6 Free Blogging Tools That Make My Online Life Easy + Awesome

This blog post has been gathering dust in my drafts folder for, oh, always. I want to write posts for you guys that are clever, inspirational, and filled with ideas that make your online life more awesome.

I also assume that you already know about the piles of tools/apps/platforms available to you. But one person’s obvious is another person’s you just changed my life with this information, right?

And if you already know all of these? Here’s a cool cat hoodie.

6 free blogging tools I swear by

Buffer (there’s a free version)

Buffer allows you to schedule content across multiple social media platforms in one click! Even better, it shows you the analytics so you can see which of your updates was the most popular. Then you can ‘re-buffer’ your most popular content, adding it back to your queue.

Eventually you can work up to a queue of a proven content that people repeatedly like and comment on! All from within one dashboard!

Gramblr

In a perfect world, we’d all be professional-level photographers who took in-the-moment, filter-free photos for Instagram. For the rest of us, Gramblr allows you to post images from your computer, so you can pull images from blog posts or something you took with your DSLR.

Unsplash // Flickr Creative Commons // Pickle Jar

All of these are free resources for gorgeous, professional-grade images for your blog posts, social media updates, and marketing emails. If you’re using a Creative Commons image, make sure to link and credit the photographer. You can find Flickr’s best photos by sorting by ‘most interesting.’

Canva

You’ve probably heard me yammer on about the importance of optimizing your blog post images for Pinterest. Canva makes it easy with blog image templates that are already formatted for Pinterest. And their pre-made designs are gorgeous and much better than what us non-designers are throwing together!

Trello 

Are you working with clients or a VA? I bet you are and I bet you’re sick of 15-part email threads or those “just checking in” emails. Without exaggeration, Trello has completely changed my business life. It helps me stay on top of deadlines and huge multi-part projects. It helps me work with my designer and my VA without annoying them so much they want to quit.

Trello allows you to assign projects and break them into checklists … and then save those checklists so any time someone has to complete that complicated task again, you can just pull up said checklist. And you can assign deadlines! When a deadline is looming, Trello will automatically send the task-doer a reminder email, so you don’t have to!

IFTTT
This awkward acronym stands for ‘If This Then That’ and it writes ‘recipes’ for hundreds of online tasks. Like “If I post a photo to Instagram, then a tweet with the image and caption will be automatically generated” or “If someone posts a Macbook Air on the Minneapolis Craiglist for less than $700, I’ll get a text about it.”

There a jillions of helpful ‘recipes’ – recipes for photographers, streamlining social media, even news junkies.

Of course, I also use all the usual suspects – Google Docs, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Paypal. But I imagine you really do already know about those!

I’d love to hear all about the resources, tools, and apps you use for your business! Let’s make this comment thread a recourse itself!

P.S. I remembered another one! Co-schedule’s Headline Analyzer! It’s amaaaazing!