Five Blogging Tools Worth Paying For
This post contains affiliate links, which pays to keep me caffeinated.
When you first got into blogging, you were most likely told “Yeah, you should blog because it’s free to set up! Social media is free! It’s all FREEEEE!”
So you get set-up on Blogger, sign up for a few social media accounts, and BOOM start down the yellow brick blogging road.
The problem is eventually you need more. Of something.
Maybe you move to self-hosted WordPress and have to pay to have your blog hosted. Or you buy e-courses to cut your learning in half. Regardless, you do have to put some money towards blogging in order to grow. I don’t really know any successful bloggers who haven’t spent a penny on their blogs. I’ve paid for my fair share of products. And some weren’t worth it.
But these five blogging tools are totally worth the money.
1Password
My husband introduced me to 1Password years ago and it’s been my saving grace for my useless memory ever since.
With 1Password, you can store all your username and passwords (and your credit card numbers) in one place. No more trying to remember which username you went with for this site or that. It’ll even generate passwords for you, which I let it do for any site that has my money like PayPal or my credit union. They are passwords I’d never remember on my own, but I don’t need to! 1Password has an accompanying phone app so you’ll never get stuck not knowing a password. Unless you forgot to save that password in 1Password. BURN.
There might be free apps out there that are similar, but sorry I don’t trust a free product to hold the passwords to my bank accounts or my credit card number. Nope. No way.
Tailwind
Tailwind is solely for Pinterest, but don’t let that stop you. Tailwind lets you schedule pins (and re-pins!); plus they have even more amazing analytics than Pinterest itself. And, yes, I know about other paid scheduling apps like Board Booster and ViralTag, but Anna and I don’t recommend them in Pinning Perfect. Why? They don’t have Pinterest API access, which means they aren’t supported by Pinterest like Tailwind is. Pinterest treats tools with API access as if you’re pinning directly through Pinterest.
If you’re interested in a 10% discount, use this link and code SAVE10.
CoSchedule
Oh CoSchedule, why didn’t you exist years ago? Currently, I don’t use it for content planning because I use the editorial calendar from Content Brew, but I DO plan to make those two co-exist in some way at some point.
I DO use CoSchedule to schedule my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts for each post. I love how I can do it all from WITHIN WORDPRESS. I just scroll down underneath my post editor and it’s there waiting for me.
What I also love? Being able to see my social shares!
Mailchimp
I’ve used a few Email Service Providers over the course of my marketing career. And really, I love Mailchimp the most. Not only do they have the best brand voice ever, the platform is a cinch to use. The drag-n-drop feature makes it easy to create snazzy looking emails that make other bloggers jealous. Just kidding- there’s no jealousy in blogging. (Kidding about that too.)
They’ve also broken down their pricing into lots of levels so you can inch up in cost as you build your subscriber base. Oh and did I mention it’s free up to your first 2,000 subscribers?
Premium Plugins
Okay, so this one isn’t exactly just ONE thing. Sometimes you just have to cough up some dough for a PAID plugin because the free ones either don’t exist or they suck. Where do you find these gems? My go-to place is CodeCanyon.
Ubergrid is probably my favorite plugin and one that I plan to use even more. WordPress FAQ Plugin is also a big favorite that I’m starting to use on my product pages and plan to use elsewhere too.
What’s Your Favorite Paid Tool?
Which paid blogging tool can you NOT live without?
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P.S. 10-Minute Touch Ups are officially moving to Thursdays!
