My blogging essentials? I need tools to help me write. Blogging tools to improve my SEO. Tools that help me make rockin’ images for my posts. And tools to promote those posts to the world.

The blogging resources I love best, of course, are free, easy to use, and helpful. These blogging essentials are my best resources for running my blog because they are simple and amazingly useful.

Blogging Essentials for Writing Better Posts

The most important thing when writing blog posts? Building your vocabulary and grammar. Mastering a friendly conversational tone. Strengthening your writing skills.

The second most important thing? Using writing tools to help you do these things. The right spell-checkers and editors will help you get your blog posts right.

Try Out Grammarly

If you want a convenient, free spelling and grammar checker, take a look at Grammarly. It’s a great tool for proofing your blog posts and removing any errors.

Screenshot of my well-used Grammarly account.

Run Your Posts Through Hemingway

This is more than a spell-checker—it’s a developmental editor. Basically, it’s a grammar checker that gives you feedback to help you strengthen your writing.

Hemingway aims to help you make easy to read blog posts. It warns when your sentences are too long, when you use a word that’s too obscure, or when you make other common writing mistakes. Using Hemingway helps you ensure your posts aren’t just technically correct—it helps you write better posts.

Blogging Essentials for Doing Keyword Research

If you want your blog posts to get lots of traffic, you need them to appear in search engine results. If you want your posts to get in search engine results, you need to use the right keywords. Putting the right keywords in your posts will get you on the front page of Google results and lots of traffic.

How do you find out what keywords readers are searching for? One easy way is to start typing ideas into Google or Pinterest and let auto-complete show you.

But, maybe you want a tool that’s a little more versatile and shows you dozens of keyword ideas at once. Enter these keyword research tools.

Search Answer the Public

Answer the Public is free and easy to get ideas from. You just type in a word or phrase, and it returns all the questions users are typing into search engines about these words.

Note how I said questions? Its results are in the form of questions. This is great because it makes planning your blog posts as easy as answering a question your readers are asking.

Hunt on Ubersuggest

Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is one of the few free great keyword research tools out there (though you do have to pay for premium data with both these tools). You type in a keyword, and Ubersuggest tells you exactly how many people are searching for it.

Ubersuggest also tells you if it’s an ideal keyword—if it has enough searchers to be valuable, but not so many searchers that other websites have surely already covered it. Finally and most importantly, Ubersuggest suggests similar keywords and gives you their traffic data, too. So it’s the perfect way to research and compare possible keywords!

Blogging Essentials for Improving Your Images

Okay, so images are really important. Even once you have a great piece of text, readers want more than a piece of text. Their eyes are drawn to nice images. So how do you give readers nice images?

Rely on a Stock Image Site

Some blogging niches really need original photography, but others don’t. If you don’t need to take photographs, that leaves you more time to do other valuable blogging tasks.

Choose images that vibe with your posts off a stock image site. This will make your blog pretty and efficient.

Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay are some of the greatest sources of free-to-use photographs on the web. They have lovely pics in nearly every niche.

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

You Might Need an Affordable DSLR Camera

Some niches like fashion or reviews rely strongly on taking your own original images. How do you start taking great photos for your blog?

I recently bought a Canon EOS Rebel T6 DSLR. It has plenty of great-for-beginner features, like a mode that automatically adjusts to help you take better photos.

You don’t necessarily need fancy lighting setups or backdrop props. Sunny days are your new best friend because they provide perfect free lighting. White sheets and posterboards, scrapbook paper, and natural settings can make pretty and cheap backgrounds for photos.

I would also invest in a few courses and books to learn photography basics. This way you’ll start learning how to use your camera’s setting and how to compose great photos.

Edit Your Pics With Canva

You’ll need more than just raw photos to run a blog. You need social media graphics, logos, pin templates, blog graphics, printables, etc.

Canva is a graphics creation program (with a handy app!) that will make this easy. It has free templates for FB posts, Instagram stories, pins, YouTube thumbnails—basically anything you could need.

It makes adding text and details to images easy. In fact, you can even create posters and A4-sized printables with a few taps! I swear, it’s that easy.

Canva is a must-have blogging essential for all your image and graphic needs. Go for it, and you won’t regret it.

Blogging Essentials for Promoting Your Posts

So once you’ve got a great post, put in keywords for SEO, and added the right images, what’s left? Besides hitting publish?

You also need to promote your posts. In fact, you need to market your blog as a whole, so you have plenty of loyal readers waiting for posts.

The key to doing that is social media. Find out what platform your ideal readers are on and go there! Get an account on Facebook, Twitter, Insta, or anywhere else—and make awesome posts.

But there are a few more blogging resources I know to help you do this marketing.

Schedule Your Social Media Posts with HootSuite

Hootsuite is a social media manager—you connect it to your accounts, write as much content as you like, and then schedule it to go out weeks or months later.

This makes promoting your posts easier because you can create and schedule posts in batches.

Or if you just keep odd hours, you can schedule your tweets and grams to go out during prime hours.

In any case, Hootsuite makes managing your social accounts simpler.

Repost your Content on Medium or LinkedIn

There’s another great way to get your posts further: Repost them on sites like Medium and LinkedIn.

These sites allow reposting whole articles to their service. Then, with the correct tags, they serve your posts up to tons of readers.

You include the link back to where you originally posted. That way, LinkedIn and Medium users can discover and check out your blog.

Doing this helps your posts reach a whole new audience. Any browsing through Medium or the feed on LinkedIn might stumble on your posts.

Of course, LinkedIn is really for business and professional topics. Blog posts on personal finances, advice for small businesses, and freelancing seem to do well. Medium, however, welcomes a wide variety of topics, including personal essays, sex, parenting, and more.

Some bloggers like to post a small sample and encourage readers to head to their blog for the full post. I normally just offer my whole post for readers to enjoy. But, do whichever works for you!

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So there are my must-have blogging essentials. These are the blogging tools I use to compose my posts, get keywords, perfect my images, and promote my posts.

Tell me, what are your blogging essentials? What resources do you rely on to keep your blog glowing and growing? Or do you have any questions about my recommendations? Let me know in the comments!

Mint Miller

Mint is a writer and digital marketing pro who lives in coastal Virginia with her family and one lovable pitbull. Her passions include helping people and businesses display their best side through the power of communication, buying her dog costumes he doesn’t want to wear, and talking all day about Batman.