7 tools every blogger must have

So you’ve joined the bandwagon of Bloggers or maybe you run a business that incorporates blogging as part of her marketing strategy.
 
You have set up the website, have all the strategies mapped out and ideas are coming effortlessly. Everything seems to be flowing as you want it to. But your blog is not gaining as much traction as you would want or put more appropriately, you want to blog like a Pro, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s.
 
I tell you, if this is your situation, the article you’re reading now will help you achieve that and even add some colours to your blogging escapade. It reveals 7 essential tools every Blogging website must have.
 
Let me take you on the ride

Grammarly

The first on the list is Grammarly, a Google Chrome extension. Even though this article does not arrange the tools in order of relevance, I believe that this is an indispensable tool to use if you care about quality writing. So what does Grammarly do and how does it function.

From the name, you can guess its function.

Yes, you’re right!
 
It’s a grammar tool.
 
Grammarly is an auto-correct tool used in dictating and correcting grammatical errors.
 
Auto-correct?
 
What’s so special about that since your smartphone has the same ability and you Microsoft word software does same?
 
Calm down!
 
Grammarly is not like the conventional auto-correct tool. It digs deeper into the syntax and morphology of grammar.
 
It recognises the errors in the spelling and arrangements of your words and tenses and gives you an option to make corrections as appropriate.
Enough of the talking, let me show you what it is like using Grammarly for your blog post.
To use Grammarly, all you need to do is to go to your Chrome extension market, search for Grammarly in the search box and install it as an extension on your Google chrome. Once this is installed, copy and paste your written blog post into any text editing box like your email text box and Grammarly will automatically highlight the errors in red. If you want to go a little bit advanced, you may have to click on the Grammarly icon at the end of your text. It will open up a pop-up window that shows you more information about your text
You have to read through your article again and make the necessary corrections.
 
The good thing about this tool is that once installed on Google Chrome browser, it gives an auto-correction for every text you put up in a text editing box as long as you’re in Google Chrome. So you don’t have to bother about calling up Grammarly when you want to edit.
 
Another amazing feature with Grammarly is that it has a free version with awesome features. The free version is so versatile that you may never need a paid version.

Ezinearticles

Another amazing tool for Blogging is a website called Ezinearticles. I recommend this website if you run out of ideas on what to write.
Ezinearticles have numerous assortment of articles on almost anything you may want to write on. It’s a website where you get premium-free and copyright-free articles that you can use as you want. So here, you already have completely written articles waiting for you.
 
But I must caution you, even though Ezinearticles is free to use, never copy and paste to your blog! This is because most search engines perform an operation called Crawling on every article posted on the internet. The purpose of this is to discover the originality of articles and to know if there is a copy of any part of it already in existence.
 
Because this crawling operation has been performed on any article you will find on Ezinearticles, if you copy it and post it in your blog, these search engines already sees it as a plagiarised work and will mark you down immediately and if that continues repeatedly, your website may be blacklisted as notorious for plagiarism. And I tell you, that’s not a good place to be at all because your SEO score will never rise.
 
So how then do you use Ezinearticles?
 
My advice is just to get ideas on what to write. See the way the topic was structured and discussed, the sub-headings, the images and the argument. Just pick the ideas, but by no means should you copy verbatim.

Plagiarism Checker

If you use Ezinearticles or any related tool, then this tool will be very useful for you. There are quite some plagiarism checker websites out there and a handful of them are completely free like the Small SEO tool. Even Grammarly has a plagiarism checker ability but I will concentrate on Small SEO tool
 
Plagiarism checker just like the name checks for the authenticity of an article. This is because of the crawling process done on websites as discussed in Ezinearticle. If the crawling process finds out that the article you’ve posted has a copy (whether partly or wholly) elsewhere, your article will be marked down and your efforts will be in vain.
 
Those in academia can find this tool useful for checking the originality of student’s work.
 
So how does this plagiarism checker work?
 
When you paste an article in the plagiarism checker box, it performs the same crawling process done by search engines and will search the nook and crannies of the internet to see if there is any part of your article that is already in existence. The search comes out with a result of your plagiarism score which will help you judge yourself. If the score is high (usually above 15%), you should cancel the work and start afresh on restructure it. But if the work is entirely yours, there is nothing to worry about,  the score will always remain low. Take for example these reports from two source, one from ezinearticles and the other from an ingenious work.
It is obvious that the first was copied and search engine algorithm will waste no time in marking it down.
 
However, if you are fond of posting your articles on social media or any other space, you must first post it on your blog and allow it some time to propagate globally before posting it on other platforms. This is because, if that article is found any other place irrespective of the author, the system sees it as plagiarised. But social media don’t rank posts based on that system.
 
Let’s move on…

Ubersuggest

Another great tool to help you in your writing escapade is Ubersuggest. This tool performs much like Google keyword planner. It helps you see what keyword people are searching for in the area of your interest.
 
So let’s assume you write on reproductive health. There are quite some articles and aspects to write on in this topic. However, it’s not all topics that interests people. You may discover that people are searching for some specific keywords like low sperm counts, many more times than other keywords. What this suggests is that your blog post has higher chances of being seen if you write on low sperm count than on other topics. So low sperm count becomes a heavy keyword and a lot of people can even pay to boycott the process of organically ranking for the keyword. That is where search engine marketing comes to play.
 
Let me show you

Ubbersuggest does many more things than help you see keywords. It also helps you see who your competitors are and what keywords they are ranking for in their articles.

With this, you can position yourself aright to compete with them based on their keywords and quality of articles.

See an example

There are many more purpose to which Ubersuggest can be put into but this article is not on Ubersuggest, so I have to leave it here for now. You go and search out the rest for yourself, but if I get a couple of requests on that, I can put up an article on that.

Rank Math

In the Ubersuggest tool, I introduced the word “keyword” that you may not be conversant with. Keywords are words, phrases or clauses that people search for in search engines like Google.

When a person goes to Google and search for low sperm count, for example, the low sperm count is a keyword and so the Google algorithm goes into work to search for articles on the internet that have that keyword littered in it. To make it easier to be seen by the crawling algorithm, you may need to tell the system that you already have the keyword and that can only be done with an SEO tool like Rank Math.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and the process of adjusting your article to fit into the ideal article that search engine algorithms are looking for is what is called optimisation.

There are a couple of SEO tools out there, the most popular of which is Yoast SEO but I’d rather write about Rank Math. This is because I have used the 2 and I can tell you that although Rank Math is relatively new, it has more robust functions than Yoast SEO. And the good part of it is that with the free version of Rank Math, you can rank for as much as 5 keywords while you have the option of only 1 with the Yoast SEO free version.

This means that for the low sperm count example you can also rank for other keywords like low sperm count signs, low sperm count treatment, causes of low sperm count, IVF with low sperm count and many more related keywords.

The only issue with this tool is that it requires some level of technicalities to set up, but once it is set up it is very easy to use. It is usually set up by a website developer so you can contact your website developer to install that for you or better still, you can reach out to benchmark digital to help you with that.

Mailchimp

If you are concerned about making website visitors come back again or you want to inform them whenever you have a new product, then you may have to collect their email addresses. There are several ways to do that and the most popular of which is to ask them to insert their email address in exchange for something valuable when they enter your their website.

Depending on the tool you are using to collect the email, the emails will be listed at the back end of your website once they are captured and you have to export the emails to an email Marketing System from where you can send automated emails.

MailChimp is an example of that email marketing system. It organise your email contacts into audiences and gives you the option of designing the email the way you want with things like images, videos, internal links and many more, much more like a one-paged website than an email. This kind of email template is much more interactive and will increase conversion.

MailChimp also has the capability of sending automated emails to a new subscriber and grouping subscribers based on certain parameters but this will require that the opt-in form used in collecting the emails is synchronized to the MailChimp account using an API. This may be a little bit technical but again we’ve got your back at Benchmark Digital.

One reason I choose MailChimp over many other email marketing platforms is that it allows for up to 2000 emails in the free version and it has a good user interface that can make it easy for even a newbie in email marketing to use.

Google Analytics

The last of them all but certainly not the least is Google analytics. With this tool, you can monitor the activities on your website: the number of visitors you get every day, what pages or post of your website they visited, visitor’s location, what keywords brought them to your website, what device they used to get into your website, what operating system they used and so many more information.

This information will help you pattern your subsequent posts or adjust existing ones to meet the desire of your average visitor because the writing is all about them and not you!

Any website or blog without analytics is trading in the dark. You don’t know why you are not gaining traction, you don’t understand what your visitors want and so you can’t satisfy them.

Google analytics has quite a myriad of data and so may require closer observation and study to understand the data. But there is an easier way out to get this done using a plug-in called monster insight. With this tool connected to your Google analytics, it can filter the most important data to you and display it on a more concise manner on your website dashboard.

This article discusses 7 tools that will help you in your blogging escapade, so go on right away and implement the knowledge and if you have any further questions you can contact us or drop it on the comment section.