New posts generally mean new feedback gathered from your audience. You want to make sure that each post is going to better build your list and improve your blog’s value. You can do that by having a solid strategy for finding the best tools for writing blog posts. The following list provides a diverse range of tools you can use to tailor a blog to a wide variety of needs, including:
1. Sendible
Is Sendible the right social media management software for your business? Maybe so.
Taking social media marketing seriously can increase your bottom line.
In fact, if you want to reap the rewards of blogging, then you’ve got to pay attention to your social media activity. Whether you want to drive organic or referral traffic, having a social media strategy can make the difference.
According to Regalix, 76% of marketers use social media to support and improve their search engine optimization efforts. What’s more, 92% of CMOs are starting to look beyond sales goals and web metrics to identify the value of social marketing efforts.
Your social media marketing efforts can yield substantial results if you use the right tools to navigate the social media channel matrix.
With so many tools around, it’s extremely difficult to pick the right one. The question you should ask is, “which social media tool will help me achieve my business objective?”
For example, if your objective is to attract qualified leads, look only at tools that have features for lead acquisition.
That said, Sendible may just be the right social media management software for your business.
If you want to manage your social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences and measure ROI from one, easy-to-use dashboard, you should seriously consider using Sendible.
Sendible does everything Hootsuite and Sprout Social do, plus a handful of things Hootsuite hasn’t added to its software yet.
With Sendible, you can have multiple accounts and multiple services per account as well.
The interface for Facebook scheduling – posts, notes, photo albums, group messages and personal messages – is just amazing. You can also post on any of your friend’s personal social network walls with the click of a button.
And that’s just for Facebook. Sendible also integrates with Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and more.
With Sendible, you can scale your social media activities and schedule only the messages that’ll help your audience.
This social media solution allows a large number of integrations with the latest social media networks. It has in-depth reporting and analytics, too.
It does cost a bit more than the least expensive paid versions of Hootsuite and Buffer, but it offers so much more that it’s a reasonable investment for your business to get blog content pushed out effectively.
2. Google Docs
It’s no longer a one-horse race for productivity on PCs and mobile devices. There’s a huge list of blog content writing tools that bloggers can use.
One of these tools is Google Docs. A study by White Stratus shows that almost 20% of companies use Google Apps.
Google Docs is one of the most popular apps in the suite. And, contrary to common misperceptions, it’s not just for startups and non-enterprise organizations.
A White Stratus study found that larger companies with over 10,000 users have successfully deployed Google Apps and found its rich features quite useful.
Furthermore, 31.2% of companies with over 10,000 staff members had deployed all or some Google Apps, compared to 18.5% of small organizations.
Google’s suite of Docs, Sheets and Slides allows you to create and edit documents online, for free.
These rich capabilities in Google Docs are why its use is on the rise. Google has done a great job of rapidly building out their features, in order to gain market share in enterprise and education.
Here are the pros and cons of using Google Docs over Microsoft Word:
Pros:
- You can collaborate with your team or contractors easily.
- It’s easy to store your documents on the cloud and access them from another computer anywhere in the world.
- You can easily create and export documents as PDFs.
- You don’t have to install software on your computer.
Cons:
- Google docs currently has limited document support.
Writing can be difficult if you don’t have the right tool. Google Docs is one of the best word processing tools and it’s 100% free.
Once you have a Google ID and an internet connection you can use Google Docs to create articles for your blog.
Google Docs has a user-friendly interface. When you login to your account, you’ll notice that your documents are well organized. All you have to do is click on a document template to start a new document and you’re on your way to new blog content.
With Google Docs, you can organize and present information in a better way, thus making your articles richer while still maintaining proper formatting and increasing your article’s perceived value.
There are a lot of limitations to using Microsoft Word. If you’re working with a team, you’ll have to continually email document attachments back and forth. And, if you’re creating a lot of content, that can wreck your productivity.
The Recruiter ditched Microsoft Office in favor of Google Docs. As a result of that shift, collaboration became easier and they were able to get more done in less time.
No matter what industry you’re in, you can use Google docs to manage your digital projects, and save a lot of time when writing blog posts. In fact, when creating articles in Google docs, you can conduct a quick search for data right in the workspace.
Here’s how to do it:
Go to the Tools menu and click on the “Research” tab. A dialogue search box will appear on the right sidebar. There, you can search for anything, including Scholar, Quotes, Images, Personal, Dictionary and more.
Let’s assume that you want to add an image or chart related to “blogging statistics.” All you have to do is type your keyword into the search box. Then, automatically, you’ll get results.
You can simply add any of those infographics/visuals into your article (of course, you’ll want to make sure you have permission from the copyright holder first).
3. Fyrebox
Fyrebox is a free tool that that lets you make your own quiz in minutes. Imagine how long it would take to design an interface and write code for your quiz manually.
A well-designed quiz that’s relevant to your target audience can exponentially increase your conversions and grow your product sales.
For example, Zenni Optical, a brand that sells fashionable eyewear online, created a quiz entitled “You’ve Been Framed.” Within 6 months, they generated over $1 million in revenue, 29,410 qualified leads, and got a 9,665% ROI.
Quizzes are an example of the kind of interactive content that your target audience wants and needs.
A typical WordPress blog hasn’t integrated this type of social network engagement opportunities.
Most content that we create regularly — blog posts, white papers, webinars, reports, infographics, podcasts, etc. — is designed to be passively consumed by our audiences. People can read, listen, download and comment or even share the content. But, there are only limited ways to bring them into the conversation.
That kind of content doesn’t ask for input, opinions or suggestions, let alone react to the reader in real time.
According to SnapApp, B2B marketers who’ve added interactive content to their marketing mix have significantly improved prospect engagement, achieving 35% click rates on their content, 80+% content completion rates, and 45% lead form conversions.
Interactive content – quizzes, calculators, configurators, assessment tools, games, contests and workbooks – connects with the user and makes them an actively involved participant instead of a passive consumer.
Creating a variety of content is one of the challenges that content marketers face.
As a blogger, you’ve got to recognize that your readers need a variety of content. You can’t expect to build a strong level of engagement when all you do is write generic blog posts.
Creating a variety of blog content is the only way to rid your blog of boring topics, content and data. So, every now and then, create interactive content to engage your readers and let them participate.
Creating a quiz is super easy with Fyrebox. Just follow these simple steps:
Step #1: On the Fyrebox homepage, click the “CREATE A QUIZ FOR FREE” button:
Step #2: Create a free account by filling in your personal information. Then, click the “CREATE ACCOUNT.”
Step #3: Choose your quiz template. Click the “template” placeholder to begin:
Step #4: Choose a pre-made quiz. Top brands such as Shopify, Leadpages and other educational sites have already made professional quizzes that you can start with and then tweak.
So, let’s go ahead and choose Leadpages:
Step #5: Select your preference. If you want users to know when they answered a question correctly, you can set that up, too.
Step #6: Edit your questions and answers. Remember that we’re using a template, so these questions won’t be relevant to your audience. But you can edit them in this step and provide the right answer.
Next, you can define the pass mark for your quiz. Just slide the bar below to set it. Currently, the pass mark is 75%.
Finally, decide what the interface should look like for a successful result. Click “YES” to collect player’s details, such as email address and name.
Also set the screen for an unsuccessful quiz. You don’t have to collect a user’s email address or name in this case – but perhaps you’ll want to encourage them to try the quiz one more time.
That’s pretty much all there is to Fyrebox. The quiz maker contains a lot of other great features that enable you to set a time limit, customize the look and feel of your quiz and even use your own custom background image.
Blast it out to every social media channel you have access to.
A lot of brands and startups use quizzes to generate qualified leads, grow their social presence and increase revenue.
For example, Forbes launched a quiz called “Which College Is Right For You?”
A week later, the quiz had generated 75,000 views and over 1,000 social shares.
Forbes used the quiz to promote the Forbes College Adviser, a proprietary tool to assist students in making the right college choice.
When you want to create quizzes to engage your social media fans, build strong rapport with your blog readers and give potential clients a taste of your expertise, you should consider using Fyrebox along side quality blog content.
4. Quora
If only there was a social media network where a deeper connection could be built and people engaged with each other on a deeper level – imagine how useful that would be.
Well, this network does exist. It’s called Quora.
Quora is a great tool for bloggers. It has everything you need to engage with other people and build a thriving online business.
You can connect and network with fellow marketers, business leaders, passionate students and high-profile investors. “Quora is truly a Q&A engine,” says Ritiki Puri
The best part is that it’s free. And, you can use it to find a lot of great ideas for your blog posts. Quora also receives a lot of traffic. This year, the site generated an average of 40 million website visits per month.
Quora has an amazing and diverse community that you can leverage. If you ever experience writer’s block, you can tap into Quora to find ideas worth spreading – and you’ll never run short of blog post ideas.
A lot of smart bloggers are using Quora to find long-tail keywords that they can’t find with Google AdWords’ Keywords Planner.
For example, Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com, used Quora to find keywords that many people in the SEO community were actively using.
He used the question in his blog post’s headline:
Interestingly, Brian now ranks number #1 for the search query “Google hates my site.”
You can follow a similar approach when you want to create a blog post that’ll interest your target audience. Just find common questions on Quora, research the topic and create a helpful article that will address those search engine questions.
For example, let’s say you want to write a blog post on the topic “list building.” Head over to Quora, plug the keyword into the search box and click the “enter” button. Here’s the result:
Let’s now create some compelling blog content headlines from the questions above.
The Quora questions are:
- What are some of the best blogs about list building and email marketing?
- What are the basics of list building?
- What list building techniques are new and promising?
Next, here are the headlines that I crafted, targeting the intent behind each of the questions:
- 13 Best Blogs About List Building and Email Marketing
- The Best Blogs About List Building for Your Email Marketing Campaign
- What Are the Basics of List Building for Your New Startup Site?
- List Building 101: What Are the Basics of List Building?
- 7 New and Promising List Building Techniques to Increase Your Subscribers
- List Building Techniques: 15 New Strategies You Can Use to Grow Your List
You can get answers from Quora when creating your blog posts on any question or keyword. Just go to Quora, find questions and read the answers from experts for insights.
Of course, you won’t copy the answers to your post. That would be plagiarism and Google would most likely penalize you for duplicate content. But, you can learn from the best answers and use them to provide invaluable ideas and advice in your blog post.
As a B2B company, Rivalfox uses Quora to drive the right traffic to its site. It’s the right traffic because the people visited a link after they were satisfied with the answers provided to their questions.
Conclusion
You want to write a blog post. Your friend has a good guest article article idea, and every time he mentions it, you think about writing one. You probably know how you can write a post, too. All you need is a decent writing software and the best blogging tips. Here are the best tools for writing your own blog posts.