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Growing your blog is one of the most important aspects of blogging. In fact it is the very first and most important thing you should think about if you ever have the intention of starting a blog or a content creation website, be it that you’ll be talking about food, cosmetics fashion, sports, technology, education, or anything at all, the worst situation you wouldn’t want to find yourself in is the situation whereby it is only you the blog’s author that gets the information that is pushed out of your blog.
Using this article, we intend to give you important life saving lessons about blogging on a wide scale from our own angle, and gift you a list of the best online utility tools available on the internet that you must have as a blogger and content creator, in order to manage, develop, grow your blog, boost your traffic, and become successful.
See also: WordPress vs Blogger: Which one is better?
Utility tools
Utility tools are programs that can add functionality to your blog and help your blog grow and function better in many different ways. They include programs such as data backup services, malware protection, social media connectivities, blog repair and maintenance services, etc. There is no blog that can survive without utility tools. They simply exist to make blogging easier, better, and more interesting.
Although all utility tools can be important in their own ways, we seek to bring you some of the most important utility tools that we think that you should have for the proper functioning of your blog.
Check them out below.
Top Utility Tools for every blogger
WordPress
The first tool any ambitious blogger must have is WordPress, particularly the self-hosted variant of the blogging platform.
WordPress is a versatile content creator and manager. It is by far the best option for blogging compared to other alternatives like blogger, wix, squarespace, weebly, etc. It is very power, customizable, and optimizable.
Starting your blogging career with WordPress blogging platform can prove to be a stepping stone for your business as you won’t have to worry about a lot of things when you have a lot of amazing features that WordPress offers.
Sucuri
The reason for naming Sucuri as the next tool on our list is born out of the necessity for adding valued protection to your blog and it’s content. If you don’t provide security for your blog, especially if you’re self-hosting, you could lose all your data and eventually your blog to external cyber threats.
Sucuri provides your blog with security against hack or attacks by malware. It offers real-time alerts for suspicious activities on your website, prevents, detects and remove malware as well.
VaultPress
Making backups for your blog and it’s content is highly advisable, especially if you’re going to be operating a self-hosted website like wordpress.org. VaultPress is a subscription based service with a list of different plans and different pricing depending on what you need for your blog. It offers automatic real-time cloud backup solution for your data and all the content of your blog, with the option to restore at anytime with just one click.
Google Drive
Surely, as a blogger, you will have many documents, media, drafts and files around your computer or any other work device. You can keep all your media, documents and content together safely with this wonderful tool. Easy to use, no subscription required. You only need a Google profile with which you will be able to recover your saved documents whenever you need them.
Polldaddy
Polldaddy is a plugin offered for free by WordPress. It allows you to easily create and embed polls to your posts and enables you to add surveys, polls and quizzes on your WordPress site. This enables communication and participation among your audience, and gives your blog that professional interface that your audience want to see.
Grammarly
If you’re going to be blogging more of words than images, you might need this software for your blog.
As a blogger, one of the worst scenarios you would always want to avoid is the issue of grammatical blunders, which is why we have included Grammarly as a very important utility tool that you should have if you’re going to be blogging for anything serious. If there are spelling errors or inappropriate punctuation and inadequate spacing in your work, it won’t sit well with a lot of visitors on your blog who will start to avoid your blog because of its low quality in terms of language. Grammatical mistakes are embarrassing and will hinder the impact of your content on readers. Grammarly crosschecks your work to make sure that the spellings in your work are correct, and also helps you ensure proper grammar, all automatically.
Canva
Canva helps you to create amazing designs for your website. It allows you edit images, create posters, and add professional looking graphics to your website. It is user-friendly and simple to use by everyone including starters.
Sumo
Sumo is definitely one of our favorite blogging tools and we think you should have it. It allows you to add social media sharing buttons with which you can share contents on your blog directly to social media, and also provides email capture forms and some other analytics to your blog.
Sumo is a very important tool for bloggers, especially for beginners seeking to pull traffic to their website through different social media platforms. You really have to check it out.
Google Trends
Google trend has to be one of the hottest tools out there. It shows you the topics trending in the moment, and maybe gives you a clue on what to blog about.
InfiniteWp
If you own or manage more than one WordPress site, then this is a very important tool for you. It allows you to manage and maintain multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard. Talk about ease of work!
Blog Topic Calculator
This tool gives you ideas of posts to make when you enter your necessary keywords. Really useful if you’re the lazy kind of blogger.
Camtasia
This tool offers recording for your desktop. It is essential if you’ll be interested in making PC screen recorded videos of guides, walk-throughs, and how-to’s which you need to give your audience a practical demonstration.
Google Webmasters Tools
This tool allows you to check how Google sees your website. It shows you the most frequently used queries where your site appears. Quite useful for record keeping and progress management we must say.
Google Analytics
The curtain dropper for this topic has to be this tool.
If you’re blogging for business, you have to do everything you can in order to make sure your efforts do not end in vain. You have to be dedicated and make sure your content is not seen and know by you alone, you have to be successful. The key to successful blogging is knowing and understanding your audience. We have included Google Analytics among the top utility tools every blogger must have because it provides you with all the details and statistics you need to understand your audience and fellowship. Google Analytics gives you the details concerning your site, the number of guests and the location (country) they accessed your website from. Having this information has proven to be a motivational drive for bloggers to work harder knowing there are people from many corners of the world that are interested in their online activities.
Advert networks
It is every Blogger’s dream to make some money for their efforts in blogging, and that can only be achieved through blog monetization.
There are many ways to monetize your blog, be it through selling of products and offering of services, or running advert services for revenue.
For starters, we advice that you build up your blog as standard as possible and connect with any of the available advert networks so that you can be able to make some money from your work. We suggest you try out any of the following advert networks, but bear in mind that each of them have their different requirements and earning rates, so select the one to work with according to your needs.
Live Chat
While we agree that this is not a fundamental for you to have, we cannot say that the addition of this feature to blogs is not a show winner.
Having live chat function on your website can help you get involved with your readers and foster a better understanding between you and your guests. They can chat you up with enquiries through the live chat button on your blog and you can ask for their suggestions and how they feel about your blog, an article, or any other topics. This can help build up an online relationship for you, and help to keep your visitors glued to your blog, and also score more audience for you.
There are a few good tools that we can suggest for a live chat feature for your blog, each of them slightly different, so you should try them out and go with any of them that suit your needs and serves you well.
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What utility tool do you use on your blog? This list will never be complete without your contributions. Let us know by leaving a comment in the comments section below.
