5 Must Have Blogging Tools For Smooth Blogging

As I started out blogging, many times I came across situations where I had to rely on certain kinds of tools to get certain work done. Thus, I happened to stumble upon some valuable tools that helped me (and still do) make my blogging experience seem like a piece of cake. Sure there are heaps of tools suggested by numerous bloggers online. But here is a list of stuff I cannot blog great without. Most of these make it to the inevitable list of many pro bloggers.

Once you get started with them, it is hard to not deploy these tools.

1. CopyScape: There are numerous cases of plagiarism each day on the web. You as a blogger could be subjected to the backlash of plagiarism as well. Here is where CopyScape enters as a savior. It is a tool that makes it possible for a blogger to check if his new content (probably a guest post to his blog) indulges in copyright infringement. CopyScape also makes it easy for you to keep track of your blog’s content and be proactively informed if it is being snatched by someone else without proper acknowledgement.

2. Creative Commons: Creative Commons is the answer to everything you search for free to be used in your blog. All this without any fear of copyright infringement. You can find resources such as music, videos, and images.

3. Paint.Net: Good blogging involves images. Existence of images brings up the need for image editing (for the image to fit into your blog). Most bloggers are not very technically into image editing. All you need as a blogger is simple image tweaking like resizing, color adjustment, flipping, cropping, merging of pictures, etc. While most such work is generally done with the giant photo-editing software (like Photoshop), I find that for a non-graphic designer, Paint.Net works great, giving results at par with other major image editors.

4. Windows Live Writer: Live Writer is yet another awesome freeware distributed by Microsoft for the Windows platform. This tool is basically a content creator (in simple words – a text editor) that lets you seamlessly make good looking well-organized content for your blog. This tool can be integrated and used to create and submit posts to your blogs in many different platforms including the major one – WordPress.

5. Evernote: Evernote is new to the web and is proved to be an instant hit. As blogger you may want to jot down and keep track of your ideas, maintain a record of your work, collaborate with your team members, store all the content components (like images, text, etc) at one place, or in short – be organized and much more productive. All this can be accomplished by wisely using Evernote. It is being made available on android as well. You should give it a try.

Some other important tools include Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, Keyword research tools, etc. I am not going deep into these as they are by now a more than integral part of blogging.

I bet the above mentioned tools can make your blogging better.

Do share some of the tools you rely on in the comments section below.