I think a lot of us bloggers have our little tricks up our sleeves, whether it’s a favourite place to get images from, quotes, or whatever it might happen to be. Here’s a quick run-down of the blogging tools that I’ve been using the most over the past year.
Graphics
Canva continues to be my go-to. A kit of the graphics I use are created specifically with Pinterest in mind, and Canva works well for that. I used to get most of my images from Pixabay, but ever since Kacha clued me in to CleanPNG, that’s been my top choice. While I have my suspicions about how legitimate some of their freely available images are, I’m not exactly motivated to try looking into that further. I also use Wikimedia Commons a fair bit, which has all of the images from Wikipedia.
Spreading the word
I’m on Twitter very passively and on Instagram very rarely, but I use Pinterest a lot for blog purposes. My blog is syndicated on Blogarama, Bloglovin, and Flipboard, although Bloglovin is the only one that actually brings people to my blog. Actually, since I wrote this, I’ve deleted my Flipboard account because there didn’t seem to be any point.
Looking things up
Google and Wikipedia have been my good friends for a long time. I also use Google Scholar quite a bit to look up research papers. For some reason, Google has decided I have Campus-Activated Subscriber Access through my alma mater, so I can access a lot of full-text articles. Hey, works for me.
CSS
If you’re on the WordPress.com premium plan or above, or if you’re self-hosted, you can use CSS to customize the design of your blog. A few months ago I started learning how to use it, and W3Schools tells me (and shows me) pretty much everything I need to know.
SEO stuff
Google Search Console is useful to see what search queries are bringing people to what pages on my blog. I started off the year trying to figure out Google Analytics, but I find it’s too much bother to put in the time, especially since I don’t care all that much about those particular kinds of stats anyway. So I rarely check that anymore. It’s the Google Search Console stuff that’s actually interesting, anyway.
Sometimes, Search Console will tell me that my site is slow, so I’ll trot on over to Google PageSpeed Insights. Sometimes it tells me things I can fix after some (or a lot of) fussing around, like if my layout is dancing around as a page is loading, but a lot I can’t do anything about, yet I waste time faffing around trying to figure out if I can do anything. I should just not bother, but that hasn’t quite sunk into my head fully yet.
Ahrefs and Seobility are my favourites for technical site audit stuff; it makes for great mindless busy work. Ooh, I’ve got images missing alt text—I can take care of that with no brainpower required! I knew about Ahrefs before as a backlinks checker, but it was fairly recently that I discovered it does pretty wide-ranging site audits, withe two freebies a month.
I use Moz and SEMrush occasionally to check out my blog’s backlink situation, but my interest has waned in Moz as its whole domain authority thing seems far too mysterious and outside of the realm of what I can control.
Copyright
I’ve encountered a few plagiarizers this year. My go-to resources are this page from WordPress on DMCA notices and the DomainTools WhoIs Lookup to figure out where a plagiarizer’s site is hosted.
That’s it for me and my 2020 blogging tools of choice. Do you have any favourites that you’d like to share?
For tips on blogging basics, check out the New Blogger’s Guide to WordPress.
The Blogging & Writing Tips page has more advanced info to take your blogging to the next level.
I’m not very clued up on all this, so have learnt a lot from this
I’m glad!
Thank you for sharing these tips. I’ve only been blogging about a year now and am always looking for ideas. This is really good info! John
You’re welcome! I always like coming across new tools.
You are far above and beyond my blog capabilities…! And always a pleasure to read.
Thanks for sharing all these resources.
Thanks! For me, the biggest thing has really been time. I have lots of time to spend on blogging, but not enough ideas to spend all that time writing, so there’s lots left over for exploring.
I love using Wikipedia!! It’s a favorite site of mine!! I like Pixabay too, but sometimes for book covers I’ll buy an image at Shutterstock for around $15 per image. I guess I don’t use images for blogging quite as much though! And then I get content from the Washington Post and Creators for advice columns!! 🙂
I’ve just started working my way through free trials for a few sites like Shutterstock to get prospective cover images to play around with.
You as much out of and into blogging as anyone I’ve seen. You put the work in and it shows!
Thanks! 😊
I don’t use it as a blogging tool, but I really like W3Schools!
Yeah, it’s super-useful!
That is one large tool box Ashley. My favorite go to for pics is needpix.com. It has what I am looking for. Sometimes I have to use publicdomainpictures.net
I use some quote pages that I like, Brainy Quote is my favorite.
I haven’t used needpix.com before – I’ll check that out!
Thank you Ashley for mining the ore of Internet blogging tools. I am always interested in images, photos and related editing apps. Thank you for the note on CleanPNG, I had not heard of that site. I am a huge fan of Canva too. Great post. ***Shared it on Pinterest. Thank you Ashley Leia ❤👍
Thank you! 💕. It’s always fun to find new tools.
Yes! 🎣🧵😊❤
I enjoy looking under the hood of other people’s processes. I like Canva still somewhat, but I find that it frustrates me since they made a series of changes. I’m using PicsArt online and QuoteCreator on my phone. I’m impressed that you’re learning the nuts and bolts of the process. I confess, reading it did make me kind of want to flee. Things in the “I should learn this but I probably won’t” category. Props to you – be proud. 😊
Thanks! I haven’t tried PicsArt before. I just Googled it and it’s biased in Armenia, which seems rather random.
It’s a very strange world sometimes. You never know where anyone is.
So true.
So there were a lot things I didn’t know and some sites that I don’t even know what they are used for. Surely I’ll learn it soon
🙂
Interesting stuff! You mentioned some tools that I take advantage of and some other tools that I was not aware of. Seobility is definitely one I use myself.
Yeah, I was pretty thrilled when I stumbled across it.
I tried out Bloglovin’ but I haven’t had much luck with it. It seems like it’s dead. Other social medias I’ve had success with, though.
Bloglovin seems like it’s for people who read some blogs but aren’t bloggers themselves, which I can’t see as being a huge number of people.
Yeah 😐
Whatever happened to Kacha? She seemed to just disappear one day.
I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her in ages.
She got that dog and disappeared like the friend who gets a new girlfriend or boyfriend and then you never see them again.
Pretty much!
Thanks for letting me know about Canva and Google Search Console. I’ll look into both once I get the presence of mind.
🙂
People are stealing your work?! That sucks! And makes me all growl-y and turns me into an anger-ball. Let me at ’em! I got’chu, Girl! Grr!
I think it’s just part of the game . For most of them, I only found out because people didn’t remove my internal links and I got pingbacks. I used to get annoyed, but now I don’t even waste my time dealing with them directly. It’s much more satisfying to have WordPress swoop in and take it down.
I suppose, at some point, I may need to look into that… but quite honestly, I’m far too lazy to care. 😂
Lol
I’m really learning a lot from your posts – thank you so much for the tips!
Thanks! 😊