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The Best Free & Paid Blogging Tools You Should Be Using In 2023
Updated on December 2, 2023 – Written By: Shant Alexanian
By utilizing the right blogging tools, you can increase leads, establish trust with your readers, and improve search engine rankings. Various tools can help maximize your blogging efforts, including those related to planning, writing content, search engine optimization, and promotion.
In this post, we will explore tools to enhance your writing, fast-track your publishing process, and improve your search engine rankings so you can drive more traffic and leads to your blog.
Best Free & Paid Blogging Tools
To make the most of blogging, it is important to invest time and effort in finding the appropriate tools to enhance your blog. Fortunately, you do not have to search for the right tools; we have compiled them right here.
Before getting started, it is important to mention that we have focused on tools that are compatible with most website-building platforms; however, you should confirm their compatibility with your platform before downloading them.
If you’re utilizing a CMS, you’re off to a great start. The best CMS systems not only support integrations with many of these tools, but some platforms already have these functionalities integrated, so you won’t need to constantly buy and install additional apps for your technology stack.
We will go over some of the best tools that you can use for:
Blog Hosting
Blog Planning
Blog Writing
Blog Images
Blog SEO
Blog Promotion
Blog Hosting
To start, you need to choose a reliable hosting platform for your blog that offers the necessary page speed, SEO features, and security you need to create and grow a successful blog.
The Best 18 Free & Paid Blogging Tools
1. Bluehost (Paid)
Bluehost is one of the top 3 web hosting providers officially recommended by WordPress, and we recommend them for your hosting needs.
Best for
Individuals and small businesses who simply want to use WordPress, since Bluehost makes it super simple to install. Check out our in-depth Bluehost review.
2. WordPress (Free)
WordPress is a platform that’s great for creating blogs. It comes with a drag-and-drop block editor and there are more than 80,000 plugins and themes available, so you can customize your blog to look and feel exactly the way you want. Ensure that you have enough time and resources to buy, download, and maintain third-party tools and templates. Gaining a better understanding of how they work can improve the execution of a professional blog, making it more enjoyable for readers to navigate.
Best for
We highly recommend WordPress for bloggers who want to create a highly customizable blog from both the front and the back end of their website. It’s also ideal If you have the necessary time, money, and experience to handle the design and maintenance of a WordPress website, then it would be an excellent option for you. WordPress is a great CMS once you figure out how to use it for your needs.
3. Elementor (Free & Paid)
Elementor is an awesome WordPress plugin that allows you to create visually appealing pages using a drag-and-drop interface. It is a quick and easy way to build dynamic websites with a visual editor.
This WordPress plugin allows you to easily manage all aspects of your website’s design within one platform. You can use Elementor to easily edit your website and make it match your brand. You can add motion effects, use different fonts, and improve your background images.
What Can You Build With Elementor?
With Elementor, you can build and customize entire websites as well as individual landing pages. This platform can help you turn your ideas into reality by allowing you to design sales pages, promotional pages, and custom forms. Anything you can imagine; you can create using this platform.
Best for
Elementor can be used by everyone on your team, regardless of their level of technical ability. The visual editor allows you to easily drag and drop over 90+ widgets, such as buttons, dividers, star ratings, and progress bars.
WordPress developers still consider it a top-choice platform. This is because it offers script optimization, custom attributes, and rollback versions.
4. Keyword Planner (Free)
For a free and easier alternative to Ahrefs, you can use Keyword Planner. This free SEO tool can help you research keywords and plan your content strategy. Simply enter a keyword, and the tool will automatically generate the search volume for that keyword, as well as related words and phrases.
While the tool is designed specifically for ads, you can still utilize this free tool to explore new keywords related to your business and view approximate search volume estimates. Although Keyword Planner is a free tool, you need to have a Google Ads account to be able to use it.
Best for
We suggest Keyword Planner for novice bloggers and marketers who are just starting to explore the world of keyword research. It is especially a good fit if you have experience with setting up, or are planning to set up, Google Ads.
5. Google Trends (Free)
Many Bloggers often use Keyword Planner and Google Trends together, as the keywords suggested by Keyword Planner can be analyzed on Google.
The tool will provide information about how the search volume of the keyword changes over time, its performance in different regions, and related topics and search terms. You can also use this tool to develop a content plan that incorporates current seasonal trends, attract an international audience, and utilizes relevant keywords that people are searching for.
Best for
Google Trends is a useful tool for freelance bloggers, marketers, and small businesses to track the popularity of their products, services, or industry over time. This way you can plan your future online content accordingly. It’s a free and essential tool for anyone who publishes content online.
6. Google Search Console (Free)
For more insights into how SEO-friendly your blog is, you can just ask Google. With Google Search Console, you can gain insights into how search engine-optimized your site is. It provides information on click-through rates, impressions, search queries, indexed pages, HTML errors, and backlinks, giving you a clearer understanding of how your blog appears to search engines.
Like Yoast SEO, Google Search Console is a free tool that identifies problem areas and opportunities for improving your blog’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). It can be accessed with a free Google account.
Best for
Google Search Console is a must-have tool for all bloggers and marketers who want to track the performance of their website in Google and improve the rankings of their posts. Now, if you’re managing your web hosting account, then using Google Search Console will be easier for you. However, if you don’t have access to your web host’s settings, verifying ownership of your website can be challenging, and this is necessary before you can utilize Google Search Console.
Blog Images
7. Dreamstime (Free & Paid)
Since 2004, Dreamstime has been a global leader in professional royalty-free stock photos, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips. It has a vast collection of stock media files available for both commercial and free use, created by a large community of professional media creators from around the world.
The company’s collection of royalty-free media is constantly expanding and includes a wide range of subjects and themes. This ensures that they have the appropriate content to meet their customers’ stock needs, no matter what they may be.
Dreamstime offers various options for downloading images at affordable prices including free downloads, purchasing download credits, recurring subscriptions, and custom corporate plans. This makes Dreamstime a suitable choice for both small and large projects.
Best for
Bloggers who are looking for high-quality images to use in their blog posts.
8. Canva (Free & Paid)
Canva is another great tool for creating branded images and templates; it simplifies the process of creating attractive and artistic materials, and it is accessible for anyone to use for free. You can also create social media images, videos, and GIFs, as well as posters, websites, booklets, and much more.
Canva is free to use, but you can upgrade to its paid plans for more templates and advanced functionality.
Best for
Canva is particularly well-suited for big blogging teams and enterprise-level marketing teams, although it can also benefit freelance bloggers and small marketing teams. The tool’s collaborative features are its strongest aspect. It allows a blogging team to create a library of branded templates, for example. If you’re looking for stronger design and collaboration features, we suggest using this as a viable alternative to Design Wizard.
Considering that blog posts that include quality images get much more total views than those without, it is essential to know where to get quality images for your blog. Such images can make your content more engaging and memorable and enhance the overall reader experience on your site.
Blog Writing
9. Jasper.ai (Paid)
Jasper.ai is an artificial intelligence tool designed for writing; it can create marketing copy such as blog posts, product descriptions, product titles, ad copy, and social media captions.
The tool offers hundreds of templates for a variety of uses, such as writing a long blog post or writing a response to a review. This eliminates the anxiety of starting with a blank page when writing.
Best for
Jasper.ai is useful for marketers, as well as small to large businesses.
Jasper.ai Features
- Content generation
- Integration with Grammarly
- Plagiarism checker
- Auto-save
- Document editor
- Content improver
- Revision history
- Multi-user login
Jasper.ai has a cool feature worth checking out: the “Explain It to a Fifth Grader” option. As its name suggests, this feature helps you to replace words that are difficult to understand with simpler terms that can be comprehended by someone with a fifth grade reading level.
This can be especially helpful when writing about a difficult topic for an audience with limited knowledge; it helps maintain its meaning while becoming more understandable.
10. Hemingway App (Free)
We know that it takes more than a catchy headline to create a good blog post. To keep your audience engaged throughout your text, it is important to ensure that it is easy to read, from the headline to the conclusion.
The Hemingway App is a free tool that analyzes the readability of your text and highlights any sentences that are complicated to understand, allowing you to edit out too many adverbs and a voice that is too passive. The editor will also calculate a score to measure the readability of your writing in English, helping you to ensure it matches your intended reader’s vocabulary and understanding.
Best for
Best recommended for any blog writer who needs to reduce errors and redundancies in their writing. The app is best suited for shorter pieces with minimal images and basic formatting since it cannot be integrated with rich-text editors such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Despite its limitations, it is perfect for writing and editing without distractions.
11. Grammarly (Free & Paid)
In conjunction with the Hemingway App, you can use Grammarly to write interesting and grammatically correct blog posts. The Premium version of Grammarly can improve your writing by not only checking for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors but also suggesting ways to enhance your vocabulary and identify any instances of plagiarism.
You have the option to either write your blog posts from scratch or paste them into Grammarly’s editor. Furthermore, you can install Grammarly as a Google Chrome browser extension to offer suggestions as you write on Google Docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other websites.
Best For
We suggest Grammarly for bloggers and marketers who need a modern editing tool that integrates with the other writing tools you might be already utilizing. Because it works in Google Docs and on the web, it’s ideal for editing long-form content you don’t wish to copy and paste into a different grammar checker. You can also use Grammarly to check your social media copy for errors before publishing it live if you’re combining social media marketing with blogging.
12. Mailchimp (Free & Paid)
MailChimp is a marketing platform that is developed for businesses that use email marketing to reach their target audience. With Mailchimp, you can manage your mailing lists, create custom email templates, and automate your whole marketing campaigns. Businesses looking to leverage email marketing need a tool, such as Mailchimp, to run their campaigns like a well-oiled machine.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing can effectively promote organizations worldwide without straining their marketing resources. Although social media marketing has gained popularity, email is still an efficient method for promoting businesses, gaining new clients, and retaining existing ones.
Best for
Email marketing has significant potential for businesses to expand their consumer base, strengthen their brand, and increase revenue. Numerous statistics and figures support this claim, making it a viable option that should not be overlooked.
13. BuzzSumo (Paid)
BuzzSumo can help you with how best to promote your content. You can track the performance of your content so you can understand what the ideal days and times of the week are to post. BuzzSumo will also make you aware of what the ideal lengths of your posts should be.
In addition to your content, you can also use BuzzSumo to track the performance of content in specific niches. Simply enter a topic or URL into the search box and you will get back a wealth of information, including how many times it has been shared across popular social media sites. This can give you insights into which topics and types of content perform best on popular social media platforms.
Best for
BuzzSumo is best for both bloggers and marketers who don’t prefer a specific performance-tracking tool. For example, if you’re using a plugin or content management system (CMS) that measures user engagement metrics for your content, you may not even need BuzzSumo. But if you find it difficult to understand or evaluate the analytics user interface, then consider trying out BuzzSumo.
SEO tools
14. Ahrefs (Paid)
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO suite with various tools for analyzing competitors, tracking rankings, keyword research, performing site audits, and building links. Most of the features within Ahrefs are designed for marketing professionals.
In short, Ahrefs is a tool focused on helping people improve their Google rankings through SEO.
Ahrefs is mostly used to evaluate a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and overall, SEO health. In addition, Ahrefs can be utilized for conducting keyword research on various platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Amazon. Furthermore, some individuals also use Ahrefs to identify popular content related to a specific topic based on metrics like social shares and links.
Best for
SEO professionals seeking various in-depth website metrics, Ahrefs’ pricing depends on the plan that you choose. If you choose to go with either monthly or annual billing, be prepared to spend a significant amount of money as the plans are quite expensive.
15. Yoast SEO (Free & Paid)
Yoast SEO is a tool designed to improve the on-page SEO of your blog; it works similarly to the Hemingway App and Grammarly, analyzing the readability of your content and providing recommendations for improving grammar, sentence structure, reading level, and other factors.
What makes Yoast SEO different from other tools is its SEO analysis feature. The tool provides recommendations for adding keywords, optimizing meta descriptions and URLs, and including internal links.
While some platforms, such as CMS Hub, offer SEO recommendations while you write your blog, others require you to use Yoast SEO to optimize. Although Yoast SEO is mostly purchased and downloaded on WordPress websites, it can also be used on Magento, Drupal, and Neos CMS platforms.
Best for
Yoast SEO is a great alternative to the SEO tool that comes with CMS Hub and All in One SEO. It is especially helpful for you if you are using a content management system (CMS) other than CMS Hub or WordPress, as Yoast SEO is compatible with additional CMSs. Moreover, it offers detailed assistance on how to optimize your blog posts for better search engine rankings.
16. Surfer SEO (Paid)
Surfer SEO is a tool that helps you with your on-page SEO.
This tool is intended for writers, marketers, and developers who require page-by-page optimization for a website. The tool gathers information on your competition, such as:
- The keywords they target
- The links they have
- The content they write.
You can also utilize Surfer SEO to optimize blog sites, e-commerce sites, and service sites.
The tool considers 500 different ranking factors and provides useful insights on how to optimize every page of your website.
Best for
Surfer SEO is an awesome on-page tool that helps take the guesswork out of the process. The tool is user-friendly, even for beginner SEOs, and using it can improve your SEO skills. Furthermore, it can help you rank higher and more frequently.
17. GTmetrix (Free & Paid)
Let’s say your data shows that there is a problem with how quickly your page loads; you can use a free tool like GTmetrix. This will help you see how fast your blog works on both desktop and mobile. GTmetrix is easy to use; just type in your website URL and it will give you a score regarding how fast your website is. Additionally, it will tell you what to do to make it faster.
Best for
GTmetrix is best for both bloggers and marketers who do not have a preferred performance-tracking tool. If you are already using something like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to evaluate your website’s performance, GTmetrix may not be necessary. Nonetheless, it serves as an excellent starting point for individuals with minimal experience in monitoring their website’s performance.
18. Pretty Links (Free & Paid)
Pretty Links makes your affiliate links look cleaner and tracks clicks. It also helps you share those links in and outside of WordPress. Create links that look the way you want, using your own domain name.
Pretty Links lets you make a shorter link using your own website name instead of tinyurl.com or any other link-shortening service. Not only does it create clean links, but Pretty Links also tracks every click on your URL and generates a detailed report on the source of the click, including the browser, operating system, and host.
Best for
Bloggers and marketers who are looking to clean up their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, or track clicks from their own domain.
Start Growing Your Blog Today
Utilize the tools mentioned above to create beautiful image-rich blog posts, enhance your on-page SEO, analyze your site’s performance, and promote your blog on social media. These measures can aid in boosting the traffic of your website. Ensure that you are utilizing a CMS platform that integrates with these tools and includes pre-built SEO functionality. Investing in blogging in this way can boost your ROI and have a positive, lasting impact on your company.
FAQs About Best Blogging Tools
How do I start blogging?
Here are some tips to help you get started with blogging.
1. Choose a blogging platform
2. Choose a topic that you are passionate about.
3. Be consistent with your posts.
4. Schedule time each week to write and publish new content.
5. Promote your blog through social media and other online channels.
We have a great post on how to start a blog.
What is the best site for blogging?
The best sites for blogging are as follows:
- WordPress
- Blogger
- Tumblr
What tools do I need as a Blogger?
As a blogger, you’ll need several tools, with the most crucial one being a blogging publishing platform such as WordPress. You will need tools like Grammarly, Canva, and Yoast SEO to help you create content and promote.
What is a blogging tool?
Blogging tools are designed to assist you in writing, organizing, and optimizing your content effectively. There are various types of blogging tools available that make the blogging process smooth.
How do I find content as a blogger?
Bloggers use various blogging tools or conduct research independently to find content. They tend to write about popular and trending topics.
How do I choose keywords for my blog?
You can use different tools to find words that you can use. Determine the content and narrow down the topic on which you want to write. Produce and optimize your content.
What tools are required for blogging?
1. Bluehost
2.WordPress
3. Elementor
4. Keyword Planner
5. Google Trends
6. Google Search Console
7. Dreamstime
8. Canva
9. Jasper
10. The Hemingway App
11. Grammarly
12. Mailchimp
13.BuzzSumo
14. Ahrefs
15. Yoast SEO
16. Surfer SEO
17.GTmetrix
18. Pretty Links