This is a comprehensive list of Tools and services that I use to create and maintain a blogging site. Are you looking to start a blogging website or looking for the tools required to improve your user experience or to improve SEO score? You have come to the right place. Keep reading to better understand why I suggest the following products and how they will help you become a better blogger.
I started my career by developing an e-commerce business for Mangalore where I learned how to develop a website, how to host it in a server how to improve a website’s Search engine visibility etc. Then I moved to Bangalore and joined a Startup that mainly dealt with B2B e-commerce. There I handled multiple software projects which ranged from multiple small sites to an education management system.
Now I am working as a Software Engineer at Newscorp’s Bangalore office. I developed the hosting platform for some of the News UK’s top websites including news.co.uk, the-tls.co.uk, driving.co.uk, etc. It’s been almost 7 years now I am working in this industry. Through this journey, I learned a lot about the software industry which includes website development, digital marketing, branding, SEO marketing affiliate marketing, etc. You can read more about Karthik Bhat here.
Is this the best blogging tools list?
In this post, I want to put together all the best tools and services I have used and am using in multiple projects, which immensely helps in boosting the productivity as well as generate handsome revenue. I will mainly concentrate on the tools which are useful for bloggers and content writers. For enterprise-level tools, I will write another blog which might not be suitable for small and medium level businesses. I will constantly update this post to include all the tools you will ever need to host a successful blogging website.
Let us start with the steps involved in blogging.
- Finding the niche
- Finding a suitable domain name.
- Registering a domain name.
- Buying a hosting Service.
- Blogging software.
- Writing Content
- Optimizing Content
- Optimizing Website
- Monetization
Finding the Niche
This is probably one of the most overlooked subjects by beginners. Your blog topic can be the single most important part of your blog! But if you want your readers to take you seriously you need to have a deep understanding of the topic of what you are writing about. So finding a niche which you have good knowledge of is very, very important. At the same time, you also need to make sure that the niche is not highly competitive. This, in turn, helps your blog to rank better in organic search results. Let us start with our first tool in this post.
Google Trends: This is one of the free tools you can utilize for finding the niche for your blog. Go to Google Trends, search for the niche keyword, see how the trend is. Check for the Interest over time for different time frames to get a brief idea about the number of searches in Google. You can also enter multiple keywords and compare the search interests. If the interest for the keyword is high, you can consider that topic to be the niche for your blog. However, do this for multiple words related to your topic and make sure that people search for those terms.
Once you find a niche, make sure that it matches with your interest and expertise. Ask these questions to yourself: Will I be interested to write posts on these topics after one year or after writing 20 to 30 posts? If the answer is yes, you are good to go. Else you need to do this again and again until you find the best topic.
Keyword Research
The next step is to do some keyword research.
Ubersuggest: This free tool is by Neil Patel and is very simple and intuitive to use. Type some keywords related to the niche and search for the Volume, Cost per click, Search Engine difficulty, etc. If you find most of the keywords you type results in high competition or less value, you will find it difficult to attract a good number of visitors to your blog, at least in the beginning.
You can also use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc to find what is trending.
Domain name search tools
I will not waste your time here. Straight to the point.
Instantdomainsearch This is one of the best domain name search tools out there. You start typing, the tool tells you whether that domain name is available or not. Find something green and come back here!!
Registering a domain name
There is a lot of competition between the domain name registrars. So its always tough to suggest a single name here. Godaddy, Namecheap, name.com, Hostgator. There are so many. In my personal experience was always good with Godaddy and NameCheap. I registered some domains with some other registrar earlier and had problems with DNS settings. So I always prefer a trusted registrar like Godaddy.
Buying a hosting Service
It is always easier to buy a domain name and hosting service from a single provider. Hence you can buy hosting from them too. However, there is a better alternative.
Siteground ‘s best plan is their “GrowBig” plan which includes Unlimited domains, Free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, SSD, OpCache, CDN, Free daily Backups, SSH and many more essential features. Again, do your research before finding the best “shared hosting” provider, but Siteground never let me down with their value for money proposition.
If you are looking for an extremely low budget Hosting provider, in the beginning, you can also consider using Hostinger. Their hosting plans are very competitively priced and servers are decent too.
However, in the long run, you should consider switching to better providers. But who knows how their service will be after one or two years. You may still end up sticking with them!
If you are already in the business and receiving a lot of traffic, you might not be okay with shared hosting. Then look no further than AWS.
Blogging software tools
As this post is mainly focusing on blogging, I will not suggest any other tool than WordPress. It is not just the WordPress core that makes it one of the best blogging software, but it is the WordPress ecosystem. It is the number of plugins and themes available for WordPress. The WordPress hook system also can extend core functionality. It is no brainer at the time of writing of this post, WordPress hosts 34% of the total websites on the entire internet.
Content Writing Tools
Hmm… Do you think of anything other than your brain for this point? If no, you might be wrong. Isn’t it always better to write content in the most efficient way possible? There is one pro tip I want to give you here, which even professionals do not consider using. Google docs with voice typing. This considerably reduces the time required to write your content. Trust me. Once you finish writing content, just copy from the docs and paste it in the WordPress editor. It’s smart enough to paste the post content in the correct format.
Optimizing Content
RankMath SEO: I know many articles on the internet straightaway suggest to use Yoast SEO. But trust me I have used both Yoast and RankMath. They have so many features which you will love. Also, check out the detailed comparison of RankMath and Yoast
Yoast SEO: Does that mean Yoast SEO is not good? Definitely not. They are very good too. Yoast I think is the only WordPress plugin with more than 5 million installations.
Optimizing Website
Lighthouse Tool: Search engines nowadays give more importance to mobile users. In fact, that is a good thing because the number of mobile users surfing the web is always increasing. Hence, having a website which response fast to user requests, loads in the least time possible, Does not load unnecessary scripts, etc are important. One of the free tools you can utilize is the Lighthouse by Google. This also enables you to test your local development environment via Chrome’s inbuilt lighthouse feature.
Jetpack: Automattic is the company behind WordPress which also developed Jetpack. A very good plugin you can install to increase site performance via their image CDN, blocking brute force attacks, analytics, etc.
Autoptimize is another plugin to optimize the assets loaded by your website. This includes CSS and JS concatenation, assets compression, etc.
You can utilize the WP Super Cache plugin to cache your content on the server. This helps to reduce a lot of load from your server by serving already generated HTML content.
If you are a beginner and want to use a CDN service for free Cloudflare CDN is one of the best services out there. They provide a host of features that will help your website to be a better website than your competitors in so many ways. Their feature list includes a Free SSL certificate for encryption, DDoS protection, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, Analytics, Browser Caching, Always Online, CNAME Flattening, Firewall, Workers, AMP Real URL, Mobile Redirect and so much more.
Monetization
Google Adsense: If you have a lot of visitors then Google AdSense is a good option. Google reviews your application and approves it based on the value of the website. Once you have good traffic and quality content, you should definitely try this method.
Affiliate Network: This is usually a bit easier than Adsense to start with if you are considering affiliate marketing via Globally trusted partners. Most of these services also review your application but easily approved. You should try this method if you are a beginner and has relevant content to direct users to affiliate links. Affiliate links will yield you much better earning than other advertisement methods. Rakuten’s Linkshare provides you the ability to get affiliated with multiple advertisers. One more good agency is Commission Junction.
WooCommerce: Are you also planning to sell any products on your website apart from blogging? WooCommerce plugin is the most used e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Again this plugin is maintained by Automattic. So you have will have continued features addition and support from the community.
Tutorials
Do you want to learn more about digital marketing or Website development or even Search Engine Optimization? Udemy has a bunch of courses that completely cover these subjects. I would suggest you search and learn more about any topic via Youtube first.
But if quality content is lacking, Udemy is one of the best places you find some good quality learning materials. Give it a try!
Now it’s your turn to let me know what tools do you use for your blog? Are there better alternatives to the tools I listed here? Please let me know in the comment. I am always happy to update this post to make sure that this post is up to date and these are some of the best tools anybody can find.
1 comment
I think you can also add Bluehost to the hosting list