1. 
   Blogging Tools List – Saves You More Than $997/year.
2. Best Designing and Graphic Tools
3. Keyword Research and SEO Tools
4. Content Marketing Tools
5. Best Social Media Management Tools
6. Free Email Marketing Tools
7. Website/Blog Building Tools
8. Essential WordPress Plugins 
9. Productive Tools
   1. Clockify 
10. Community Collaboration Tools
11. Video Marketing Tools
12. Analytics Tools
13. Random Tools to Grow Your Blog
    1. Plagiarism Checker
14. 4 Blogging Essential Paid Tools 
15. Wrapping Up
    1. 4 thoughts on “55+ Free Blogging Tools That Makes You SuperMan [worth $997]”
    2. Leave a Comment Cancel reply

I know you have very little savings or money to invest in blogging tools.

If you are on a budget, saving money is equal to earning money.

In this blog post I am going to discuss 55+ Free Blogging Tools that will kick-start your blogging career even though if you have no money to invest in blogging tools and also have limited resources at your disposal.

The tools discussed here in this post will help you in enhancing your essential blogging skills and help you find monetary results fast.

Blogging Tools List – Saves You More Than $997/year.

Quick Links for 55+ Free Blogging ToolsCanva Tool​Unsplash​​Pixabay​Awesome Screenshot​Tiny PNG​​UbersSuggest​​​KeyWordsEverywhereAnswerThePublicLSI Graph​Bonus SEO Tools​Quora​BuzzSumo​​SimilarwebMultiple Social Platforms​​Grammarly​​Google Drive​​EverNoteCo-Schedule HeadLine Analyzer​Bonus Resources​Buffer App​​Hootsuite​​​Mailchimp​​​​​Bonus Email Automation Tools​​​​Sumo​​​​​​Collect.Chat​​​​​​ManyChat​​​​​​​WordPress​​​​​​​​Sucurri​UpdraftPlus​​​​​​​​Yoast SEO​​​​​​​W​3 Total CacheEssential WordPress Plugin List​AsanaBonus Productive ToolsZoom.Us​SlackWhatsApp, Facebook And TelegramCategory: Building Your Tribe ​YouTube​Facebook Live​Instagram StoriesCamtesiaCategory: Screen Recording & Video Recording ToolBonus Video Editing And Presentation ToolsAnchor.Fm​Google AnalyticsGoogle Search ConsoleNamechkLeanDomainSearchWebsite Speed TestBlogging Paid Tools [That You Can Not Ignore]

Best Designing and Graphic Tools

1

Canva Tool

Category: Designing & Graphics Tool

• Easy drag and drop design tool
• Limited access to free images and vectors
• Access to over 8000 templates

All images, infographics on FreshersBuddy are created using Canva (free plan). You can learn Canva in 1 week time. Explore and watch Youtube video tutorials on Canva and create awesome images.

Alternate Tools: Crello, Stencil, Piktochart and Snappa

Alternate Paid Tool: PicMonkey – Price: basic plan $8/month

Con: Apart from free images, you will find useful images and vector images that might be exact suitable for your content which you need to buy for $1 if you want to use these images without Canva watermark.

Pricing: Basic version is Free [Paid version with more powerful features starts @ $12.95/month per user]

Get design tips and inspiration for everyone from beginners to professionals.

• https://www.canva.com/learn/design/tutorials/
• https://www.canva.com/learn/design/
• https://about.canva.com/design-community/

2

​Unsplash

Category: Images & Pictures

• Beautiful Free Images and Pictures
• Over 55,0000 High quality resolution images
• Do what ever you want with Royalty free photos.

Your blog requires visual content and high quality stock images which will improve your reader experaince. I use Unspalsh, Pexels, Pixabay and other royality free images providing platforms.

With Unsplash you get beautiful and free stock photos for personal and commercial use – no attribution required.

Con: Finding images related to health niche, Amazon niche websites, etc will be difficult.

Alternate Tools: Pixabay, Shutterography

Alternate Paid Tool: ShutterStock – Price: basic plan $8/month

Pricing: Free to use without attributing the photographer/creator.

Get awesome photos according to your requirement from wallpapers to quality stock photos.

• https://unsplash.com/wallpaper
• https://unsplash.com/free-stock-photos
• https://unsplash.com/creative-commons-images

3

​​Pixabay

Category: Stock Images & Videos

• Stunning Images and Videos
• Over 1.5 million High quality images
• Browse Images, Videos, Illustration and Vectors from 20 different categories such as food, business, beauty and health.

Both Unsplash and Pixabay along with pexels has a wide variety of quality images released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes these platforms safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the photographer or creator – even for blogging and other commercial purposes.

Alternate Tools: Pexels,VisualHunts, FreeFoodPhotos

Alternate Paid Tool: ShutterStock – Price: basic plan $8/month

Con: Finding images related to niche websites might be difficult. Search for niche related free stock library such as FreeFoodPhotos platform.

Pricing: Free to use for editorial purpose without attributing the artist .

You can follow popular artist, editorial picks and use videos for editorial purpose for free.

• https://pixabay.com/en/videos/
• https://pixabay.com/en/editors_choice/
• https://pixabay.com/en/users/?order=popular

4

​Awesome Screenshot

Category: Screenshot Capturing Tool

• Easy to use screen capturing tool 
• Highlight, crop, use annotations, comments, blur sensitive info with ease. 
• Capture all or part of any web page and share with one-click uploads. 

As part of creating blog visual content when you publish tutorial or information related blog post you will require to share step by step or specific screens to support your content. You also might require to highlight, crop, add comments etc. For this reason screen capturing tools will be helpful in your blogging career.

Alternate Tools: Light Share, Picpick, ShareXcreen shot and

Alternate Paid Tool: Snagit – Price: Single License $49.95/user

Con: Few bugs when you try to take screenshot of tables [use both Awesome screenshot and light screenshot tools]

Pricing: Free to use when you add as a Chrome, Firfox extension.

Available on Mac and Windows platforms.

Academy resources that help you to create screen recordings and how to use light for video etc..

• https://academy.techsmith.com/

5

​Tiny PNG

Category: Image Compressor Tool

• Quick and easy to use drag and drop options.  
• Compatible on all modern browsers including mobile devices.
• Smart lossy compression techniques are used to reduce the file size. 

For faster loading and utilizing less bandwidth to improve Search Engine Optimization results we need to use images that will not take up more file size. Also, to make our website faster we need to keep the image file size minimum. Tiny PNG saves disk space and bandwidth by compressing images without comprimising on quality.

Alternate Tools: Smush WordPress plugin and ImageOptim

Paid Tools: Both Tiny PNG and WP Smush offers premium tools – Price: $25 per year/user

Con: File size > 5MB can not be compressed. 

Pricing: Free and paid options available.

Automate optimizing of all your images by integrating with the image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.

• https://tinypng.com/photoshop  [Checkout Tinypng Photoshop tool]
  

Keyword Research and SEO Tools

6

​​UbersSuggest

Category: Keyword Research Tool

• Get free Keyword ideas and sugegstions 
• Country specific search volume traffic filter options  with  Keyword difficulty and Competitive Intelligence.
• Only Keyword tool in its class providing unlimited searches for free.

Find keyword ideas, search volume, competition and much more with UberSuggest. Ubersuggest is the new addition to favorite keyword research tool among digital marketers and SEOs.  Ubersuggest aquired by Industry SEO expert Neil Patel and now he is working on making Ubersuggest a strong competitor to SEMrush premium tool (promised to provide all SEMRush features for free for Bloggers – Good news for newbie bloggers)

Alternate Tools: https://serps.com/ and https://kparser.com/ 

Alternate Paid Tool: SEMRush – Price: $100 per month

Con: You will find great list of keyword suggestions, finding out relevant keywords that suits your primary seed keyword will be tedicious task.

Pricing: Free with powerful keyword and SEO analysis features.

Get all the UberSugget updates and new features addition details by signing up to Neil Patel newsletter.

7

​​​KeyWordsEverywhere

Category: Keyword Research Tool

• Get free Keyword search volume 
• Find similar Keywords that Google users type and get some keyword inspiration.
• One click installation helps you track every keyword that your potential reader type on Search Engines.

Finding the keywords that your users type on Google, keyword competition and monthly search volume is key to Blogging success. KeywordEverywhere is available as Chrome and Firefox extension and helps you to track search volume when you type any serach query online [Google, Amazon and AnswerthePublic] to name a few.

Alternate Tools: UberSuggest, SERP’s and Kparser tools will also provide search volume. But KeywordEverywhere is a dynamic tool where you no need to perform keyword serach volume. With the installation of KeywordEverywhere the tool shows the stats without you being seraching.

Alternate Paid Tool: SEMRush and MOZ – Price: $100 per month

Con: You will find great list of keyword suggestions and finding out relevant keywords that suits your primary seed keyword will be tedicious task. 

Pricing: Free and dynamic Extension Tool

Check this post by me on How to do keyword research using 7 Free Tools.

8

AnswerThePublic

Category: Keyword Research Tool

• Beautifull visually backed keyword tool 
• Understand the emotions of the people and get content ideas.
• Find out what questions people ask on Google.

AnswerThePublic is a data visualization keyword tool where you will find a set of keywords related to your user questions.

This is the unique feature of the tool that unlike other keyword suggestion tools, it provides keyword related to your user pain points, which can help you decide which keywords to focus so that your users value.

Alternate Tools: Quora,UberSuggest, SERP’s and Kparser tools will also provide question keywords but you will find very difficult to identify. Quora will be close match as it provides keywords related to user questions.

Premium: AnswerThePublic also has the premium plan which will give access to unlimited searches, filter options such as language and location based results.

Con: You will find great list of keyword suggestions and finding out relevant keywords that suits your primary seed keyword will be tedicious task. 

Pricing: Freemium model with $49/month pro option. 

Workshop and learning resources: https://learn.answerthepublic.com/ ​

9

LSI Graph

Category: Keyword Research Tool

• Helps search engines understand our content better.
• Find relevant keywords that Google loves. 
• Find out all different phrases people type on Google.

LSI Graph will suggest keyword phrases that your users might be searching for.

Keyword ideas that LSI Graph tool provide are based on phrases that people actually search for. Adding the suggested keywords in your post will boost your website rankings.

Alternate Tools: Google auto suggestions and https://lsikeywords.com/

Premium: SEOPressor starts $9/month.

Con: You can only perform 3 searches per day.

Pricing: Freemium model with $49/month pro option. 

Check this post on How to do keyword research using LSI Graph.

10

​Bonus SEO Tools

Category:Keyword Research & SEO Tools

•  Keywordtool.io
• SEMRush 
• KeyWordFinder 
• Wordtracker
• WordStream 
• SEO Book 
• Google Keyword Planner
• AHref
• LongtailPro

Note: You can find alternate Free Tools that will help you find keywords which will boost your organic search results when you click on the above image. 

All the above-listed tools are premium tools but will allow to perform limited searches per day.
When you are starting and when you are on a budget make use of the free limited access and find out keywords that will work for you.

Must Try Tools: SEMRush, AHref, KeywordFinder and Buzzsumo.

Premium: You can try the premium version for 2 months if you can afford money and do the research and plan your content for one year which is possible. [Will cost you $300/month for the must try 4 tools that I mentioned above]

Con: If you can not dedicate focused time while you are on premium plan you will be tempted to waste few more dolloars by opting to extend premium subscription plan.

Check this post on How to do keyword research without using the paid tools on ZERO budget.

Content Marketing Tools

11

​Quora

Category: Content Creation

• Good platform to find out your audience questions and pain points.
• Find great questions that your audience want answers. 
• Find out answers written by other experts and get inspiration.

Quora is a question and answer website where you can gain and share knowledge. People provide insights, quality answers and contribute to the community.

Type your blog niche topic on the serach bar and find tons of free knowledge shared across the platform.

You can also use this platform to republish your blog posts to get more eye balls and traffic to your website.

Alternate Tools: Reddit, Ask.com, Yahoo answers.

Con: Aggressive spamming, link sharing and average answers without value will be deleted.

Pricing: Open your free acount and ask questions or write answers to topics related to your blog niche.

Check out my Quora profile and answers I wrote on topics related to startups, online business and money making.

12

​BuzzSumo

Category: Content Development

•  Find what content is working better.
• Find key influencers to promote your content. 
• Understand the social foot print and plan your content strategy.

With Buzzsumo you can find most shared content online for any given topic. Helps you in content research, influencer marketing and finding quality backlinks. 

You can also use BuzzSumo for finding major influencers in your blog niche, Outreach and connect with them so that you can write roundup posts and interview articles on your blog.

With free version you are allowed to do limited searches.

Alternate Tools: ​Influence.co, Content Studio.

Con: You can only perform limited searches per day and the tool is costly for a blogger.

Pricing: Freemium model with $99/month pro option. 13

​​Similarweb

Category: Content Research

• Helps you find traffic insights of any website.
• Find similar websites and apps and how they are performing on 10 different metrics. 
• ​Check out popularity and site rankings along with major traffic source of the competitor website.

Find website rankings, traffic sources, competitors, referal traffic and much more with Similarweb.

Extensively helpful to find similar and competitor analysis information. Chrome extension available which is dynamic in providing the popularity of the websites you are browsing.

Alternate Free Tools: Alexa and Similarsite.

Premium Tools: Alexa premium tool and Similarweb premium tool.

Con: Limited access to freemium members and as a blogger we will not be able to invest in the pro tool which is on higher price point.

Pricing: Freemium model with $499/month billed annualy. 

Watch and learn the best resources on competitor analysis from team Similarweb.14

Multiple Social Platforms

Category: Content Distribution

• Republish your content and get more traffic to your blog.
• Establish your personal brand and make connections. 
• Find out real questions from real people and distribute your content as a solution.

Quora, Linkedin, Facebook, Medium, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest and other social channels.

Use popular social platforms as a content distribution channels. Republish your content on these platforms to establish your authority, add value to the community and make connections.

Find out what medium works best for you and maximize your online presence on those platforms.

Alternate Tools: Facebook groups, Slack Groups and Niche Forums.

Con: Over doing and Spamming content without adding value to the community using these platfomrs will lead to your account ban.

Pricing: Free to join with your email account. 

Complete the social profile 100% and give your contact details for better results.​

15

​​Grammarly

Category: Content Writing

• Write without fear using the spell check and contextual spelling mistakes features.
• Fix your common grammar errors. 
• ​Free ad-on which will highlight critical and common writing mistakes.

I use this tool so often that I can not imagine blogging without it. If you are like me who struggle writing grammer and spelling free content Grammarly tool is for you.

Simply, add-on the Grammarly Chrome extension and worry not about spellings and minor Grammar mistakes when you write blog posts, social posts and email copy.

Alternate Tool: Hemmingway Editor, Slick write and Ginger.

Premium: Grammarly also available for $7/month.

Con: Dependcy on the Grammarly tool sometimes make you embarassed and you will have to be careful in using the tool for spell check.

Pricing: Freemium model with $7/month pro option. 

Every blogger brag about Grammarly and Canva tools. [I also do the same]

16

​​Google Drive

Category: Content Writing

• Can be used as a backup and collaborative tool.
• 15 GB free space to host all file types including video files. 
• ​Seamless workflow and ability to organize all your work files in a single place.

Manage your time and improve your efficiency with cloud based collabrative tools such as Google drive.

Generally, I use Google docs and spread sheets to write blog drafts and proof read couple of times and publish on the blog.

With Google drive auto save option and cloud based storage option along with the sharing the blog draft for a quick feedback is awesome for a blogger on a budget.

Sharelarge files that cannot be sent through Gmail and get free 15GB data storage space that can be accessed from any device if you have Gmail account and the internet.

Alternate Tools: Dropbox.

Con: Spell checker tool such as Grammarly will not suggest spelling mistakes when you use Google Drive to write blog posts. [Double work that I do]

I also use Google Drive to backup all my blogging resources, images, videos, files every 2 months and name them with the current date so that I feel safe from my Laptop crash.

17

​​EverNote

Category: Content Ideas

• Capture the ideas and share with team members on the go.
• Evernote’s web app available for desktop lovers like me. 
• Collaborate, share and organize all your ideas and work remotely.

With Evernote, you can capture the notes (a text file, image, audio, sketch etc.) The same note can be accessed instantly on all of your connected devices. (i.e, you can access all the files from your mobile and desktop).

With the tool, you can share notes with your team members or virtual assistance to get feedback, inputs and add some extra info before you roll out any campaign or marketing plan.

Alternate Tools: Paperwork and Turtl.

Con: Evernote doesnot uses end-to-end encryption of your information.

Pricing: Freemium model with $4/month with multiple pro options. 

Getting started and how to use Evernote can be found here…

18

Co-Schedule HeadLine Analyzer

Category: Head Line Ideas

• Improves your head line quality with suggestions that work and drive traffic to your blog.
• Know power words, count and emotion stats to use in your Title. 
• Write titles that converts with Co-schedule.

Co-schedule is available as a WordPress plugin and helps you to plan content calender.
You can schedule and publish posts on the days and time that work for you.

Co-schedule Headline Analyzer will help you drive traffic and increase shares of your posts by suggesting the best titles for your blog post.

Considering the stats your headline will make a great impact such that when you use the headlines sugegsted by Co-schedule will dramatically improve your page hits.

I generally go with the score of more than 70 on Headline Analyzer adding the emotional and tweaking power words. 

Alternate Tools: SEOPressor and Impact blog generator

Con: Tweaking and finding perfect headline for your blog post will take time. Incorporating and using power words is a tedicious task. [Go with your gut and use titles that make sense for your readers]

You can use all the tools listed here and to make money online by blogging.​

19

​Bonus Resources

Category: Content Ideas

• Write content that your user loves.
• Find unlimited ideas and content relevant to your niche. 
• Every platform has huge volume of search data. So, use the information in your work.

Facebook search, Google Trends, Social Mentions, Facebook Communities , Google Autocomplete will provide you content inspiration and ideas related to customer search queries, questions.

Amazon search suggestions will give you great content ideas and writing inspiration if you are in to a Amazon Niche website business.

HubSpot’s blog ideas generation and Porten’s content idea generation tools will help you in coming up with the content that your readers love and value.

Alternate Tools: Google auto suggestions and ​Buzzsumo.

Con: Follow your interest and passion along with the content ideas and trends that the above-mentioned tools help you with. [Complete dependency will be a disadvantage]

Best Social Media Management Tools

20

​Buffer App

Category: Social Media scheduling

• Schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all your social accounts in one place. 
• Add richer content to your posts through buffer fast video and GIF uploader.
• 80,000+ Social Media Marketers trust Buffer.

Buffer makes easy for people to schedule their social media posts on multiple platforms with a single click.

Twitter scheduled posting: With Buffer all you do is compile few tweets and schedule in your Buffer application and the app schedules tweets for your Twitter followers throughout the day from a single dashboard.

Alternate Tools: ​Hootsuite

Premium alternate tools: Social Poilet, Meetedger and Hootsuite

Con: You can only mange 3 social accounts with free plan.

Pricing: Freemium model with $15/month pro option. 

Buffer Blog is one of the best resources to learn about social media.​

21

​​Hootsuite

Category: Social Media scheduling

• Engage customers and manage all social accounts in one place.
• You can replay to customer responses with a single click. 
• Trusted by more than 16 million users worldwide.

Manage multiple social networks from a single dashboard, connect with customers, and grow your brand on social media with Hootsuite. 

Alternate Tools: ​Buffer

Premium: Social Poilet, Meetedger and Buffer.

Con: You can only manage few social accounts and also I found scheduling posts on Instagram account is difficult with Hootsuite.

Pricing: Freemium model with $20/month pro option. 

Hootsuite shares case studies, industry reports worth spending our time on their website.

Free Email Marketing Tools

22

​​​Mailchimp

Category: Email Marketing

• MailChimp is the world’s largest marketing automation platform.
• Free up to 2000 subscribers. 
• Easy to use email campaign builder.

Mailchimp is moderately easy-to-use email marketing platform. You can send email newsletters, campaigns, online surveys and follow-up mails.

Best tool when you are on a budget and will help you to send mails upto 2000 subscribers for free. Whereas Drip email marketing tool which is more powerful and easy to use will only allow to send emails upto 100 subscribers.

Alternate Free Tools: Mailerlite, Drip, EmailOctopus.

Alternate Premium Tools: Drip, Convertkit and Getresponse

Con: You can not promote affilaite links to your subscribers with Mailchimp email tool.

Pricing: Freemium model with $10/month pro option. 

Use all three tools Mailchimp, Drip and Mailerlite when you are starting and move to a best alternative premium tool once you make money from blogging.

23

​​​​​Bonus Email Automation Tools

Category: Email Marketing

• Building your email list for Day 1 is vital for your blogging success.
• You will need to use multiple email marketing tools for multiple campaigns. 
• Get used to the dashboard and interface of each tool and decide what works best for you.

Freemium email marketing tools that you can try for Free are: EmailOctopus, Mailerlite, Sendgrid and Drip.co 

If you are on a budget you need to try Mailchimp and Drip.

But drip provide only 100 free email subscribers. So, plan to use all of the above-mentioned email marketing tools and explore what works best for you.

Premium Email Marketing Tool: Convertkit

​​Get your free trail account using this link.​24

​​​​Sumo

Category: Email Marketing

• Sumo provides Free marketing tools to grow your email list, get more traffic, analytics and much more.
• Free Forever with design tools and basic email integrations. 
• Powering more than 751,802 websites. No coding required.

Sumo is a platform that has more than 10 super cool tools and email signup tools to track and increase website traffic.

With Sumo you have all the required set of free marketing tools in one place that can make your website visitors in to paying customers.

Alternate Tools: GetSocial, Optkit, GetSiteControl

Con: Free Forever upto 200 subscribers.

Pricing: Freemium model with $30/month pro plan for bloggers. 

You can get valuable info from Sumo blog particularly from Sumo Growth studies.​

25

​​​​​​Collect.Chat

Category: Customer support & email optin

• An interactive chat bot for collecting data on your blog.
• Get email id’s and provide customer support. 
• live chat app that will help you automatically chat with your website visitors.

Engage your blog visitors with live chat by asking questions and provide support to basic questions.
Also, collect name, email id and other basic information and provide scripted answers.

Give away free course or freebies and get email ids if you have any free course and use this live chat app as a lead generation. [lead magnets]

Collect chat is an interactive chat widget with free plan for bloggers that can be used to collect data from your blog visitors by asking basic questions, fully on auto-pilot. 

Alternate Tools: ​Zendesk chat, optin chat

Con: On mobile devices the live chat app is not user friendly and occupies maximum screen of mobile that will let vistors to bounce back.

Pricing: Freemium model with $14/month bileld annualy. 

Over 50+ free templates that help you collect data, leads, information and increase your business.

26

​​​​​​ManyChat

Category: ChatBots

• Deliver personalized, 1-on-1 experiences to your customers with ManyChat.
• Best tool to drive new sales, engage and support community.
• No coding required and build your audience with Facebook.

ManyChat will help you create a Facebook Messenger bot for marketing, sales and support. 

Connect, engage and drive traffic to your website with personalized automated messages using ManyChat. 

Alternate Tools: Chatfuel

Con: Platform depended tool. When Facebook did not allow third party tools such as Manychat during July’ 2018 marketers who got good results suffered when the tool did not work.

Pricing: Freemium model with $10/month pro option. 

Free Video course on how to create chat bot for Facebook.​

Website/Blog Building Tools

27

​​​​​​​WordPress

Category: CMS platform

• WordPress is a self-hosted open source software that you can use to create a beautiful blog.
• 31% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online. 
• 45000+ plugins to help you enhance your blog functionality.

WordPress.org is a self-hosted WordPress software publishing tool for content creators which is avialble for free.

Create a free blog with ease using self-hosted WordPress, customize and choose free themes or paid themes to make your blog more appealing to your readers.

Alternate Paid Tools: ​Squarespace.

Con: Best of the best resources and plugins and community support avialble. Choosing the best that works for you will require time and experiance.

Pricing: Free Self-Hosted platform.

Find great free themes and plugins to help your blogging career.​

​​free themes​

Essential WordPress Plugins 

28

​​​​​​​​Sucurri

Category: Security

• Protects your blog from brutal hacks and malware attacks.
• Easy to use dashboard. 
• One click easy activation and gives you analytical security reports.

Sucuri is the most popular security plugin for WordPress. Sucuri is avialble as a Freemium plugin and prevents the website from suspicious security issues and protects your website from hacks and malware.

Alternate Tools: Wordfence, All in one WP security and firewall WordPress plugins.

Premium: premium plan starts at $16.66/month 

Con: ​Limited security features for starter plan.

Pricing: Freemium model with $16.66/month pro option. 29

​UpdraftPlus

Category: Backup WordPress Plugin

• Easy to use interface with one click automatic backup options.
• Restores backups directly from your WordPress control panel. 
• Performs both manual or scheduled backups of all your WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes.

You can have back up and restore the database files with UpdraftPlus plugin:
You have different backup options where you can take backups locally, or back up to Amazon cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, and email, on automatic schedules.

Alternate Plugins: Backup Buddy, BackWPUp andWordPress Backup & Security Plugin

Pricing: Freemium model with $88.90 with additional add ons, free support and upgrades. 

30

​​​​​​​​Yoast SEO

Category: SEO

• Helps search engines understand our content better.
• Get more visitors from Google and Bing 
• Tweak your title, meta tags and improve SEO results.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that will help you analyse your blog content and optimizes your blog for Search Engines such as Google.

Alternate Tools: All in One SEO Pack

Con: ​There was a major Yoast bug in the first half of 2018 and most of the bloggers lost organic traffic due the bug present in the Yoast plugin.

Pricing: Freemium model with $49/month pro option. 

Read Yoast SEO blog on experiencing best content on topics like Content SEO, Technical SEO, Analytics, and WordPress.​

Get your Free SEO basic training by signing up.

31

​​​​​​​W​3 Total Cache

Category: Cachy plugin – optimization

• Improve user experience of your site by increasing website performance.
• Improve SEO especially for mobile-friendly websites with W3 Total cache 
• You can save Up to 80% bandwidth via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more.

W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most comprehencive WordPress performance optimization plugin. 

With W3 Total cache you can improve your blog user experience by improving your server performance by caching pages, posts, database objects, memory, CSS, feeds, reducing the download times and much more. 

Alternate Tools: WP Super Cache

Con: ​Setting up and using W3 Total cache is a challenge for beginners.

Pricing: Freemium model with premium services starts at $200.

​How to install and setup W3 Total Cache plugin perfectly even if you are technically challenged.

32

Essential WordPress Plugin List

Category: WordPress Essential Tools

• You need plugins to enhance your blog functionality, performance and more.
• Find out the best plugins and use very minimum plugins. 
• Plugins makes your job easy and help you work fast.

List of Essential WordPress Plugins: 

1) W3 Total Cache – Website performance
2) WP Smush – Optimize images for speed and SEO purpose.
3) Wordfence – Security
4) SumoMe – Email list building and analytics
5) Yoast SEO – All in one SEO purpose tool with content analysis for SEO
6) Akismet – To protect your blog from spam
7) Tablepress – Create beautiful tables inside posts and pages.
8) Elementor – Page builder plugin
9) Header & Footer – SOGO Add Script Header Footer plugin for adding code in footer and header section.
10) Prettylinks – cloak your affilaite links.
11) Ultimate Social Media – Social media share plugin

There are thousands of useful plugins that can improve your blog. Selecting and utilizing few of the essential blogging plugins that enhances functionality and improve overall performance of your blog is a must for every blogger.

Con: If you depend and use plugins for every simple tasks or functionality your website performance will effect. [You can use upto 20 plugins]

Pricing: All the plugins mentioned are free and wonderful resources for a newbie blogger.

​​

Productive Tools

33

​Asana

Category: Project Management Tool

• Collaborative tool for teams to improve productivity and track project results.
• Easy and user friendly dashboard. 
• Trusted by world best companies.

Improve your team productivity by coordinating all the work, tasks and deadlines set by your team. So everyone knows what needs to get done, who’s responsible for doing it, and when it’s due.
Share files, communicate, and collabrate what to do, when to do and how to do using Asana with your team memebrs.

Alternate Tools: ​Trello

Con: With Free plan you can manage and collabrate with only 15 team memebrs with a limited features.

Pricing: Freemium model with $10/month per member.

For a blogger you never require advanced features and at any point in time you will not manage more than 10 members in your first 3 years.​

34

Clockify 

Category: Time Tracking Tool

• 100% free time tracking tool.
• Advanced time tracking features that make your work tracking easy.  
• Super easy time tracking tool

Clockify is a time tracker tool. Let’s you to track the time you take to do each task.

Use Clockify to track the time you take to complete daily tasks. You can analyse and track your work and the time taken for each task and improve your time management and productivity. 

Alternate Tools: Toggl and Project Hamster.

Pricing: Free to use35

Bonus Productive Tools

Category: Task Management Tools

• You need to-do and task management tools to be organized and work fast.
• Productivity matters for online entrepreneurs. 
• Task management tools makes your job easy and fast.

List of Productive Tools: 

1) To-do List – Task Management Tool

2) Google Drive – File storage, sharing and collaborative editing tool.

3) Evernote – Online notes storage and sharing ideas, info etc.

4) TickTick – To-do and task list and be organized.

5) Workflowy – List-making software help you make task list and be organized

6) Todoist –  Fast and easy to use task management tool.

7) Quire – collaborative task management tool for organizing tasks

8) Calend.ly – Manage all your meetings and get organized and use your time wisely.

9) Wonderlist – Task Management Tool

10) Pocket – Productivity Management Tool

Pricing: Freemium Tools. 

Manage your tasks and be organized, collaborate and complete tasks fast with productive tools. [Pick any of the above-mentioned tools and get organized]

Community Collaboration Tools

36

Zoom.us

Category: Building Your Tribe 

• Zoom provides the art of the state best video meeting quality.
• Screen share photos, web, Dropbox files and much more.. 
• Conduct Online Meetings, Training, Technical Support and Webinars.

Stay connected with your team or potential customers and conduct meetings, training and communicate your message with high quality screen sharing, and instant messaging features.

With Zoom you get reliable, effective web and mobile conferencing online meetings. You can also work with anyone, anywhere in the world and get things done. 

Zoom offers a full-featured Basic Plan for free with unlimited meetings.

Alternate Tools: ​Skype, Hangouts, GotoMeetings.

Con: You can only host upto 100 people with 40 mins limit on group meetings.

Pricing: Freemium model with $14.99/month pro option. 

Zoom is vital for selling your online course or conducting any other meeting in a closed environment.37

​Slack

Category: Building Your Tribe 

• Build community for your online success.
• Simple to use and organize topics and segment channels. 
• Collaboration and communication tool for like-minded group of people.

Digital Marketers use slack as a community tool to stay updated on latest happening in the internet world. Collabrate, network and ask questions and get answers from experts.

There are slack communities for developers, designers, marketers, business owners and other groups.

Best Resources and Slack Commuinities:

1) The best slack communities for bloggers that you must join curated by JeffBullas
2) The 11 slack Communities for SEO and Digital Marketers listed by aHref

Slack is a powerful project management and collbartive tool that will help you collaborate with fellow team-mates and get things done fast. 

Alternate Tools: Trello, Asana

Pricing: Freemium model with $6.67 Per active user, per month.38

WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram

Category: Building Your Tribe 

• WhatsApp Groups
• Facebook Groups
• Telegram groups

You build your list and send valuable content and tips and information that you generally do not share in your blog.

This way you build a relation and establish human connection and sell your stuff using email campaigns.

For every business you need sales support and community building platforms to engage with your customers. Personal Whatsapp, Facebook and Telegram groups that you create to take care of your customer every questions will make you successful online.

Building your own tribe and community will help you in the long run and create a loyal customer base so that what ever you create the community likes it.

Alternate Tools: You can also create your own community with slack.

Con: Your customers expects you to support and answer all the questions. So, community platforms will take your extra time. [be prepared]

Gains: You can also get the real problems and pain points of your customers and hence work on providing solution to your community. [when you support community you get monetary results in the long term]

Video Marketing Tools

39

​YouTube

Category: Free Traffic

• Publish your video content for free
• Upload your videos, share valuable content and get paid for your work. 
• Get free traffic to your site by uploading useful content that your users love.

Open your YouTube account for free and start publishing valuable video content online.
YouTube helps you to get more traffic and build your online presence.

YouTube is a video-sharing platform that allows you to upload, view, and share videos. You can convert your blog posts in to a compelling videos and get high targetted vistors to your blog.

If you want to dominate online and be successful getting on to YouTube and doing video marketing is a must. [I fear camera and so you do not see my YouTube channel yet.]

Pricing: Free platform with monetisation option.

Create your first YouTube channel using this link.​

40

​Facebook Live

Category: Building Your Tribe 

• Boost your online reach and engage your audience with Facebook Live. 
• Improve your organic reach on Facebook. 
• Share your thoughts seamlessly on Facebook Groups, pages and profile.

Share live videos with your followers, freinds, group members and public.

Facebook Live is a great platform to attract targetted customers for your products that you sell on your blog or bring in new customers for your website.

As Facebook focusing more on video content and giving extra organic push for video content.

Getting on to Facebook Live and engaging your followers or potential users is a must.

What to do: Use your smartphone and go live and share valuable info related to your blog niche.

Pricing: Free to use and great way to drive more organic traffic to your site.

The complete guide to Facebook Live Video by Hootsuite.
How do I go live on Facebook?

41

​Instagram Stories

Category: Building Your Tribe 

• Drive engagement and value to your followers using Instagram Stories.
• Create dynamic videos with hands-free option. 
• Stunning filters, lenses, motion and much more features that make your videos shareable.

Now, you can also share beautiful and fun moments of your blogging life with friends and followers through a series of videos on Instagram.

Stories on Instagram are now popular and if your in to food blogging, life style blogging or travel blogging then make use of Insta stories to your best to get more traffic and loyal followers.

Con: Instagram’s stories that you craete will expire after a day.

Pricing: Free platform. 

How do I share a photo or video to my Instagram story?

This is a great resource from Hubspot on How to Make an Instagram Story Like a Pro?

​​

42

Camtesia

Category: Screen recording & Video recording tool

• Powerful all in one Screen recording and video editor tool.
• Let’s you create how to tutorials. 
• Free and easy to use tool for beginners with 14 million users.

Camtasia Studio lets you create professional quality videos with powerful screen recording and video editing tools.

Create professional training, explainer, presentation and demo videos for your followers and customers. Useful to create how to tutorials and get more eye balls from your audience.

Compatible with Windows and Mac platform.

Alternate Tools: Open Broadcaster software and Windows Movie Maker

Pricing: Freemium model with $249/licence. 

Download free version of Camtasia.

43

Bonus Video Editing and Presentation Tools

Category: Video Editing Tools

• Easy to use mobile applications.
• Great features with tap and click options. 
• Create stunning videos that attracts your audiance.

Quick, Filmora Go, Prezi, Powtoon, Lumon 5 etc… 

Create video content and distribute over social media channels for quick attention from your audience. People are attracted to video over boring text content. With Facebook, Google giving preference to video content and boosting organic traffic for creative video content.

With this trend…

As a blogger, video making and editing skills are must. Availability of multiple video editing tools with powerful features and easy to use interface making bloggers work easy.

Pricing: Free tools and apps that can be used from your smartphone on the go.
44

anchor.fm

Category: Free Podcasting Tool

• The easiest way to start a podcast.
• Publish unlimited podcast episodes for free.
• Track how your podcast episodes performing with powerful analytics.

Anchor.fm is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds that you can use to edit your audio files for podcasting purpose.

People are willing to do multi tasking and especially while travelling or waiting for a meeting etc. So, creating podcast episodes (audio content) will bring in additional traffic to your blog.

Republish your blog content in the form of audio and enjoy additional traffic to your site.

Alternate Tools: Audacity,GWavepad and Mixpad.

You can monetize your podcasting episodes with Anchor.fm

Embed podcast recordings on your website or blog and hook your audience.

Pricing: Free to use recording and editing software. 

You can also create podcast episodes from anywhere in the world using Anchor mobile apps with a click using your smartphones.

How to start a Podcast?

Analytics Tools

45

​Google Analytics

Category: Free Podcasting Tool

• Gain insights about your blog traffic real-time.
• Key metrics like bounce rate, sessions and page views data can be analyzed. 
• Find out what is working for you by monitoring your website/blog and improve your efforts.

As a blogger you are more used to Google Analytics and you also might be checking your traffic details, page visits and traffic sources multiple times in a day as I used to do for a long time when I started.

Gain insights into your website traffic and know more about your visitors and traffic sources and how they are interacting with your site.

Google Analytics: For insights into your user experience, sources of traffic and visitor data including the user geographical data, time spent and pages viewed etc can be analyzed.

Alternate Tools: ​Clicky and Bing analytics for Bing search engine

Pricing: Free 46

Google Search Console

Category: Free Analytical Tool

• Analyse Traffic real time.
• Know your audience, traffic source and website data. 
• Find out what keywords that your blog showing in search results.

Google Webmaster Tool i.e, Search Console provides you with detailed reports about your blog traffic, potential errors, demographics and all the data about your visitors, what keywords your blog ranking for and much more. [You can create content related to same keywords or similar keywords to get more traffic]

Google Console: Formerly known as webmaster tool is a great free SEO tool with which you can effectively monitor website performance. It provides detailed reports on your search traffic, click-through rates and mobile vs. desktop traffic etc…

Alternate Tools: Clicky and Statcounter.

Pricing: Free

What is Search Console and why you need to use it?

Random Tools to Grow Your Blog

47

Plagiarism Checker

Category: Plagiarism Checking Tool

• You can upload file, copy and paste the content or use the URL to scan the uniqueness of the content.
• Simple and user-friendly tool.  
• Both Android and IOS applications available for ease of use on the go.

User friendly and quick to use, simple copy paste content area to check the originality of the content.

You can copy and paste the content you want to check for duplicate content or use the file upload option or simply type the URL to scan the originality of the content.

Alternate Tools: duplichecker and plagiarism checker

Con: You can only perform limited words (1000 words per search) or pharses to check the orginality of the content

Pricing: Free to use.48

Namechk

Category: Domain Name Availablity

• Know the availability of your social channels usernames.
• 50+ social channels can be searched 
• Helpful to recall your brand name [using same name everywhere] 

Find a unique username across all the top social media sites

Use Namechk to see if your desired username available at popular Social Networking platforms. Helps you promote your brand consistently by registering same username on all social channels. 

Your brand name will be consistent and easy for people to remember and recall and provide a strong branding intangible assets.

Alternate Tools: KnowEm

Pricing: Free to use.49

LeanDomainSearch

Category: Finding Brand-able Names for Your Blog

• Find brand-able name for your blog.
• You will only get available domain names that you can buy. 
• Explore more than 100’s of names which you never thought of.. 

Finding brandable names which are short, easy to spell and remember is tricky. With almost all of the regular and creative domanin names have been already taken, finding your desired blog name will be a huge task.

Lean Domain Search will help you find great available domain names to register by combining searchable keywords.

Lean Domain Search is domain name search tool that lets you enter keywords and it will look up domains availability by providing different combination with prefix and post keywords.

Alternate Tools: Machiname and Domain Suggestions

You can also check the available social usernames after you found great blog name for your business.

Finding Social usernames also important which will give you a recall brand name for your audience.

For example I have not got FreshersBuddy username for Facebook page so I used FreshersBuddydotcom [you can avoid it]

50

Website Speed Test

Category: Speed Test Tools

• Your blog speed is important
• Know what is wrong with your website speed performance with detailed reports.
• Measure up-time and downtime of your blog.

List of top 3 Website/Blog speed testing tools:

1) Pingdom tool
2) GTmetrix
3) Google speed test tools.

Alternate tools: Sitespeedtester and Pagespeed Insights

Pingdom is a web site monitoring and speed test tool. Measure up-time, downtime, and the performance of your website/blog.

GTmetrix is a free tool that analyzes your page’s speed performance. Using Page Speed and YSlow metrixs.

Find recommendations to fix the issues.

Pricing: Freemium model with pro options available.

4 Blogging Essential Paid Tools 

$

Blogging Paid Tools [that you can not ignore]

• Doamin Name/ blog name
• Hosting Services 
• Paid Theme optimized and designed for SEO

1) Get Your Domain name right

2) Get SEO optimized theme

3) Invest in Super fast Hosting provider

4) SEO Tool [SEMRush]

Register Your Domain Name: Namecheap, Godaddy   – approx $5 to $12 per year

Buy Hosting: Siteground and A2Hosting  – approx $72 per year

Get paid Themes: Thrive, Generatepress, StudioPress and Mythemeshop – approx $39 to $120

SEO Tool: SEMRush [keyword, back links and competitor research tool]

Bonus Tools that you can plan to invest:  Thrive Membership and Convertkit

Wrapping Up

We have discussed about 55+ free blogging tools that help you grow your blog when you are on a budget.

We also have talked about world class tools that are available for free to assist you and enhance your blogging work. [get things done fast].

This post has more than 100+ free blogging tools (including the mentioned alternate free tools). Let me know if I have missed any tools that you feel worth not listed in the article by commenting below. I am happy to add to the list and make it a perfect beginner blogging tools guide.