7 of the best tools for bloggers worth paying for

I’ve been blogging since 2012, in that time I’ve used lots of different tools and resources for bloggers. With lots of tools out there, I wanted to share the best tools for bloggers that I use and pay for.

I stand by that you don’t need to spend any money on your blog if you can’t afford it or would rather put your money elsewhere. You can get a free blog and domain with Blogger and WordPress if you are okay not having your own personalised domain. There is no right or wrong answer to how much you should spend on your blog.

But if you do decide to spend some money on blogging tools, you should be looking at blogging tools and resources that help you to:

• save time
• save money
• fill a skill gap you don’t have
• give you results

I always look through my blog expenses every month to see what I have bought and if it’s worth it. This is a good way to get rid of any subscriptions or tools you aren’t actually using. I like to spend about 10% of my blog income on blog tools, blog resources or other things that I can use to better my blog, such as ebooks.

So here are the best blogging tools I currently use.

The best blogging tools I pay for

SocialBee

SocialBee is a social media scheduling tool that you can use to completely automate everything.

I’ve just started using SocialBee for my Twitter and Facebook page posts and I love it so far.

What I love about SocialBee is that you can put tweets into different categories, then schedule something from that category to go live at certain points, or just request a random tweet goes live and then it will continue to loop them over and over. This means all you need to do is add any of your new posts to each category, not manually schedule tweets each day or week.

You can also decide how long you would like a tweet to reloop for which is great for content that isn’t evergreen. For example, if you have a post about Christmas gifts, you can set it to stop being tweeted after Christmas day.

Try a 14 free trial for SocialBee here.

Stock Images

I have written a whole post on why I use stock images before. Stock images are so handy when you have a blog post that isn’t centred around a review of something. I always take my own photos when I review a product or restaurant. But for posts about blogging or other topics, I often use stock photos. This is because I don’t have the props to take stunning photos of my own and it’s cheaper and easier to just buy styled photos.

I do use some free stock photos from Pixabay or Pexels, but I also like to invest in buying them from time to time as you get a full pack of similar photos and they are often more unique. Lots of people will use the same free stock photos and I prefer my blog to use photos that aren’t used on other websites. Although paying for them doesn’t mean nobody else can use them, it does mean that fewer people will as not everyone buys photos.

Check out my favourite stock images that I have bought, or would like to buy here.

Hosting

I use Stablepoint to host my website. With my hosting package, I can host up to 10 websites. This includes an email address and SSL certificates for them all. You can pay less for fewer websites.

They also include migration for you. They did mine and were fantastic.

What I love about Stablepoint is that you can use Live Chat for any query and they will help you out instantly. I’ve always got a response quickly from Live Chat. I’ve needed help with things such as when I’ve gotten my blog stuck in maintenance mode. Or I’ve messed with something that has caused a problem, or a Plugin has caused a problem.

I’ve also never had slow loading speed or downtime with StablePoint. They migrated my blogs from TSO host as I was constantly having my servers go down for 10 minutes at a time a few times a week and I was getting fed up with it.

You can find out more about StablePoint here and use the discount code C0OB5GUC84 for 20% off (valid for 20 uses only, so be quick!)

Keysearch

I love using Keysearch to research Keywords for a blog post. It is a great way to ensure you are targeting the correct keywords that are low competition and also get search traffic. SEO was always a bit of a stab in the dark before I started using Keysearch to really spend time on my search engine optimisation to drive organic traffic to my blog from Google.

I have written a whole blog post about Keysearch here including why and how you should do keyword research for your blog.

You can sign up to Keysearch here and use the discount code KSDISC to get a 20% discount. It really is the most efficient and affordable way of doing SEO!

Themes

You can use free blog themes if you don’t want to pay, but you can buy affordable WordPress blog themes from Etsy. This means you don’t need to spend hundreds on a custom blog design, which would be nice but isn’t necessary!

With themes from Etsy, you can get many different ones to suit your niche and taste. You can usually customise them a fair bit!

Here are some of my favourite themes (the first one is my current theme)

• Jellybean WordPress Theme for Bloggers
• Honeydew Cute WordPress Theme
• Megan WordPress Theme
• Influencer WordPress Theme
• Dainty WordPress Theme

Instagram Templates

I’ve only recently started using Instagram templates for my new Instagram account for my new money blog.

You can follow it here if you want! I love using them on this page. It’s a much a different page compared to my normal Instagram so having a way to share and highlight money-saving tips is a must for this account. The templates have been a lifesaver for me as I’ve been able to quickly edit them and change the colours in Canva to reflect my colour scheme.

Here are some of the Instagram templates on my favourites list at the moment.

Tailwind

Well, there’s lots of conflicting information about Tailwind and I cannot tell you what is and what isn’t right. But apparently, Pinterest wants you to spend more time ON Pinterest and want you to use their scheduler. So when you schedule through a third party, they don’t show it as much to people, resulting in your monthly views on Pinterest dropping.

I have tried to use the Pinterest scheduler within Pinterest twice and both times my views have dropped. It’s also so time-consuming so I keep going back to Tailwind.

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With Tailwind, you can also create new pins quickly too so you don’t need to share the same Pin over and over again. It’s so easy to make and schedule fresh pins with the new creator tool.

I feel like I would like to do Pinterest properly – which is to schedule via Pinterest, SEO up all my boards, write unique descriptions that are aimed at keywords but I just don’t have time to do all of that and I don’t see enough traffic from Pinterest to warrant spending the time there. It just doesn’t really work for me that well.

You can get a free month of Tailwind here if you want to try it for yourself!

What blogging tools do you pay for?

Looking for more blog resources – check these ones out.