Are you a blogger that’s just starting out? If so, welcome to the blogging community! It’s great to have you.
As you are beginning your blogging career you must start out on the right foot.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over these past 3 years, it’s that blogging can come as easy as you make it. Let me explain what I mean by that. As a blogger, there are so many useful resources available to us. It’s actually really cool if I’m being honest. There’s truly a tool for everything!
Being strategic with the tools available to you will elevate your blog day by day and allow you to take steps towards monetizing your blog, expanding your reach, and perfecting your craft as a writer.
Blogging is as easy as it’s ever been.
For example, WordPress offers a wide variety of SEO plugins that are available and ready for bloggers like you and me to use. SEO tools have been such a lifesaver for me. Something that bloggers used to spend hours on years ago now takes me little to no time at all. However, this wasn’t always the case for me. I’ll be honest when I first began blogging I tried to keyword optimize my own posts and did okay for a while. But after a while, I realized I was wasting my time. I wasn’t blogging smart and although I’d get hits on Google here and there, I was actually limiting my visibility.
It was then that I began to seek out resources that could help me blog smarter so that I could be strategic with my time, focus on the future, and elevate my blog.
If you are a beginner blogger I want to save you the trouble I went through when I first began my blogging.
Three useful tools have proven themselves as essential to keep my blog up to standard. Or should I say my high standards for myself! Nonetheless, I’m sure every blogger can use at least one of these tools in their life.
Let’s get started!
As a blogger proper grammar is key
Having the correct grammar, spelling, sentence structure and tone are very important when blogging. I sometimes spent hours combing through my blog posts when I first started blogging to make sure what I wrote made any sense. Looking back, part of my reasoning for that was because I hadn’t found my authentic self as a writer. However, the other part was me not using the resources available to me.
Grammarly is a program/website that saves me a ton of time on proofreading. I downloaded the Grammarly browser extension, so now when I write it’s operating in the background making the edits for me. Now that I’ve become familiar with it I can’t believe I was blogging without it at one point. Gone are those days, forever!
Click here to check out Grammarly.
SEO is much easier with this tool
Your blog’s SEO ranking is one of the most critical pieces to get a handle on as you’re starting out. Getting the hang of SEO early will save you so much trouble in the long run. Trust me on this one! I learned this the hard way.
As I said earlier when I first started blogging my content was good but not as great as it could have been. By that, I mean the SEO work I did myself allowed me to get by, but it was lacking quality. I wasn’t using the best searchable words or terms, which in turn caused my blog to rank fairly low in Google. I didn’t know it then, but I was hurting my blog’s chances of growth. That is until I found YOAST SEO.
YOAST makes SEO easy and is actually a plugin you can download directly from WordPress to run in the background on your site. Now, each time I write a post I can visually see each box being checked on the SEO checklist. As a blogger who also leads a busy life outside of blogging this tool is a lifesaver. It saves me so much time and I truly don’t know where I’d be without it!
I also would like to mention that YOAST SEO offers both a free plan and a paid plan. I currently use the free plan and it works well for my needs. So, free plan or paid, the choice is yours!
Click here to check out YOAST SEO.
Improve your blog posts with keywords
Keywords Everywhere is convenient and easy to use. As writer keywords play a critical role in SEO ranking. So, I enjoy using this tool along with YOAST.
There is a cost to use Keywords Everywhere, but the amount you spend is totally up to you. I chose to purchase $10 worth of keywords, which gave me a bank of close to 100,000 words. This Is a fairly new tool for me, as I have only written 7 blog posts with it, including this one. I currently have a little over 89,000 keywords left, so that small investment of $10 is paying off greatly. Once you run out of words you can simply purchase more at your convenience.
Click here to check out Keywords Everywhere.
Find what works for you and your blog
I hope you’ve found this advice useful as you are beginning your career as a blogger. I’m all about blogging smarter and I am so thankful for the resources I’ve found
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If you are a blogger with experience and would like to share other tools you find useful, please comment below. Sharing is caring!
