As a blogger, I have to find ways to create content on a regular basis. Sometimes it feels as if I am in a creative rut and I need a little help, writes Amanda Patterson. I have found that these seven blogging tools have saved my sanity on several occasions.
1. Portent Title Maker. When I need to find a unique title for a blog, this is perfect. For example, I typed in emails and the prompter gave me these suggestions:
- Why Emails Are Sexy
- Darth Vader’s Guide to Emails
- What Experts Are Saying About Emails
2. HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator. When I need to kick-start my creativity, I use the Blog Topic Generator to come up with customised topics. I have to type in a keyword and the tool generates engaging titles. For example, I entered a few keywords (writing, emails, business) and these are the ideas it generated for me:
- 5 Tools Everyone In The Writing Industry Should Be Using
- What Will Emails Be Like In 100 Years?
- The Ultimate Cheat Sheet On Business
- 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Writing
- Why We Love Emails (And You Should, Too!)
3. Ubersuggest. UberSuggest is a free keyword suggestion tool that makes use of Google Suggest. Type a term into the search box, choose a language and a source and this tool will provide suggestions for it. You will get thousands of keyword ideas from real people who are using these keywords in search engines. If you are organised, you can generate ideas for blog posts in advance and put your ideas in a blogging calendar. For example, ‘How to write a book’ generated 361 suggestions.
4. Canva. If you want to create customised professional images for your blog and social media posts, you should try this tool. There are thousands of stock images to choose from, and you can add different elements (such as text, banners and buttons) to create customised images. I created this blog post title image with Canva.
5. Buzzsumo. If I want to find out which content is being shared the most on any website, this tool lets me find it. You can use this to generate more of the same type of content in the future. For example, these two posts have been popular on writerswrite.co.za in the last few months. The first post has generated more than 60 000 shares and the second post more than 11 000 shares. The statistics show you where the posts have been shared. (Note: The posts have been shared more over a longer time period.)
6. Pixabay. If you need free images for your blogs, Pixabay has over 460,000 free photos, vectors and art illustrations.
7. Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that allows you to share free media content, from songs and videos to scientific and academic material.
I hope these tools help you to generate content for your blog posts.
Amanda Patterson is the founder of Writers Write. If you want to learn how to write for social media, e-mail news@writerswrite.co.za for more information.
