teams, or even clients.

4) Edit Flow: Edit Flow provides a WP editorial calendar that gives you the option of having multi-user support, which you can also synchronize with iCal or Google Calendar to keep track of all your projects. Some features include custom comment fields and the ability to create groups of users, making communication easier between team members.

5) Editorial Calendar: This plugin for WordPress lets you see all your upcoming posts and when they’ll be posted. It’s a simple tool if you mostly just need to manage posts, edit post titles, publish posts.

6) Flow: Flow allows you to effortlessly organize teams, delegate tasks, and prioritize your to-do list to make sure that nothing gets overlooked. It’s easy to see who needs to do what, when it will be completed, and what comes after. Communication is to-the-point, meaning it will take less time to discuss the work and give you more time to do it.

7) GatherContent: Unlike other content management tools on this list, GatherContent allows you to carry out a project to its entirety on the platform, much like WordPress. It has a minimalistic design that is uncluttered and easy to use and stores everything on a cloud, making your work accessible from any computer, no matter what stage you’re in.

8) Kapost: This is a great tool if you produce large volumes of content or have numerous team members. Kapost tracks the workflow of content marketing, starting from strategy and execution all the way through distribution.

9) LooseStitch: This is a great tool for companies that outsource content production. It allows you to create concepts and outlines that can be shared with selected users for collaboration. You can share drafts and final versions of your content and store it in a well-cataloged library.

10) Marketing.AI: This gives you access to standard calendar features, such as tracking production schedules and task status. You can also keep track of all the stages of content assets and keep track of all content published over time. It’s great for monitoring the impact of all your content marketing efforts.

11) SocialCast: This tool allows you to create posts, assign tasks, collaborate, and track the progress of all your content. It’s easier to talk to team members about content, e-books, and other marketing materials.

12) Trello: While not a proper editorial calendar, Trello can help you keep track of blog-related projects with your team. It uses visual organization techniques to help organize and collaborate across teams smoothly and quickly. The design is easy to use and makes brainstorming and collaborating effortless.

Design/Images

13) Animate It!: This plugin lets you add cool CSS3 animations to your content.

14) EWWW Image Optimizer: The EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimizes your images as you upload them onto WordPress and reduces the file size in bulk for images that have already been uploaded.

15) Fotor: Fotor is a fantastic online photo editor that allows you to edit images using filters, frames, text, and more. It’s quick and easy to use and offers many tools to create custom images and collages.

16) Gimp: Gimp provides you with tools to customize and enhance your images. The program is easy-to-use and comes with multiple tutorials to help you learn various techniques to create awesome images.

17) File Renamer: This plugin changes the names of your media files directly from the WordPress backend and updates all the links associated with each images.

18) Pexels: Pexels is a great resource for free stock photos that you can use for various projects. The site contains a huge library of images and videos sorted into multiple categories.

19) SEO Friendly Images: This helpful plugin automatically updates all your images with the proper titles and ALT tags so you don’t have to worry about it.

20) Skitch: Skitch lets you draw attention to what’s important through the use of annotations and markups in an easy-to-use app. You can use it on your phone, tablet, or desktop.

21) Visage: Column Five sister company Visage created this easy-to-use design tool that lets you create visual content for your site. There are a number of readymade templates at your disposal and you can create your own. Sharing with your team is simple and straightforward, letting you complete projects quickly and seamlessly.

22) WP Smush: This plugin optimizes your images so the page loads faster. Smush strips images of unnecessary information, reducing the file size without sacrificing image quality. The best part is that it performs this operation automatically when you upload a media file—and it can optimize your existing images in bulk.

Ideation/Writing

23) BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo analyzes your audience’s interests so you’ll have a better idea of what they’re attracted to. It looks at your competitor’s sites to see what keywords and content performs best, so you can build upon them and create better resources.

24) Cliche Finder: Unlike other proofreading tools, this one is designed to specifically filter through your text to determine which phrases have a weaker impact.

25) CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is the perfect tool for headline optimization, especially if you’re using the CoSchedule calendar plugin. The analyzer will give you tips on how to get the perfect headline, analyzing your word balance, type, and sentiment to let you know what you can do to make your headline better.

26) E.ggTimer: Keep yourself on task with this awesome tool, which lets you create deadlines and countdowns for projects.

27) Emotional Marketing Value Analyzer: This analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute returns a score based on the total number of Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) words in relation to the overall number of words that are present in your headline. From there, it determines what type of emotional impact your headline has: intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual.

28) Feedly: This tool helps you keep tabs of your industry content. You can take all those blogs and sites and keep them in one place, organized by subject or folder, so you can easily peruse next time you need blog inspiration.

29) Google Trends: Google Trends is the perfect tool to help you determine if your content idea is currently trending.

30) Grammarly: This browser extension proofreads your text, checking for 250 types of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors, as well as any form of plagiarism.

31) Hemingway: The Hemingway app is perfect for determining if your text is too dense, too complex, or unreadable. After analyzing your content, it gives you hints on how to improve your text by highlighting words or sections that may need replacing.

32) Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator: This allows you to input three keywords on a topic and generates several ideas for a blog post.

33) Keyword Planner: This free tool is perfect for researching keywords to determine how difficult it is to rank for a particular search term.

34) Keyword Tool: This tool is linked with Google’s autosuggest feature to generate a list of possible optimal keywords for not only the Google search engine but also Bing and the Apple App Store.

35) KingSumo Headlines: This lets you A/B test headlines, showing different options to each visitor and selecting the best-performing headline over time as readers post and share your content with others.

36) ShareThrough: ShareThrough’s headline analyzer uses over 300 unique variables to help you create engaging headlines that will deliver stronger impressions to your audience.

37) Scoop.It!: This tool is good for queueing up content for your blog. It allows you to search for great content that you can put your spin on and lets you publish it at a later date on various social sites.

38) WordPress Distraction Free Writing: If you just want to focus on content (not all the distractions of the WP interface), enable this mode to keep yourself on task.

Conversion Tools

39) GetSiteControl: This all-in-one widget lets you do it all. You can create surveys, email and contact forms, popups, and live chat windows.

40) HubSpot: HubSpot helps you attract visitors and convert leads with tools that help you optimize your posts for search engines and social media using inbound marketing. It allows you to create email forms and perfect landing pages to increase your traffic and keep your readers engaged.

41) MailChimp: MailChimp helps you manage campaigns, including email and popup forms. There are a variety of ready-to-use templates to choose from or you can create your own using HTML.

42) OptimizePress: This tool lets you set up easy landing pages for sales, e-books, or whatever you need.

43) Postmatic: Postmatic is an email-based commenting plugin that allows users to subscribe to a post in order to receive notifications, which they can then comment on through email.

44) SumoMe: This plugin gives you a ton of tools to increase conversions and optimize your site, including popups, social sharing, heatmaps, CTAs, and more.

Site Optimization

45) Akismet: Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that performs real-time data analysis of millions of sites to block spam automatically.

46) Crowd Control: This plugin was created by Postmatic and is perfect for comment moderating. Instead of manually filtering through comments on your site, Crowd Control gives readers the ability to report comments that they believe are violating your site’s commenting policy.

47) Broken Link Checker: This scans all your posts, pages, images, comments, redirects, and more to ensure that there are no broken links. You can edit directed links straight from the plugin’s page, so you don’t have to manually edit each piece of content.

48) Epoch: This is a commenting/chat experience that uses fully native comments while being compatible with page caching, CDNs, mobile, other comment plugins, and SEO best practices.

49) IntenseDebate Comments: IntenseDebate allows readers to create profiles and build reputations through a comment-voting system. This grants readers the ability to develop a community, which increases social interactions on your site.

50) Jetpack: This plugin gives you visitor stats, security services, speeds up images, and helps you get more traffic.

51) Redirection: This helpful plugin automatically sets up redirects for posts that have had a URL change. It also provides statistics about how often the redirects are being accessed and where the original links are.

52) Easy External Links: This plugin is an SEO-friendly external link handler for WordPress. Some features include domain handling and external image hosting support that standardizes the format of external links to create steady on-site SEO.

53) Open in New Window: This handy plugin makes sure external links open in a new window, leaving your page open to ensure consistent on-page SEO ratings.

54) wpDiscuz: With wpDiscuz readers are able to comment on your content, vote comments up or down, and load previous comments in a thread. The plugin also provides support for popular anti-spam plugins available for WordPress.

SEO

55) All in One SEO Pack: This plugin optimizes your site for search engines by automatically optimizing titles, overwriting default meta details, and generating the optimal meta keywords for various search engines

56) Google Analytics: This plugin seamlessly connects Google Analytics with WordPress to create a dashboard directly to the backend to help you track downloads, search results, and 404 errors.

57) Moz: Moz checks your competitor’s sites to see where they get their links from, what their top pages are, as well as their domain and page authority.

58) Rankie: This WordPress plugin tracks your rankings on Google while keeping a close eye on keywords to help improve your overall search engine exposure.

59) Premium SEO Pack: This tool optimizes your site for search engines. The minification tool provided makes your site render quickly so users have a more enjoyable experience. The plugin also improves internal link building, optimizes images, handles 301 redirects, and optimizes your site for social media.

60) SEMrush: This tool analyzes your competitors’ sites to determine where their traffic comes from, which keywords they rank for, and who links to their site.

61) SEO by Squirrly: This plugin is helpful for the non-SEO experts. It helps you create content that is human and search-bot friendly, which helps your site rank better in search results and keep users engaged.

62) SEOPressor: SEOPressor offers a lot of impressive features to help optimize your blog posts, such as a built-in keyword research tool to find the perfect keywords related to your content. The built-in SEO analyzer provides a score and the plugin also optimizes images, manages internal linking, and optimizes your blog post for social media.

63) Ultimate SEO Video Plugin: This is a must-have plugin for any video blogger. The plugin automatically generates schema.org video object markup and automatically fetches SEO details from its video hosting service. The sitemap that it generates helps Google and other search engines index pages easily, which helps your video rank higher.

64) Yoast SEO: This free plugin has a large list of features that optimize your website, including XML site-mapping and on-page analysis. The comprehensive optimization setting panel allows you to manage each element of the plugin easily to help you understand how well your post is being optimized.

Social Sharing

65) AddThis: AddThis is a great tool to use when trying to publish content on various social sites. It supports over 300 social media services and provides you with a variety of icon designs and sizes and analytical support to update you on what people are sharing across platforms.

66) Better Click to Tweet: This Twitter-specific WordPress plugin makes it easier for visitors to tweet memorable lines and snippets from your content, meaning your content will be shared more frequently across Twitter.

67) Buffer: Buffer makes it easy for readers to quickly share your content on social media while they are reading a blog post.

68) ContentDJ: This helps you track and plan original content, optimize your posts for social media, and source new content for curation all from the dashboard. It also tracks in-depth metrics like how far your content reaches, how many retweets your content has had, and how many times your content has been clicked on.

69) Monarch: Monarch tracks and display share counts with a built-in statistics tool and also provides an easy-to-use interface that allows you to display social sharing widgets, popover, and fly boxes across your site for popular social networks.

70) ShareThis: ShareThis supports 120 different social channels, allowing your visitors to spread content across multiple platforms, including email, quickly and easily.

71) Simple Share Buttons Adder: This simple plugin is a no-frills tool that allows you to add basic social buttons, customizing what text and images are shared.

72) Social Metrics Tracker: This tracker collects data across various social sites to tell you which posts are most popular based on the number of shares.

73) Warfare: This tool helps you increase shares through social buttons, tweetable quote boxes within your content, Pinterest-specific images, etc.

74) WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol: This fantastic social optimization tool makes sure your posts and pages are displayed properly on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

75) WP Social: This free plugin works seamlessly with other WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO to increase your social media traffic. It automatically implements Rich Snippet Tagging to all your content in order to optimize your social media content.

Think we missed any? Let us know what blog resources you love.