Blogging is a learning curve; if you want to actively pursue getting your blog out there and earning income from ads and affiliates all that jazz. This blog is no exception. What started out as a hobby is now a kinda-under paid job.
In 2018, I spent a year growing this blog.
In 2019, I abandoned it to focus on the Cloth Diaper Podcast.
In 2020, I’m going to grow my business as a social media strategist/communication assistant/something PR related.
To thrive in blogging and keeping this website alive, I’ve relied on a few tools that I spend money on, or use for free. These applications and software can be a game changer in shaping your blog life. They were for me. This post will include affiliate links.
Blogging Tools
- Pinterest: Tailwind Scheduler – Tailwind is the best $119/year that you’ll ever spend. Remembering to Pin daily is exhausting and will kill your soul and love for blogging. With Tailwind I can sit down once a month and schedule shares of all my blogs best performing pins, share pins from other boards and group boards, and get recommendations of other content that will work for my Pinterest board. Tailwind lets my Pinterest board stay alive when I need to focus on other tools.
- Instagram: Facebook Creator Studio – Late in 2019, Facebook rolled out the Creator Studio for users. This is a space where business can schedule, interact, analyze, and more the content they create and publish on Facebook and Instagram. Once you connect your Instagram account to Facebook Creator Studio, you have access to a Native Instagram Scheduler. That’s right. Free scheduling of Instagram content direct from Facebook (owns Instagram) to Instagram. This includes photos, video and IGTV content. You can schedule up to 6 months in advance, declare business partners, add hashtags, and tab people.
Creator studio changed my life. I can sit down when I’m creative and schedule a month of content. Every day I log in and interact with my followers and community. This is amazing because it frees up so much of my brain space on my to-do list for the Cloth Diaper Podcast.
- I recently fell back in love with Canva in 2019.Graphics: Canva – while I do use Adobe Creative Programs and Affinity Designer, Canva is a great tool for designing crisp, clean, creative content for your social media channels. My favourite reason to use Canva is because they have built in dimensions for each platform. This saves me from looking things up every time. Every now and then, I will pay for Canva when I need access to additional graphics or font functionality. Canva also has templates to help guide you creating content that converts. Use them as a guideline, change the fonts, colours, or what have and you’re on your way to Pins for Pinterest and quotes for Instagram.
- Instagram Giveaways: Arbritery – Drawing an Instagram winner can be complicated. I like to keep my giveaways simple and clean, and for that reason Arbitery is the prefect match. There is a fee of $6.99 per month or a $3.99 per draw. I find this to be incredibly reasonable considering many of the other giveaway drawing platforms charge higher fees per month, and I typically only need 1-2 draws per month from time to time. Arbritery lets you choose a winner based on certain criteria and verifies all entries.
- Organizing All The Things: Trello – Trello is an online platform for creating boards and lists and all the things you think you need. I just started learning to use Trello for my other jobs but it is slowly something I’m incorpoating into my blog routine to keep all my thoughts, links, and tasks in one place. Bonus: if I work with someone, then I can share boards with them and bring them up to speed with me.
There are probably more tools that I should be using like headliner, MOZ, and keyword search platforms, but I just don’t care about them. I would rather create content for me then google. These are the tools that keep me sane as a WAHM who loves to write on this silly blog she’s been maintaining for years, and continues to. I’d love to know if theres something I need to know below
Leave a Reply