What one needs to become a successful blogger? Creative mind, persistence, dedication, and… the right set of the best productivity tools for business work.
Yep, productivity tools are essential. They help to boost focus, fix time management issues, and enhance the content creation process.
Whether you have been running your blog for a while or just starting out, you should use productivity tools on a daily basis. Here is a list of top 14 tools that will help you to advance your blogging career.
Tools for boosting focus and concentration
You are a blogger, and it means you don’t have to stick to a 9-to-5 schedule. You can work from home in a relaxing environment and schedule your day in the way you like. And that’s a good thing.
The only problem is that when you have nowhere to hurry, your productivity is getting low. You get distracted by everything in your home and can’t focus on writing for your blog.
Fortunately, there are tools that can help you keep your productivity levels high. Let’s take a look at these effective tools.
Best Productivity Tools For Business Work & Remote Teams
1. Tomato Timer
Have you heard about the Pomodoro technique? It’s a popular time management technique aimed to improve concentration and get more things done in a shorter period of time.
Here is how Pomodoro works:
- You choose one task and work on it for 25 minutes without breaks
- After that, you should enjoy a short 5 minutes break
- You need to repeat three more rounds (25 minutes of work + 5 minutes of break) and then have a long break (10-30 minutes)
Tomato Timer is a tool designed to simplify the use of the Pomodoro technique. You can use it to set timers for 25, 5, and 10 minutes and track the duration of short and long breaks.
This tool is free to use. If you want to try out the Pomodoro technique, Tomato Timer is a must for you.
2. Toggl
How much time do you spend researching content ideas, writing blog posts, and editing visuals? Have you ever tracked how many minutes and hours you spend on different tasks? If you want to become more productive, you should stay accountable for the time dedicated to blogging.
Use Toggl, and you will get to know how much time it takes you to perform a particular job. This tool will help you define your “weak spots” and enable you to find a way to streamline your content creation process.
Imagine you have been using Toggl for three days. You’ve found out that on average, you spend around three hours writing a post and one hour on proofreading it. What can you infer?
Proofreading takes you too much time – it’s a productivity issue that you can easily solve. You can start using an automatic grammar checkers to speed up your work process significantly.
3. Evernote
Blogging is a creative process – you never know when and where you will find great content ideas. You can come up with a remarkable blog post title while driving a car, loading the dishwasher, or talking to your friend on the phone.
The only problem is that most of those ideas fade away from your head too soon. And if you don’t write them down in a few minutes – you will forget them forever.
Evernote is a tool that can help you to solve this problem. You can use it to write down all your ideas and store them as virtual notes in one place. Install Evernote on your phone and access your notes 24/7.
Do you collaborate with other bloggers or brands? Use Evernote to share your notes with others without switching between different messaging apps.
4. Todoist
Do you like to write to-do lists on the paper? Try to create daily and monthly to-do lists on your phone or desktop using the tool called Todoist. It will help you to organize your tasks quickly and manage your time more effectively.
Todolist allows one to mark favorite tasks, create sections and subtasks. Also, it has a feature that enables the user to delegate tasks to other app users and send notifications. If you collaborate with other bloggers or content creators, this feature will be very useful for you.
5. FocusMe
As a blogger, you should be careful about using social media websites. You should spend as much of your time on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as you need to complete a specific task, for instance, to analyze trending hashtags.
Experts consider social media as the number one productivity killer. They believe that addictive autoplay videos and infinite scrolling steal the attention and negatively affect concentration. Therefore, if you want to be productive, you should listen to the experts and use your favorite social media apps only for a limited time.
FocusMe is a tool that allows blocking access to social media. If you admit that you are a social media addict, this production tool is a perfect solution for you. It’s designed to build better time-management habits and strengthen long term willpower.
Imagine you’re trying to write a 2,000-word blog post but get distracted by social media notifications. You can block Instagram and YouTube for three hours using FocusMe and get a chance to immerse yourself in writing fully.
Top Productivity Tools For Writing
Being a blogger, you spend most of your time researching content ideas and writing new posts. Here are four tools that will help you create high-quality textual content working fewer hours and putting less effort.
1. BuzzSumo
Do you feel stuck and don’t know what topic to cover in your blog next? Do you wonder what keywords are currently trending in your niche?
Use BuzzSumo to find out what topics are worth discussion. Check what content is trending on social media and create posts that your target audience is eager to read.
With BuzzSumo, you will spend twice less time on researching content ideas and finding the right keywords. You will optimize your workflow and focus on post writing.
2. Hemingway App
When it comes to writing for the web, readability always plays an important role. If you want your blog post to get viral on the web, you should make sure that it’s easy-to-read and easy-to-understand.
Hemingway App is a smart tool that can help you to improve the readability of your texts and increase your chances of building a successful blogging career.
Hemingway App can identify hard-to-read sentences, phrases with simpler alternatives, and sentences written in the passive voice. Also, it provides suggestions on how you can rewrite the text to make it sound better.
This app is available for free, and it has an intuitive user interface. Use the Hemingway app on a daily basis if you want to take your writing to the next level.
3. Grammarly
Not every blogger has high grammar skills. And if you tend to make grammar and spelling mistakes, you have nothing to be ashamed about. If you want to improve your grammar skills and excel in blogging, do the following.
To level up your grammar skills in the long run, you should start reading more books and learning grammar rules. To improve your texts right now, you should begin using Grammarly, an AI-powered grammar checker that proofreads documents automatically.
Grammarly will help you to spot even small grammar mistakes and typos. Whether you misuse a comma misspell the word, this tool will indicate the issue and offer suggestions on how to fix it.
4. Story Chief
Do you distribute your content across multiple platforms? Do you work with editors, fellow bloggers, or websites that write for you? Use Story Chief to save time on collaboration, approvals, and publication of your content.
Add Story Chief to your productivity tool list, and you will not get disappointed. This tool will help you to create and plan content, boost marketing efforts, and improve multichannel lead generation.
The best thing about Story Chief is that it’s designed to drives internal motivation. The more you use it, the more inspired and eager to write you get.
Popular Productivity Tools for visual content creation
Let’s face it. Visual content creation is the most time-consuming part of the blogging job. Therefore, if you want to boost your productivity, you should be using tools that allow you to design catchy visuals in a few clicks.
Here are three great tools that will help you to create memes, infographics, cover images for blog posts, social media banners, and other visual content with ease.
1. Piktochart
Are you one of those smart bloggers who is able to write simply about sophisticated subjects? Do you create infographics to enrich your blog posts and present your ideas more clearly and coherently?
Consider using infographic templates offered by Piktochart. These templates will simplify your work and cut your time on infographic design from a few hours to a few minutes.
Piktochart has a drag-and-drop user interface, so you will face no difficulties in using it. This tool is suitable for everyone, even for those who have never tried to create infographics before.
2. Canva
Canva is a tool similar to Piktochart. It also has a user-friendly interface and offers more than 6,000 free templates of various kinds.
Using Canva, you can design infographics, email headers, social media posts, and many more. Check out this tool, and you will find inspiration to create more diverse visual content for your blog.
3. Meme Generator by Imgflip
Do you create memes for your blog using Photoshop or other sophisticated software? Try out Meme Generator and design funny memes fast and easily – save your time for more challenging tasks.
Meme Generator allows you to choose images from an existing meme library, as well as upload images from the device or by using URL. All you need to do to create a viral meme is to come up with a fun meme caption – the app will do the rest.
Best Tools that aimed to boost overall productivity
We have already talked about the tools that allow us to get rid of distractions, enhance concentration, and create high-quality textual and visual content.
Now let’s take a glimpse at tools that help to deal with multitasking, password management, and similar tedious tasks that consume too much time.
1. Lastpass
As a blogger, you need to use a bunch of different platforms and websites every day. It means you have to create various logins and passwords and memorize them.
The problem is that our memory is not perfect. And we tend to forget most of the passwords once we create them. As a result, we face issues trying to access platforms, particularly those that we do not use on a daily basis.
Lastpass is a tool designed to solve password issues. It allows you to manage passwords securely and conveniently and save time on password resetting and access restoration. Add Lastpass to your tool list, and you will never worry about forgetting the password again.
2. IFTTT
In 2020, bloggers use too many devices and too many different tools. And that explains why it’s getting so challenging to coordinate the workflow process.
IFTTT offers a great solution to this problem. The abbreviation IFTTT stands for “if this then that”, and explains the basic idea of how this tool works. IFTTT allows to create connections between various tools and services, and automate repetitive tasks.
Here are a few examples of how you can use IFTTT to link multiple channels and boost your productivity:
- If you get a new follower on Instagram, the system will send an invitation to follow you on Facebook.
- If you get an email with the attached files on Gmail, the system will save files to your Dropbox account.
- If you get an invitation to the Zoom conference on Gmail, the system will set a reminder in your Google calendar.
Best Productivity Tools: Wrapping up
Blogging is a challenging job. And if you want to ease your job, you should choose the best productivity tools.
All the tools discussed above are highly effective and easy to use. We highly suggest you try them out.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that all these tools offer free trials or free plans. You don’t need to spend extra money to become a more productive blogger.
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