Blogging Tools That Will Make You Insanely Productive

Let me guess.

You read the title of this publication and thought, "Cool!" Then a small voice in your head whispered something like "Why do I need another release on all the awesome tool, I have no time to use it?"

That's the key, is not it? Time. Having time to set up, play with and really get all the amazing tools that work a blog scourge in heaven.

And have time to write. And the time to follow other bloggers. And network time on social networks.

After you post your blog, after the technical part is complete, every new blogger is basically the same. They are full of tension and plans. They have a new bright and shiny blog, full of potential and ideas.

And zero readers.

Time is the key factor that separates the new bloggers into three different types of bloggers. For this reason, all the standard advice about the tools you need is confusing. The tools do not have bloggers. The time is the case.

Because that's how long you go to explore the best bloggers in your niche, improve your writing and maintain relationships with the readers and influencers who determine how fast your website will increase. And how fast your blog takes determines the tools you need.

The tools are important, but time is the magical elixir.

Again, cover a wide range of bloggers, but are divided into three different groups. Read the following descriptions, then continue with the tool section of each group to find out what you need.

The minimalist blogger

They have ideas that you want to share, but you might not be too much on this blogger thing. Are you ready to dive your toes in the water because it seems like it might work, but the technical part is still a challenge. You do not need fancy tools.

Above all, you do not even want to spend a lot of time, or you do not have much more time in your life now. You might just want to write and follow others in your niche. Whether your topic is a passion, a hobby or a link to what you experience, a blog is a side project that can only give you 10 hours a week when that happens.

The serious and dedicated bloggers

You have good wet in blogs and agree to that you do. You want to start a business from your blog, but your income and your readers are not important enough for you to finish your job. They remove as much time as possible, maybe 10 to 20 hours per week, and you need tools that do not require much time, which have a significant impact.

The Entrepreneur Blogger

They look at the blogs differently than everyone else:

They do not have a blog; They run a business. Blogging is a marketing strategy, but it is not a self-purpose.

Since you do this more or less full-time, you have much more time to experiment with tools, others do not.

Since this is the case, you are willing to invest money, so the higher price tags on the most sophisticated services are not really cleared away - if they make sense for business growth and you save time and effort that can be better used elsewhere.

The tool list Blogger

We list all the tools we know and use. Many of the links below are affiliate links, for which we earn a small commission when you decide to buy (no extra charge). Expect additions and changes when we find better tools. We will also add sections on courses and books that will help you in your blog business.

We organized in four sections that you consider to be a blogger.

Set up your blog: the technical list. If you are planning to start a blog, go here to find out what you need.

The minimalist blogger: tools build a solid base, but nothing special.

The serious and dedicated bloggers: upgrades many basic tools needed to add products, create your customer base and make money.

The entrepreneur blogger: advanced tools for blogs to win $ 10,000 to $ 10 million.

Set up your blog

HOW TO BUY A DOMAIN NAME 

Namecheap (affiliate link) is our favorite registrar good market. There is no reason to pay. We also recommend to buy your domain name through your web hosting company, because if you decide to change web hosting later, how likely this can be more complicated.

HOW TO CHOOSE A WEB HOST

The standard advice a great web hosting company to accompany long-term stability is strong. Small Business Web Hosting always disappears without prior notice, a frightening situation. They will also have different level of bandwidth and capable of needing a blog to increase.

For the minimalist and serious bloggers, we recommend Siteground (affiliate link) that offers more cheap plans for new and small blogs. You can buy a shared hosting for such a low amount $ 3.95 per month and the support is excellent.

WHY YOU MUST HAVE WORDPRESS

We are convinced about this tool: Just Wordpress. Forget bloggers, weebly and all other free amateur platforms, if you want people to take a blog seriously. Wordpress has become the industry standard.

Most major web hosts have Wordpress for installing your hosting account. But you can do it yourself by downloading it from http://wordpress.org/. It is individually a number of features, as your website increases, you can set up a good-looking website without knowing how to code.

HOW TO GET A GREAT PROJECT FOR YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG DESIGN

Wordpress provides the guts behind scenes from your blog. A "theme" offers the model and design. You can pay a web designer or you can buy a custom wordpress theme. Many graphic designers would be annoying to say this, but do not waste money on graphic design at this stage. As you'll see in a minute, premium wordpress themes can be very appealing and have a robust code that makes them more than enough for your initial needs.

While you can create a blog on the built-in WordPress theme, your site with a premium theme will be more professional right away. We do not recommend using a free theme. The differences between the free themes and premium themes in the backend: although both can be helpful to visitors, free subjects do not come with technical support and are almost always ignored by their developers as they happen to other projects to provide you with an outdated Topic that will become more vulnerable to hackers and more vulnerable to fractions over time.

Premium themes are regularly updated to keep up with wordpress upgrades and new trends. They also have support offices that help you solve, customize, update, and maintain your setup.

We use Themes ElegantThemes (affiliate link) for additional locations. It does not take much effort to make elegant theme. For $ 39 per year, you have access to all 86 subjects and customers. The prices for developers and the cost of living available.

Studiopress (affiliate link) is a leader in premium wordpress themes. Built on the Genesis platform Wordpress, Studiopress is used by many social networking bloggers. Although more elegant than the elegant themes you purchase Genesis about an individual subject or the whole subject.

A Set Of  WordPress Plugins

Using the plugins, is not always better, and in fact most can slow down your site or cause code conflicts. You just need to add a few basic plugins advanced features for sharing social media, email capture, analysis, and site performance.

Social sharing: Dozens of social plugins are available for Wordpress. We love the plugin digg freely as it floats on the side of the screen and follow the drive up or down on the page as they read, so it is always visible.

Pop-ups: We are not the aggressive pop-up box for the screenreader have fallen or hostage, so we have a better - unpop, a polished pop slides the screen, do not disturb the reader and disappear when the player is in puts. You can use it to get e-mail subscribers that you like for your Facebook page and register for the readers for a webinar. Try it for 30 days free trial.

Analytics: Make sure you have some form of tracking code or analysis on your blog early. Google Analytics is free and easy to install. Later, if your traffic increases, you can invest in an analysis program, but also for the analytics in the short and medium term, you will provide enough data to turn your head.

Website performance: We recommend WPSuperCache to install the loading speed of your blog pages for a visitor. Consider the exact setting of the engine of your blog; Knowing that the technical details at this time will not make you a better blogger, but your blog will not bother your visitors.

SEO: The degree of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that you need generates among bloggers to implement intense debate. For beginners, let's forget it. Seriously. In addition to creating very basic metadata so that your messages are displayed correctly in a Google search, your time is better to write out great content and promote it.

Many Wordpress themes, as Studiopress, have an integrated SEO design that makes the fast and painless basic configuration. Do not think about this part.

WHERE PICTURES AND PHOTOS

Everyone has their favorite photo in stock, and we are bigstockphoto. The rates are cheap for small pictures that are the right size and resolution for blog publishing images. Finding suitable images to illustrate a publication on the blog can have been a great time, so limit yourself to one or two stock sites.

HOW TO CREATE AN E-MAIL LIST

Building your email list should be your primary goal as a blogger starting the day you start. Rely on the RSS or other e-mail programs to keep your list collection is madness. You should try to collect emails by day or earlier.

We recommend you start with the free version of MailChimp. It provides a set of clean and simple board to use and you can not only create multiple lists, but also create list segments. One important thing you can not do with the free version is to create a set of e-mail autoresponders that will be sent automatically when a visitor logs in to your list.

You have to go to a paid MailChimp account or another e-mail marketing company when your blog reaches the point where you offer a free email class that requires an autoresponder.

The minimalist blogger

LISTEN TOOLS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Feedly is a free replacement for Google Reader, which you use news from blogs, you can follow in your niche to follow. Configure it with folders by topic or by size or influence that is best for you.

The free version of Hootsuite is more than enough to monitor at this point social networks in one place because you follow the best bloggers and the cool kids of your niche.

ADDING BOX REGISTRATION CUSTOM

The free version of MailChimp will always be sufficient in this phase. When you start your publication, you could consider a premium plugin as an optin skin (affiliate link) to add custom input fields to the readers who visit your site.

The serious and dedicated bloggers

Update your e-mail provider to a free course of email CREATE

You are probably ready to develop a simple history of the automatic e-mail response on your topic. To do this, go to free MailChimp MailChimp account to spend on a paid account or one of the directories. All these e-mail providers offer almost the same service and a competitive price. Choose the one you like most or find it easier to use for a free trial period.

MailChimp, paid version

Aweber (affiliate link)

Constant contact

GetResponse (affiliate link)

MadMimi (affiliate link)

DURING THE AUDIO AS FIRST PRODUCT DEVELOP

Now that you have activated the appetite of your subscriber with your free e-mail course, provides an audio course for your first paid product. It is fast technically easier to produce and manage one of the best ways to measure if you hit the target without spending a lot of time investing in the production. InstantTeleseminar (affiliate link) is the most reliable supplier we have found. It records automatically and customers can participate by telephone, Skype or Internet calls by telephone conference.

IN THE CART

You are wise to keep it simple at this stage until you have multiple products or create an affiliate network. Your best choice is PayPal, eJunkie (affiliate link) and Clickbank. Each provides a slightly different set of features, then compare to find best fit.

ADD the landing page in a blog

The product offer or registration required for the courses requiring tele or webinars requires separate landing pages to make your customers' experience seamless. We recommend OptimizePress (affiliate link) for the construction of simple landing page.

SHARE CALENDAR SOCIAL MEDIA

You should now know where your petals are located on social networks, so use a free account to use buffer links to plan useful and relevant content other bloggers, quotes, tips, and links to your posts and blog articles.

Optimize your WordPress theme

If you build a reader base and participant and you change the angle of your blog, you may find that your topic does not have the look or functionality that you need. Instead of paying a lot of dollars for someone to start a new topic that may cause unwanted technical problems as you start making money, independent web designers look for 99designs to shape Odesk or your current theme.

You can find a lot of talent on Odesk when you take the time to look closely, scores skills and comments from previous guests as lessons. 99designs uses a competitive model, rather than an hourly model. You determine what you are willing to pay and the design requirements. Interested designers meet with rehearsals for you to choose the winner, and choose.

OPTIMIZE your blog for SEO

You should be aware of enough traffic, site views and links for Google to notice a blog regularly. We recommend the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your site content.

REWORK YOUR WEBSITE

They do not try fate. Install a backup plugin. We use BackWPup and back up our server, but you can automatically back up a Dropbox (Affiliate Link) or Amazon S3 backup.

The Entrepreneur Blogger

UPGRADE YOUR PRODUCTS

Step by step as you grow your traffic, you want to improve your plan and consider you to move your own server, you can do with Siteground (affiliate link) or web servers dedicated to blogging and wordpress, such as WPEngine (link affiliate) And Synthesis in Copyblogger media. Both are expensive, but the peace of mind and support for high-level customers for a great website that houses your business, your community and your product is worth it.

UPGRADE YOUR PROTECT WEBSITE

If you win your blog traffic and it is known to expect attacks to hack. It is not nice and can be destroyed overnight Goodwill destroy you with your readers and subscribers. Sucuri (affiliate link) cleaned to the misties when BBT last year was hacked and set to keep them in check. It is expensive, but not as expensive as losing hundreds of subscribers, it took months to win.

CHOOSES THE USE OF MARKETING AND CONTROL OF THE BASIC SALES

Your growing traffic, your customers and your customers need more attention and more integration. You have several options.

Less than $ 10,000 in sales

Expect to exceed Paypal, Clickbank or eJunkie soon and start looking for other options.

Up to $ 30,000 in sales

Open a business account if you do not already have it. Most accountants and guards will probably advise you to do so earlier.

More than $ 30,000 in sales

Open a merchant account or via PowerPay or an account strip, an alternative to a merchant account. You need either a credit card processor.

Up to $ 100,000 on sale

Keep your paid email marketing provider, and add a basket: We recommend UltraCart (affiliate link). It offers the full range of basket of services such as shopping and management of affiliates and integrates with all major e-mail providers.

More than $ 100,000 sales

Consider a subscription to GoToWebinar (affiliate link). The most expensive variant is the most reliable despite its occasional problems.

TAKE a deep analysis

Up to $ 100,000 on sale

Tools like CrazyEgg or VisualWebsiteOptimizer to track sense visitor behavior on your landing pages (but not your full blog). Moz or Raven tools are also useful to track your traffic from search engines and social media.

More than $ 100,000 sales

They have several highly developed and expensive ways to monitor and analyze the data: see Kissmetrics, MixPanel. You will probably need a developer to configure these tools and manage campaigns. At this stage, small adjustment in the conversion can equal significant gains, so are not lost in the paralysis of the analysis.

SOCIAL MEDIA TACTICS ADVANCE

Because your social media monitoring has probably reached a critical mass that is organically developed, achieving individual influencers in your niche is a more efficient use of your time. A tool like BuzzStream effectively helps you to find and track your interactions with bloggers, journalists, and other people you want to monitor.

E-MAIL MARKETING TACTICS ADVANCED

The IV of the customer, which is triggered by the behavior of the user sending emails, can help you to refine your marketing and customer retention and increase the conversion.

PARTNER PROGRAM SALABLE

Depending on your particular product mix, you need to compare the associated services. IDEVAffiliated  is a popular and robust affiliate tracking software that will grow as you grow.

We have not finished yet ...

This resource guide develops how our company grows because we need different tools and new tools to be introduced. We will add a register at the top of the blog so you can easily find this guide when you return and we keep you informed of any changes.

... and you are not

Wherever you are with your blog, you now have all the tools you need to move to the next level. We did research and explore all the dead ends so you do not have to. Whether you need to work 10 hours, 20 hours, or 60 hours per week on your blog, use the right tools you will fully help the time you have to exhaust.

So it means "up up" and prepare a blog for the first time.

If you have a question about a particular tool, post it in the comments below. We will do our best to help you.