Amanda Chiu
Congratulations! You’ve written a fantastic blog post…but now what?
What will make your blog sink or swim in a sea constantly filling with content?
After all you’re competing with with over 20,000 blog posts a day.
Every writer experiences the challenge of making their content go from good to great. Editing your content is important to help you catch any mistakes and improve your writing skills specific to your readers.
By paying special attention to headlines, visuals, proofreading and social media, you will be able to give your blog post an extra boost in audience appeal.
Here are 13 tools to take your blog writing from ‘meh’ to amazing.
Making headlines
Your headline is the most important aspect to generate traffic for your blog, especially in search.
A quality headline alone can increase the traffic to your article by as much as 500%. Less than a quarter of visitors will actually read past your blog title, which means it has to be shareable and enticing enough for people to want to read your blog.
1. KingSumo Headlines
This automatic headline optimization plugin for WordPress has proven to increase blog traffic by addressing title creation intelligently.
For creator Noah Kagan, who took a few extra steps to implement this strategy into his blogging process, the payoff was an increase in blog traffic of 17.8%.
The plugin allows you to type in as many titles you can think of in WordPress. These titles are then shown to visitors and shared with others. The algorithm will be able to determine the best-performing title, where in-line statistics will then let you know which title to choose.
2. 25 Headlines
Reminiscent of writing lines as a child, this tool that was inspired by Upworthy, Kissmetrics, and Hubspot – concentrates on the ‘practice makes perfect’ method for headline writing.
Much like the perfect Tweet, the length of a blog title is one of the most crucial aspects to attracting readers. This tool will help train your stream of thought to create a title at the ideal length on the first try. Other features include checking Twitter length, and if your title reads like email spam.
Smart editing
The difference between a smart editing tool and the more popular grammar checker, is that only one of these types are able to measure and adapt to your way of writing, and who you’re writing for.
Great content involves good grammar, the writer’s style, and an understanding of your reader’s behaviour and interests.
3. AtomicWriter
As the first editing tool that adapts your writing to your audience to encourage article reads, this smart tool learns the important factors your audience considers appealing content.
You will be able to understand their reading behaviour, if the complexity of your writing is suitable for your audience, and be provided real-time feedback to improve your blog writing.
Other features include seeing how title, format, and readability edits affect your content’s performance in an easy-to-understand Chrome extension, WordPress plugin, or web app interface.
4. ProWritingAid
With an abundance of blog writing resources, often writers might not be able to keep true to their own voice.
To help maintain your identity, ProWritingAid is your objective eye to your content. Some features offered are the ability to use statistics to measure readability, find overly wordy sentences, and overused words to suggest edits that will make your content more punchy and interesting.
You will be able to identify errors to improve your overall writing.
Stock photos & gifs
Picking the right images that match your writing is crucial to increasing traffic to your blog.
The appropriate visuals can increase your total pageviews by 94%, helping visitors understand the tone of your writing and visualize your written content.
In addition to naming your images with accurate alt text, having a select variation of tools available with specific uses will increase your time for creating great visuals.
By having imagery that relates to your content and your audience, you will be able to establish a strong connection and elicit emotion out of your reader.
5. Stocksnap.io
As the ‘best place on the internet to find beautiful free stock photos’, this website delivers high quality and high resolution pictures daily.
They differentiate themselves from the stock photo pack in the curation process and social sharing options. Only a select group of photographers within the network are able to carefully select and publish the content available to you. Users are able to see how many people have viewed, favorited, and downloaded the image, creating a sense of community and highlighting a photo’s popularity.
6. Stokpic
After accumulating over 12 years of professional photography experience and hundreds of photos, founder Ed Gregory started this site as a personal project releasing photos free to the public.
As the numbers climbed, requests for a more diverse selection of people, locations, and cultures increased. Realizing he could not fill all the demand by himself, he funded a new sponsorship program that provided 12 new photographers with $ 500 worth of photography equipment. Their only requirement was to contribute 50 photos to the site a month, encouraging personal and creative growth, and work ethic.
After just one year, this site had just under a million page views, and 200,000 downloads in 197 countries.
7. Pablo by Buffer
Great to use on the fly, Pablo helps your social media posts reach further with an easy-to-use image creation tool.
Their efforts to help people benefit from posts with images drove their determination to make a tool very similar in its simplicity to Buffer – their tool for scheduling posts.
You might have seen this tool used for multiple Twitter chats.
8. Giphy
A 2-in-1 curation site providing free gifs in many different categories, and a mobile app to create your own, makes Giphy one of the most popular destinations for gif detectives.
You will be able to find the expected variety of celebrity, media, and sticker gifs, as well as a category specifically dedicated to artists who exclusively work to create illustrated gifs.
The app itself, allows you to record real-life ‘gifable’ moments and add filters or special FX.
9. Giffiti
As a mobile app that combines animated gifs and your photos, this app has become extremely popular, landing on the front page of Reddit without any formal marketing.
Adding a bit of humor into your everyday, this app can be a powerful and customized way to reach your audience. For example, if you are doing a behind-the-scenes blog post, and have a picture of your set with a dancing Carlton in the background, you’ll be adding more enjoyment to an already engaging topic.
Get social
Social media can be one of the last and most crucial steps to giving your blog writing an extra boost.
You can increase the chances of traffic and interaction when your new blog post is shared on the right day, time, and platform.
Get help along the way with these tools to ensure your social media calendar includes sharing this blog and relevant articles from your network cyclically.
10. AtomicInsights
Knowing the reading and sharing behavior of how your specific audience prefers to engage with your content is an up-and-coming topic online.
By understanding which of your blogs people liked, and the days that had the highest performance, you will be able to create an effective editorial calendar. The information that AtomicInsights analyzes includes your social media, Google Analytics, and blog history data to help you determine the direction of your blog.
11. Edgar
This useful web app helps you ramp up your social media regimen and stops your posts from going to waste.
Like most writers, you have blogs that are not reshared more than a few times within a few weeks of publication. The accumulation of green content will most likely not be seen by the end of the month, because many new articles would have already outranked your blog by that time.
With this app, you are able to categorize your content, schedule and cycle through posts according to the category, while updating your content library.
12. Social Media Calendar by Twenty20
Described as “Your weekly plan-of-attack to grow on social media”, this email-based subscription system sends you weekly reminders of ideal content you should be posting for your social media schedule.
Topics like upcoming calendar events, popular hashtags, photos, tips and guides for social media will be sent to your inbox to help build your social media presence alongside your blog.
13. Post Planner
If you work with a marketing team or are looking to increase engagement, Post Planner helps you find the right content to post in conjunction to your blog for a boost in engagement. With access to a library of amazing content like images, articles and status ideas, your audience will appreciate everything you share.
Final takeaway
Having methods to guide you through the processes surrounding your blog writing will help to encourage your content’s reach. Give these tools a try and implement what you’ve learned in your blogging strategy.
What tools do you use to take your writing from good to great? Share them with the community!
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