15 of the Best Research Tools to Use When Writing Blog Articles

  • June 20, 2019

Starting a blog is like investing in a business. The same way you employ personnel, purchase furniture and pay for rent or buy an office space, is same way you should invest in the right tools for your blog. The more effort, time and money you invest determines if your site will bring you the best Return On Investment (ROI).

The reason a lot of bloggers don’t make any ROI is because they believe that all there is to a blog is just writing quality content. But they forget that one can’t achieve all the right results from hard work alone. You have to be smart enough to save time for other productive ventures by investing money in the right tools to help you blog better and faster. Time is money, you need to save both and still make good use of them.

It’s okay to have a well designed website, but you also need to invest on plugins, the right research tools and even an effective copywriting service (that can deliver great content) for you to start getting your ROI. The good thing is, some of these tools are free. They save you time while you write great articles faster, and also increase your conversion rate by bringing more traffic to your blog. All you need do is stay glued and you’ll get a run down of 15 of the best research tools you can use to write better blog articles.

15. Shutterstock

If you won’t be able to create graphics or take time to produce your own images, videos or audio – Shutterstock is a tool that provides you with royalty-free media files for downloads. With over 150 million different files, you can get quality images with no embedded watermarks or videos without trademark registrations – once you subscribe with a monthly payment. Make the layout of your content more appealing and improve the user experience of your blog, with Shutterstock.

On the other hand, not all bloggers wish to write all their posts by themselves. Therefore, if you’re looking for professional copywriters to complete a project for you then get in touch with us or sign up here today!

14. Buffer

After creating good blog content, next thing is to promote. Marketing has a way of bringing traffic to your blog, hereby giving it more exposure. Social media is the number 1 method of sharing links and information about your brand. What better tool can make this easier than Buffer.

You can schedule and share feeds automatically with Buffer. From Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to Google+, you can now set the time to when you want your posts to be shared.

13. Evernote

You can drop images, snippets, web pages and notes into Evernote. Its like your collection of ideas with a robust tagging system. Therefore, if you want to tag or save your ideas in really cool ways like date, the stage of the idea, what next to do and lots more – Evernote provides you with a variety of features.

Digital marketers also suggest that you can also try Dropbox and Google Drive, but this tool is comprehensive enough.

12. Thrive Leads

Email marketing is one sure way of building your brand and keeping your customers updated on what’s new with you. It’s not just about having an email list, but keeping it growing is important. Thrive leads captures the emails of visitors to your site, making it easy for you to advertise.

This is a sure to increase and keep up with your sales as well. If you want to build appealing landing pages, the Thrive Leads software has one of the simplest ‘drag and drop’ interface to enable you effect your action.

11. Canva

Remember the saying “you can say a thousand words with just a picture” – well, beautiful and we’ll laid out images can make your blog content go viral. Sadly, not every digital marketer or blogger takes advantage of visual content – probably because they do not and to spend a ‘fortune’ on graphic designs or they just feel a good write up says everything.

Thankfully, Canva helps you create and design graphics for your blog. Touted as one of the best tools for creating visual content, the software can be used to create posters, infographics, logos, images and even facebook covers. It’s so simple and effective that you easily write a text on a particular image you like, download it to your page using it’s ‘drag and drop interface’, and you start using immediately.

10. VaultPress

One major problem bloggers face is hacking. Imagine if you don’t have a way of backing up your files in the advent of a cyber hack, what would you do? – Give your web hosting service provider all the money you got saved so they can try to retrieve the files, or just break down and cry? Well, VaultPress is there to help safeguard your contents.

There are many sites with vulnerable plugins and weak passwords (like WordPress blogs). They are generally prone to hacks. Therefore, if you wish to always back up your website regularly (which is the right thing to do) to avoid sleepless nights – use VaultPress.

9. Solopreneur

If you seek professional and clean WordPress themes to make your content readable and attractive, then this is the right tool you need. If your site isn’t properly designed to display your work, then your content your content may be considered invaluable. The reviews from bloggers and digital marketers is proof that this is probably the best WordPress theme tool.

With nice looking email subscription widgets and an option box beneath articles and on the sidebar, this tool is made in a way that compels readers to turn to subscribers. There are also two default landing pages a blogger can use as web pages to drive traffic. Consider getting solopreneur today, and design your pages the way you like.

8. Editorial Calendar

As a writer, it’s important for you not to miss your schedule. An editorial calendar is that tool that gives you a whole view of the dates in a year, hereby helping you decide when to post articles. You could use the free WordPress editorial calender which helps you edit and even rearrange your posts right from the dashboard.

You can also use Coschedule. Although its not free, but you can do more with it – like planning even your social media calender.

7. SEMrush

SEMrush allows you carry out audits on your website if you need to fix any issues, analyses different blogs to find the trending keywords in your niche and pretty much do anything related to Search Engine Optimisation.

From finding low competitive keywords, estimated traffic and traffic sources, to backlinks and other researches, this tool has a site audit and backlink analysis functionality. You can either pay $69 per month, or check out the SEMrush 14-day free trial and enjoy all the great benefits and features on offer.

6. Thrive Content Builder

You must not use coding to design your landing pages. Almost every blogger writes plain content. But with Thrive Content Builder, you can create sticky content and animated posts – making your blog look unique, engaging and totally different from other sites. You can also customise the layout with clear animated call-to-action buttons amongst other plugins – without coding – in less than an hour!

5. Thrive Headline Optimizer

One of the top movers of blog traffic use this tool to get the best headlines for their posts. The first thing readers see on a search result is the headline of your post. That’s what determines if they will stay to read all of your content or just scroll to the next competitor’s blog.

The Thrive Headline Optimizer searches for the most trending headlines based on how engaging they are, the number of clicks and reading time. When you find what you like, you can easily switch up the titles to make yours sound more unique. There are other tools that only tells what title will fit your blog, but this one actually performs a real time test to see what works.

4. Grammarly

This research tool is almost like a jack of all trades. With a Microsoft word add-in, a browser extension, a grammatical error checker, plagiarism checker and an app that helps you access different platforms, it could be ranked on the top 5 web-based editing and content creation tools.

It helps you check the passive and active tone of your post, duplicate content, grammatical and typographical errors – hereby Proof-reading your writing before you publish it. Alternatively, if you need a copywriter to do all these instead (and you don’t mind spending a penny because humans could be more effective than programmed bots) – the choice is yours.

3. Quora

When it comes to finding the best blog post ideas, Quora is pretty popular in the blogosphere. When you don’t come up with captivating ideas for your site’s contents, visitors are likely to bounce off to other blogs while the number of existing subscribers will start reducing. Getting the best ideas isn’t as easy as it may seem, it takes lots of effort and time. Therefore, if you do not want to struggle with writer’s block then consider using Quora.

This platform helps you find valuable answers to any essential question any body can ever think of. It indirectly helps you develop content to solve certain issues people face and let users read more on what’s trending. Asides the fact that it is free, you can also sign up to get notifications when bloggers publish content on topics that are relevant to your niche.

Quora is quite easy to use. Just follow blog topics that tickle your fancy, find questions with more views, comments and good ratings – as that helps you know what’s trending in your niche. If you also want answers for certain questions, you can ask and the Quora community will tell you what you need to know. This will help you get an idea of what people think and how you can provide them with better information via your blog’s content.

2. BuzzSumo

If you are a digital marketer or blogger looking for amazing ideas for posts on your website, Buzzsumo is good blogging tool that can help you with that. It also acts like a spy that gives you an insight on high ranked posts from your competitors.

Once you enter a domain name or a particular keyword on its search bar, details on the contents been shared constantly in your niche will be displayed – along with the number of shares and even backlinks.

If you intend to create great content that will drive a lot of traffic to your blog or reach out and build a relationship with the major influencers in your niche, you can get either the free or premium version. Any of the versions can still help you write on trending topics that will help your website’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This tool also shows backlinks of posts that display on your search results, and people who shared it.

1. Long Tail Pro

If you are looking for keywords that will increase your search rankings, then this research tool will be of great help. Keyword research is one of the easiest way to also increase traffic to your website.

You may be wondering what Long tail keywords are. These are search queries that are more than 4 words long. It targets what the user expects from a ranked article. Authority sites rank keywords that exactly match a query, therefore making long tail keywords easy for ranking. Here are some examples: copywriting – short tail keyword; copywriting agencies – medium tail keyword; The best copywriting agencies in the UK – long tail keyword.

Therefore, Long Tail Pro is a premium tool that searches and comes up with low competitive keywords to fit any kind of blog post. Using these keywords in your article will definitely boost your search rankings even if you just started blogging!

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