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Are you a full time blogger in need for some tricks and growth hacks to simplify your work and to decrease those long working hours? We made a list with 10 tools and services every blogger should use. In a nutshell, don’t use WordPress without these 10 tools, if you want to be a successful blogger.

  1. HEADLINES

  • Brought by King Sumo, Headlines is a perfect WordPress (and not only) tool, that can create headlines everybody will want to click
  • Notorious blogs like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed already use this plugin, which automatically optimizes the headlines
  • Headlines automatically rotates through all the titles you added for a post, prioritizing the one that drives more inbound traffic
  • It learns over time which headlines perform better for your writing style and readers
  • It optimizes old posts to take advantage of shifts in organic search traffic (and long tail)
  • Complete SEO friendly, Headlines adds a short parameter (or querystring) to your URLs for tracking
  • As a bonus for readability purposes, you can try HEMINGWAY APP –  a tool that will enhance your style and retain users longer periods on your page. This is a standalone app, not a WordPress plugin, but it will do wonders with your WordPress website. Available for both Mac and PC, Hemingway app will highlight too long or complex sentences, it will let you know if you use too many adverbs, will change your passive sentence into active ones, any many other tips&tricks to ensure that your readers will enjoy and share your content

HEADLINES

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  1. BUZZSUMO

  • One of the most useful WordPress tools out there, Buzzsumo helps you to find the most shared content and key influencers, perfect for content marketing strategies and SEO campaigns.
  • Powerful Content Insights – You can discover the most shared content across all social networks and run detailed analysis reports
  • Influencer Amplification – It helps you to find influencers in any topic area, review the content they share and amplify.
  • Content Alerts – Take the advantage to be the first to see content mentioning your keyword; or when an author or competitor publishes new content.
  • Competitor Analysis – Make sure you will always track your  competitor’s content performance and do detailed comparisons.

BUZZSUMO

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  1. DIGG DIGG

  • We made an extensive overview of social sharing options in a previous article: Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress in 2015. However, our top preference will remain Dig Dig plugin, a floating all-in-one sharing plugin
  • Owned by Buffer, this plugin is a valuable WordPress tool with multiple design options (you can add the floating bar at the beginning pf the post, at the end, or in the right side, with a hover option)
  • Dig Dig shares your content via any social media channel your want (Twitter, Buffer, Facebook Share, Facebook Like, Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, dZone, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Sphinn, Designbump, WebBlend, BlogEngage, Serpd, Pinterest, Pocket and Tumblr)

Dig Dig

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  1. QUICK SPROUT

  • This tool is completely free and helps you with your content marketing
  • Enter your URL or your competitor’s URL and then check the reports provided by the Website Analyzer
  • Use the Social Media Lab, if you want to see all the pages on any given domain and sorted by social shares. With this option you can see what posts are popular in your competitor’s portfolio
  • Competitor Analysis will provide you with insight about your competitor’s content and suggestions for the content you might need to produce on your website

quick sprout

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  1. ATOMIC REACH

  • This plugin grades your content as you create it, giving you additional tips for improvement
  • The first step before using this WordPress tool is to connect it with your Google Analytics account, so you can facilitate the analyse of your website. Afterwards, Atomic Reach analyses the content and scores it, and gives suggestions to improve it
  • In addition, it helps with grammatical errors, giving suggestion if the content is for novice or pro audience, if the title is good enough, if there are enough emotional triggers included in your article, etc.
  • In a nutshell, Atomic Reach is a powerful WordPress tool combining 3 factors: Quality Content, Engagement and Return on Investment

ATOMIC APP

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  1. YOAST SEO

  • While there are billions of SEO plugins out there,  Yoast SEO seems to be the most straight-forward WordPress tool , even for non-experts in SEO domain
  • Free and intuitive, this plugin is easy to install and to use, containing all the options you need for a premium Search Engine Optimization
  • Yoast provides you with a full range of features such as page optimization, actionable tips for improvement, meta tags adjustment in order to create a XML sitemap, any many other


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  1. SUMOME

  • Email is the main way towards success, by building your blog’s audience and establishing a strong readership. If your content is amazing and tempting to be shares, your readers will gladly subscribe to your blog or follow your work. The best method (even if sometimes it looks needy) is through a pop-up that asks for email subscription, by providing content update. SUMOME/MAGNET is a perfect plugin for content upgrade, “list builder” and pop-up creation.
  • Easy to install, this plugin has a Scroll Box (a polite way to get more sign-ups), Content Analytics (to figure out if people are actually reading your articles), Image Sharer (get more shares from all the images on your site), Smart Bar (gets you more email subscribers), Highlighter (increases your content sharing significantly), Contact Form (makes it easy for your customers to talk with you), Leads (you can offer free incentives to increase your daily e-mail signups)
  • Besides Sumome, you can try a lot more e-mail solutions for your Website, such as: BOUNCE EXCHANGE and OPTINMONSTER (perfect for your own opt-ins).After you have an e-mail list for your website or blog, you can interact with your subscribers through a service provider like GETRESPONSE, MAILCHIMP or AWEBER. To a more advanced level, you can use MAROPOST, for an upgraded digital marketing experience and a higher e-mail deliverability.

sumome

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  1. OPEN SITE EXPLORER

  • This tool is provided by MOZ, and can help you to create a campaign to track your site’s link profile over time, against competitors
  • In addition, you can discover new link opportunities, see where you are mentioned on the web (with or without a link), using Fresh Web Explorer
  • This WordPress tool is useful because it sorts all the URLs within a domain by backlinks (more backlinks means more search traffic). Monitoring your articles/blog posts with more backlinks will help you improve your content strategy
  • Open Site Explorer helps you to see the most back linked posts of your competitors, analyzing what works for them  and how can you improve your strategy using this information

open site explorer

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  1. W3 TOTAL CACHE

  • The faster your WordPress blog or website loads, the more traffic it receives – it’s a fact. Your loading time can be improved in few ways: by choosing a good host (such as WP ENGINE or RACKSPACE), by setting up a CDN (a content delivery network or content distribution network – a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centres across the Internet. Both solutions mentioned above allow you to enable the CDN feature.
  • The most important way to ensure your loading time is as fast as possible is website optimization. W3 TOTAL CACHE can optimize the code of your WordPress website within few clicks
  • As this is a free plugin, it can be installed directly from your site. From the admin dashboard of your WordPress site, simply go to Plugins > Add New and then search for ‘W3 Total Cache’ and it should be the first plugin in the search results. All you have to do is to follow the instructions from this video


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  1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS/SIMPLY MEASURED/CRAZY EGG

  • Google Analytics is a good tool for constantly monitoring your data and improving your strategy, but is not really increasing your traffic per se, unless you are checking some specific reports, such as: SEO reports (connect your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account and track your rankings, the number of impressions your listings are getting and your CTR); Queries (all of the keywords you rank for, the number of impressions you are receiving, the number of clicks you are getting, your average ranking position and your CTR); Landing pages (which of your pages are ranking well, the number of impressions they are receiving, the number of clicks they are getting, their average ranking position and their average CTR); Geographical summary (which countries your search engine traffic is coming from)
  • Simply Measured – Social Media Analytics Designed for Serious Marketers has a lot of tools for your WordPress. You can find out which are the best times for you to send a tweet or share a post on Facebook. The reports will break down the data for you in several chunks: the words and phrases your users want to see in social media posts; the time of day they use these social media platforms; the top users that follow you and the times when they log in
  • Crazy Egg can give you insights about the people who read your blog, how many of them finish an article completely. This tools shows you where people are clicking… and where they aren’t, how many people scroll down your pages (and where most people stop), or r where those people are coming from to begin with, and who clicks on what the most – all of this data giving you a powerful tool for your future content strategy.


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Conclusion – Blogging started as a passion, but nowadays is a full time job and a steady income source for billions of bloggers out there. Therefore, the need of creating quality content is absolutely necessary, but achievable, with so many (free) tools available that can help your generate ideas and satisfy the needs of your readership. Try at least 5 from the one we recommended you and tell us your experience in a comment below. Happy blogging!

 

Yael is a WordPress savvy; she loves to explore themes, plugins and even develops some of her own. She lives, breathes and eats code for breakfast. Yael tends to test every piece of WP code that she can put her hands on and then, write about it :-)

amit

3 Comments

  • Reply
    February 27, 2015

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  • Reply
    February 28, 2015

    This is an epic list! To this day, any site with “Sumo” in it has been an incredible addition to my blog. SumoMe is my number 1 recommendation to get things started with a new website, along with GA.

    As I get better and better at SEO, that may change, but until then my traffic is social and email, which SumoMe does very well with alone.

    Thanks for sharing!
    -Gabe Johansson

    • Reply
      Chihiro
      March 2, 2015

      You welcome, Gabe! Indeed, Google Analytics and SumoMe are some must haves of the modern blogging. We are glad we could share some useful info. Follow us on our Facebook page for many more articles and WordPress news: https://www.facebook.com/wpcrash?ref=hl

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