I wish I could say that blogging is as simple as putting words on a page and pressing “publish.” But the truth is that there are a slew of tools and blogging apps that I rely on to run my business successfully.
My aesthetic, graphics, hosting videos, tracking data, and creating pages for my offers and products are all absolutely crucial parts of the business I’ve built.
It’s taken lots of trial and error to find the set of resources that support my business the way I need them to. But I’ve finally created a library full of incredible blogging apps that help me enhance everything from email marketing to my graphics.
These are my picks for the 10 Blogging Apps Every Blogger Should Be Using. Find out why I love each and every one of them, and how I use them to support my blog every day.
1. ClickFunnels
One of the best ways to monetize your blogs is by selling your own products or services. To do this, I use ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels is my go-to tool for building my sales funnels, and I use it all the time. A sales funnel is a sequence of steps used to guide a visitor through a purchase.
ClickFunnels helps me create really easy, professional looking landing pages to promote my digital courses and products. They offer tons of templates to make building your pages easy.
Plus, the templates are designed by marketing professionals specifically to help increase conversions.
I like it because it’s way more user-friendly than other sales funnel programs. And guides you through building a sales funnel from the opt-in to the thank you page easily.
You can also use it with other email autoresponders to add subscribers or purchasers to certain email lists.
You can sign up for a free trial or grab your own account here.
2. SumoMe
I’ve mentioned my love of SumoMe before, and that’s because it’s such a comprehensive set of traffic building tools. SumoMe is a plugin that offers a set of tools designed to help you optimize your web page and boost traffic.
It has a host of capabilities. You can use it to create opt-ins such as an email bar (Smart Bar) at the top of the page and email pop-ups on each page (List Builder & Scroll Box).
You can also install share buttons on each page. SumoMe is famous for the side share buttons you see on web pages. These help track how many shares you’ve gotten across each platform and make it easy for visitors to share.
You can also create content upgrades easily on SumoMe, which I use a lot of. They work hand in hand with the opt-in forms. I can offer a freebie in exchange for an email subscribe right in the opt-in form, called the Welcome Mat.
The best part is, it integrates seamlessly with WordPress and other platforms. And it has analytics such as the heat map which helps you track which parts of each page your readers are clicking on the most. This way you know the most effective part of your page to place your opt-ins.
There are free and paid versions. You can sign up for your free SumoMe account for your blog here.
3. Push Crew
Push Crew is an app that allows you to send push notifications to any visitor who opts in.
Push notifications are highly visible and make it easy for people to opt-in to your offers in real time. Anyone subscribed to receive your notifications hear about your new post or offer without having to open an email.
Plus, Push Crew allows me to segment my subscribers based on their interests so I can send them notifications specifically aligned with what they like.
This helps increase my conversions and I really like being able to personalize the stuff I send out. I never want my notifications to be promotion mills.
Being able to personalize ensures that I can send offers I genuinely believe my subscribers will be interested in instead of just spamming them and hoping something lands.
Sign up for Push Crew here to start personalizing your own push notifications.
4. Active Campaign
Active Campaign is an email marketing program. It automates email sequences and organized customer data. This way, I can make informed decisions about what to send to different members of my email list.
It also tracks data so you can see how well each marketing email performs.
It has an awesome built-in email campaign builder with templates to make professional campaigns. It also allows you to track user’s browsing data.
Using Active Campaign has been a really valuable switch for my business because I can optimize and target my email marketing efforts based on data.
Sign up here.
5. Trello
Trello is a web-based project management system that many people are familiar with. The reason I prefer Trello over other programs like Asana is that it’s really user-friendly. Trello uses different boards and “cards” within them to organize different projects.
You can create a board for “Blogger Outreach” and then different cards to track the different stages of the task. For example, I might have “Emailed,” “Interview Scheduled,” “Interview Transcribed,” and “Blog Post Written.”
Then, I’ll just move the cards through the different sections as I progress through the task.
Because Trello is really visual, it makes it easy to see each team member’s progress on every task. You can assign cards to individuals and even subscribe to cards so you get an email notification whenever a card is moved or updated.
You can sign up here if you want to start managing your own team’s projects.
6. Rev
Rev is my favorite transcription tool because it’s super fast and easy to use. I use Rev anytime I need a recording transcribed, such as an interview with a fellow blogger or webinar session.
All you have to do is upload your recording to Rev and checkout. Then, within 24 hours (usually much less in experience), you’ll receive a word doc transcription of the entire audio piece.
You can even rate the transcription for satisfaction.
It is a paid service, and costs $1 per minute of audio. But, for me, the convenience of having my recordings transcribed so quickly and painlessly is absolutely worth the cost.
You can sign up for an account here.
7. Snag It
This is a web-based app for screen capture and screen recording. Every laptop has a screenshot capability. I know, I know. But Snag It is a screenshot enhancer.
You can choose which part of your screen to take a screen capture of. That means instead of capturing the whole screen, you can resize to get just the part you need without having to crop the image later.
It also has a slew of mark up capabilities. You can add arrows, text, and graphics to your capture. Plus, the recording capabilities make it easy to film tutorials for my team and our blog, as well as to create animated GIFs.
You can sign up here.
8. Wistia
Wistia is an awesome video platform that I use that’s available as a web-based app, as well as for iOS and android.
Wistia is amazing because it allows me to host and customize videos that I’ll embed into my sales funnels. I can add a call-to-action and opt-ins right over the video which allows me to turn my videos into yet another list building tool.
The more often people see something, the more likely they are to sign up for it. So, if I can place a call to action on my website, on my click funnel, and then again over the video in my click funnel, that’s 3 times a visitor gets exposed to my offer.
It also has a heat map function so I can see viewing trends, as well as data analytics like an engagement graph for each video.
You can also customize your play bar and restrict where your videos can be played. All in all it’s just a great tool that gives you a lot of control over your videos.
They offer tiered pricing, but there is a free version that will work well for anyone who only needs to host the occasional video. You can sign up for a Wistia account here.
9. Word Swag
Word Swag is an android and iOS app that lets you add captions, quotes, and text overlays to photos on your mobile phone.
That might not necessarily seem like a revelation, but it’s been my lifesaver when I’ve needed to post a graphic to social media or an email while I’m out and away from my laptop.
It offers quote and caption ideas to jumpstart your brain when you’re having writer’s block. Plus, the text layovers are professionally designed to make any photo look like it was created by a graphic designer.
You can add text to any photo, so it’s a mini, user-friendly graphic design supplement.
You can download it here.
10. Pinsearch
Pinsearch is a tool I developed, but it has become absolutely essential to my business. That’s kind of why I developed it in the first place!
Pinterest is one of the absolute best marketing and blogging tools someone can use. It’s even helped boost Ideal Me’s traffic so much that I created this course to teach others how to do the same.
The thing about Pinterest is that its content is constantly being refreshed. While this is great because it keeps our feeds fresh, it also poses problems for marketing.
Why?
Because popular pins sink to the bottom.
When I’m looking for viral content or what ideas most people are searching for, I want to see the most popular, liked, and repinned content. A pin with 2k repins is going to be a much better lead than a pin with 200 repins.
But it’s a pain in the neck to manually search through all of the pins on Pinterest to find the most popular ones. That’s why Pinsearch is so helpful.
It’s a browser plug-in/extension that automatically sorts through the pages on Pinterest and re-orders the pins from most repinned or most liked to least.
You just make a search on Pinterest, then click your Pinsearch tool. The tool lets you sort through as many pages as you’d like. You can select 5 pages, or 50 pages-however far back you want to go. Then the tool works its magic.
My team and I use this tool all the time when we’re creating blog posts or finding viral content.
You can get the Pinsearch tool here.
Now you see why I just can’t live without these blogging apps! I’m seriously obsessed with each of them. I’m always on the search for things that can help me streamline and save time.
Each of these apps are convenient, user-friendly, and have saved me headaches on more than one occasion. That’s enough to make me a convert for sure.
Want to know more about the strategy that I’ve used to build a successful blog? Sign up for my “Launch Your Six-Figure Blog This Weekend” training to get my exclusive tips and blogging strategy. Launching a profitable blog isn’t magic…you just need the right formula! You can sign up to get it here.
