The Best Blogging Tools: Resources to Grow Your Blog

Blogging Education: The Foundation of Your Success

How to Blog For Profit Without Selling Your Soul by Ruth Soukup

How to Blog for Profit Without Selling Your Soul is older, but it has been updated, and it’s great for people who are more serious about implementing the best blogging tips. Ruth Soukup is a businesswoman who works hard, and she “keeps it real” about what it takes to successfully blog and how to stop wasting your time on unsuccessful strategies.

This book is for people willing to “put their time in” and continually pivot.

Courses: Spend Money to Make Money!

Blogging courses have been the best financial investment I have made in myself and my blog. Bloggers say this a lot, and it’s because it’s true. Good courses usually come at a price, but that price often saves you more time and money in the long run.

I personally recommend the following blogging courses, which are all foundational to your blogging knowledge:

• Perfecting Blogging: for beginner bloggers
• SEO Jumpstart: for beginners at SEO
• Perfecting Pinterest: for beginners/intermediate users of Pinterest
• Email Marketing Jumpstart: for beginners who want a more robust email strategy
• Profitable Productivity: for bloggers struggling with time management

Tech & Web Design: Best Practices Are Essential

You’ll hear many marketers tell you you can set up a blog for free, in a day, etc. This isn’t false, but it’s giving you the wrong idea. To grow and maintain your blog, you must follow many best practices, from site speed to security, legal disclosures, accessibility, a strong user experience, and beyond.

WordPress, which is free, has a learning curve but provides unlimited technical capabilities and allows you to maintain ownership of your content). Without getting too deep, the ease of other platforms does not outweigh the benefits of WordPress, including how much better it is at optimizing your content for search engines. If no one can find your content, they can’t read it.

With WordPress, you need a separate “host” — is how your blog or website makes it from their platform onto the web.

Many bloggers start with the cheapest host, but I don’t recommend that. Why? Because you get exactly what you pay for, including smaller resources dedicated to making your site function well and inferior customer service when things go wrong. (They will.)

For years I’ve worked with one of the most highly recommended hosts, BigScoots. They handled my site migration, and they respond to my support tickets in literally a minute. They also offer site speed and security features that protect your site and make it fast.

You also need a design for your blog. Kadence is arguably the most popular framework on the market because it’s fast and well-designed with many customizable options.

Beyond this, I use NerdPress for my tech support. This is a significant blogging expense, but they are life savers. They have kicked the functioning of my site up so many notches, including helping me install and manage the proper plug-ins. They handle updates to my site, and they fix things when they break. They don’t have an affiliate program, but if you tell them I sent you, they will send me a commission, which is appreciated.

Legal: It’s the Law!

For the required legal pages on my site (and any other legal documents I need in blogging, like various contracts), I use documents from the legal store of Amira (A Self Guru), a lawyer in this field.

Branding: Make It Look Pretty!

The future of blogging after AI is far more focused on branding, but you need not have a graphic design degree!

Canva

Canva is an incredible resource that allows you to create logos, printables, high-quality blogs, social media graphics, and videos quickly and easily (like these Bookstagram story templates). And their technology keeps getting better and better.

I create several templates for each social media platform, go into Canva, where my templates are stored, and quickly edit them to re-share. I also use Canva to create photo collages. I couldn’t blog without it.

Etsy

Etsy is another great place to purchase digital goods for your blog. For example, I purchased some cheap photo presets and social media templates here.

SEO: Get Your Content Found in Search Engines

SEO is “search engine optimization.” It’s the process by which you do things on and off your site to get your website to appear in search engine results.

I now use and recommend a paid tool called KeySearch, which is a lot cheaper than other paid SEO tools out there but still gives you a lot of helpful data. It’s also way more user-friendly!

Most people use KeySearch to analyze keyword volume and competitiveness. But I recommend you take time to play around with all the different features. There’s a lot more data to see, track, and analyze.

For Pinterest SEO, I use a new tool called PinClicks. It makes it quick and easy to mine Pinterest’s algorithm to craft pins (the visuals and the words on them) that are more likely to show up frequently in users’ feeds. My analytics have reached all-time highs since I started using it.

E-Mail Marketing: A Community You Own

Email marketing couldn’t be more important because it’s not subject to an algorithm. Every subscriber is yours, and you reach 100% of them 100% of the time.

I use Kit, which is an email service provider designed for bloggers. It also does a lot of really powerful things to grow your blog. Setting all these features up, like sending automated sequences of emails to new subscribers and tagging their favorite topics so I can send them personalized emails, is also something that completely changed the trajectory of my blog.

Kit also offers more ways to earn from your newsletter through ads, paid recommendations, sponsorships, subscriptions, tip jars, product sales, and more– all within the platform. So, while it costs money, I make money by using it!

Money-Making Tools: Make That Money, Honey!

Ads

The #1 way I make money blogging is by displaying ads on my website. Raptive handles all of that for me. With requirements of 100,000 page views per month to apply, it’s an exclusive network. The value it provides monetarily, professionally, and technologically is the best I’ve experienced out of the three top-tier ad networks I’ve tried.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs allow bloggers to earn money by creating referral links. If a reader clicks on a referral link and makes a purchase, the blogger gets a small commission from the retailer (at no extra cost to the reader).

Amazon Associates is a great affiliate program to start with because so many people shop on Amazon so frequently and because it provides access to so many types of products.

But you can (and should) fill in the gaps with other affiliate programs.

Skimlinks is an affiliate conglomerate. You can instantly access thousands of retailers’ affiliate programs by signing up. Further, you can easily create links with one click all around the web with one click via a Google Chrome button.

ShopMy is a new program that influencers have been loving. It provides access to smaller stores and allows you to create a digital shop, among other benefits, like obtaining unique discount codes.

Lastly, you can use referral one-off referral links. Poke around your favorite smaller sites for them. A few I promote are:

• One month free at Libro.fm (audiobooks)
• Get your first Book of the Month book for $5
• Get 60 days of Everand (ebooks and audio books) for free
• Get $10 cash when you join and make a purchase using Rakuten (formerly Ebates, a cash rebate site — a fantastic service by which I have made thousands, and a fantastic affiliate program!)

Accounting: Somebody’s Gotta Do It

I use QuickBooks to manage my books. It’s cheap and easy, and my accountant knows how to use it, too.

I hope what you take away from this digest of the best blogging tools I use is how important they are to your growth and success. You can create so many more problems and stagnation by not setting yourself up with the best blogging resources out there.

I’ve been in this for a long time and used many tools, so if there’s anything else you want a recommendation on, just ask in the comments, and I’ll be happy to provide my favorite resource, be it free or paid!