I as a blogger always try to automate my work with the help of tools so that I can focus my precious time on other important things.

Not only me, there are many bloggers in this industry who are using tools to make their blogging career simple, easy and more profitable.

You’ll agree with me on this. Bloggers are fond of “Freedom.”

Blogging is an art, and using the best tools for your online business can help you shine out in front of your competitors and help you achieve more freedom.

But, have you thought which tools are best for you?

I have used more than hundreds of tools over the years.

Some of them are good, best and incredibly powerful, One should use these tools. But many of them are not worth giving a try. Seriously, getting access to the right tools is the fastest way to create great content, drive more traffic and boost your website sales.

In this blog post, I’ll be sharing the top 10 tools that every blogger needs if they are treating their blog as a business. All the tools are mandatory for running a successful blog. Soe of the tools are free, Some of them are only paid and some of them are Freemium.

Freemium is a combination of the words “free” and “premium” used to describe a business model that offers both free and premium services. Here freemium means you will get basic and limited service free of cost and advanced or additional features at a premium.

I’ll cover all the tools that will help you do email marketing, keyword research, social media marketing, SEO, Designing, and structuring your website.

So without further ado, let’s dive right in!

Top 10 Blogging Tools You Must be Using in 2018

#1. Canva [Free]

Canva is a social media image tool that has pre-built templates for all the major social platforms out there. You can create featured images for your blog posts, social media content, infographics, cover images and the list goes on and on. The free version of Canva is more than enough for any blogger but if you want their premium graphics library then you need to upgrade to the paid plan which starts at $12.95/mo.

I personally use this tool often to create all the graphics for my social media handles and my personal blog. They also have more than 50+ fonts to play with and millions of stock photos and graphics to take your designing experience to a whole new level.

#2. Grammarly [Freemium]

Hands down, not every blogger is good at grammar. We all make a ton of mistakes while writing the first draft version of the article. However, with Grammarly, you can solve all the grammatical errors of the article in real-time. Grammarly is a freemium tool that solves the basic errors like spelling mistakes, punctuations, passive voice errors in the free version.

However, if you want your article to be free from any grammatical mistake whatsoever then you need to upgrade to the paid plan which starts at $11.95/mo which solves all the advanced grammatical errors.

Grammarly is the tool which most of the bloggers use nowadays. The tool is super handy to use and it also has a chrome browser extension that can analyze text on any website.

#3. Yoast SEO [Free]

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin which is a complete package to optimize your article for Google. Yoast helps you in detecting the real-time on page errors that your article have

There are more than 12+ factors that Yoast checks in real-time for every article you write on your website including keyword density, image alt text, SEO title length, whether the targeted keyword is used in the H2 or H3 tag or not.

The plugin is free to use for all the WordPress users and it’s best for all those who are just starting out in SEO and want a gist of what all needs to be done to optimize an article that ranks well in Google.

#4. Buffer [Freemium]

The Buffer is an industry standard social media scheduling tool which is known for its minimalistic design. The User Interface (UI) is easy to understand and use. With Buffer, you can connect all your major social media accounts and start scheduling all your posts. The tool is best for all the bloggers and social media marketers who struggle to manage their social handles.

The Buffer is free if you schedule 2 posts daily. However, if you want to schedule more posts than you need to upgrade to their paid plan. Not only scheduling, you can check analytics, collaborate with team members, and lock all your social media accounts under one dashboard.

#5. SEMRush [Paid]

SEMRush is a complete marketing suite for all the digital marketers and bloggers. You can check competitors backlink, find out keywords, run an SEO audit, manage social media accounts, find out broken links and many more things. The tool is capable of performing all the tasks that a blogger or marketer is looking for.

SEMRush is a paid tool that starts at $99/mo. But before you upgrade to a paid plan, I’d highly recommend you to start a 7-day free trial and if you like the tool you can then upgrade to the paid plan.

#6. KWFinder [Paid]

KWFinder is one the best keyword research tool on the market right now. The best thing about KWFinder is you get to see a difficulty score for every keyword you search. With the difficulty score, you can analyze what keywords are best for your website to target. The difficulty scale goes from 0 to 100.

With the advanced filters, you can churn out low competition keywords that are perfect for you to target. The free plan gives your 5 searches for 24 hours but if you need more research than you need to upgrade to their paid plan that starts from $29/mo. It’s one of my personal favorite tools and I use it since long to find out the low competition keywords for my blog and trust me I’m ranking on a good number of keywords.

#7. ConvertKit [Paid]

As you all know about running an online business successfully you need to master email marketing. But mastering email marketing has to do a lot with the tools you use to send out your newsletters. That’s when ConvertKit comes into the picture. It’s an email marketing tool which all the big marketers and bloggers are using right now to send out weekly newsletters to their subscribers and eventually generating sales from those emails.

ConvertKit is a well-known tool because of its clean servers that helps your email land in the primary tab of the user. Moreover, it has advanced features like tagging, segmentation and automation workflows which make your life easy to manage a huge subscriber list. ConvertKit starts at $29/mo for 1000 subscribers

#8. Leadpages [Paid]

If you are in selling any online product or service, You definitely need a beautiful looking landing page that converts visitors into customer. Creating good-looking landing page is one most difficult task for the blogger.

Leadpages is a landing page builder tool. With Leadpages, you can create beautiful looking pages on your website that directly connects with your readers. It’s cheap and handy to use. Starting at $25/mo you can create landing pages and sell your products and courses that will generate a positive ROI for your business.

#9. Optinmonster [Paid]

Email Marketing is useless if you don’t have subscribers to send out emails. Optinmonster helps you collect emails by showing your readers beautiful pop-ups that convert them into loyal subscribers. With Optinmonster you can collect leads in various ways like showing a pop-up, welcome screen mate, sidebar popup, exit popup.

Optionmonster has a prebuilt library of templates or if you want to create your own opt-in form then you can do that as well with the inbuilt drag and drop builder. It will take less than 10 minutes for you to create a beautiful looking opt-in form.

It’s a paid tool that starts for as low as $9/mo.

#10. Pixabay [Free]

Being a blogger, you must be knowing that copying someone else’s work on the internet can cause a big trouble for you and your brand be it photos or videos you cannot copy others work on your blog directly.

Pixabay can help you save from this issue. With Pixabay, you get millions of high-quality full HD stock photos for free. Pixabay has photos for all the niches you can directly use the images on your website without giving credits to anyone because you own the image.

Wrap Up:

All the above-listed tools are those which I am using right now. If you are doing blogging as a business then like other business you also need to invest some money in it.

Yeah, there are many tools available which are free to use but they will give limited service and often not updated. Comparing to paid tools free tools will not give you excellent results.

I hope you liked our top 10 picks of best blogging tools in 2018. Most of the paid tools include a free trial so give them all a try once. If you like it then invest.

If you still have any doubts or feel like I have missed out on something important then don’t forget to leave a comment down below. I’d be more than happy to help you out.