This is how you think being a blogger will look like.
And this is the reality when you're starting a blog,
you don't know how many hands you need to wear in your blogging career.
And you don't know how many different software tools
you will need to learn and use on a daily basis.
You will need many and blog hosting a website building platform, AdBlock theme
and email service provider and image editing software and social media
as social media management tool search engine optimization tool.
And that's just to name a few.
But that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part is when you discover that for each category of tools,
there are dozens and sometimes even hundreds of options to choose from.
You're going to get like,
just look at this catalog of WordPress themes.
Keep looking, keep looking because you will have to choose just one of this.
Now, do you still want to be a blogger?
If the answer is yes, that's good,
because this video will save you hours upon hours of research.
It will also save you from doing a couple of refund requests because
I will only give you the best options that I personally tried and tested.
You see, I've been blogging for over four years now,
and I cannot say that I tried it all.
But I have enough experience to share with you my top
list of blogging tools in this video.
Hi, I'm Anastasia of AnastasiaBlogger.com
and on this channel, I share my online business tips.
My goal is to reach over 1,000,000 people with this channel
and to help you all transition to online income streams
if you want to follow along in this journey.
You know the balance right there will be down there now.
I will talk about lots of tools in this video
and I will give you links in the description below,
but I guess your blog and journey will be a long one
and you won't need all these tools right now.
So if you want to get back to this list of tools in a nicely organized PDF format,
I will give you a link up here in the info icon and also in the description below
so that you can save it on your computer for later.
Now, blogging involves several steps.
You will start with choosing your blogging niche, then organizing data
related to your blog topics or your blog posts.
Writing SEO friendly articles.
Designing some appealing graphics. Building a community.
And promoting everything.
But it doesn't mean that you'll have to hire someone
to start and manage your blog.
You can totally do it yourself
using the best blogging tools that will help you from step one,
and the first step would be while actually creating your blog.
Here, you will need to first understand the difference between
WordPress.com and WordPress dot org.
WordPress is the number one most used platform
when it comes to making blogs or web sites.
Sure, you can start with their free
blog hosting platform that's called WordPress.com.
But the downside to this is that you will have
very little control over your blog, meaning you can only place your site
under a subdomain something like your site name, dot WordPress dot com.
You will have limited disk space,
and you won't be able to place your own ads on the blog.
And if you just go to WordPress.org and download WordPress Website Builder,
which is totally free by the way, then you will build as self-hosted blog.
You will have full control over everything on your blog.
You can install the necessary tools you have.
You can have your own domain, something like your URL that.
Com, and you can also use ads.
WordPress dot org has to be set up with your hosting provider.
So let's talk about that
hosting providers if you're not building a self-hosted site.
You will now be able to put ads on your site and essentially
you cannot make money with your blog.
Your site may also become leggy or load really slow
if you use a free hosting platform and you technically don't own the site.
The platform owns it, so let's agree that we need to pay for hosting.
But can you start with a very affordable plan?
Yes, I started my blog with Bluehost.
Bluehost is a leading hosting provider for beginner bloggers,
especially if you plan to build your blog on WordPress,
which you should, by the way, already told you don't use Squarespace or Wix.
I don't want to go into a lot of details on that here, but these platforms
can look a bit easier for beginners, but they're very limited in the long run.
Just forget about anything except WordPress.
If you're building a blog.
As for the hosting, Bluehost has the most affordable plans for beginner bloggers.
You can host your WordPress blog with them at a price as low as two 95 a month,
and you get a 24 hour customer support via Chet's.
Plus, you can get a free domain name for the first year and a free SSL certificate.
That's to have your blog on KDVR secure address.
And if you want to get a special discount through my link,
then check it out in the description below.
This video and Bluehost is a great option for beginners, but when your blog starts
getting a lot more traffic, then site speed becomes your priority.
And if you start making some real money with your blog,
you'd rather pay for a managed WordPress hosting.
And in the last year or so, I've been using for my blog Baked Goods.
They provide unmatched support
and I can sleep better at night knowing that my sites are in good hands.
And if you're in the right place
to start paying around $100 a month for block hosting,
then check the link to this provider in the description below as well.
Now that you have your domain, the next and probably the most important step
is to choose a WordPress theme that doesn't only look nice,
but also makes your site fast because site speed is crucial
for both your rankings in Google and for potential ad income.
Sure, you can get the default and free WordPress themes,
but there are several setbacks to this.
first, your site could look too similar to other sites
that are using the same free theme.
Next, you won't really have any customer support in case you need help.
And lastly, customization options could be very limited.
I'm using Estrosi on one of my blogs.
It makes my blog fast and you can start with a free version.
I'm using the paid version of this theme
and there is a certain level of support, but I would say there is definitely more.
Room for improvement in terms of support for Astro theme
and my next favorite premium theme is called DV.
It can make your side a bit slower than it would be with Astra,
but it has a great community and customer support, and the theme itself
gives you very impressive tools for customization.
You don't have to hard code anything because they have this amazing DV editor.
It's perfect for a newbie blogger, seriously, and they have a 30 day
money back guarantee, by the way, so you can try the theme with no risk at all.
But I'm sure you will fall in love with this theme and again, check
all the links in the description below.
Now, let's talk about the email marketing tools that I can recommend
when starting a blog.
Most of the people kind of ignore email marketing, but it's a crucial part
of building a long lasting connection with your audience .
Aside from writing compelling and conversational blog posts,
you should also constantly reach out to them with emails
that are relevant to your blog posts, and you could email them short blog
like posts, maybe product recommendations, and a lot more.
But through this, your audience could actually reply to you
and have a one on one conversation with you.
But if successful, to do this, you need a high quality email
marketing tool so that your emails don't end up in the spam folders too often.
Let me first tell you what I don't recommend here. It's MailChimp.
It's probably the one that you'll
hear about a lot because it has a generous, free plan.
But the downside is that your email open rates will be very low.
With this provider, meaning that for a lot of your subscribers,
your newsletter will go directly to the spam folder.
And also, MailChimp has a lot of user experience issues,
and I don't feel comfortable with their interface.
So I personally use ConvertKit and it even has a free plan to try the software.
I think it's the best email provider for bloggers.
I love the feature, which allows you to resend emails
only to people who didn't open your latest newsletter.
And I also love in ConvertKit that when I added a sequence,
it doesn't get paused and I don't have to republish it over and over again.
After making every little change, it's such a life saver and converted somehow
happens to have very smooth integrations with about anything in the world.
Any software that I ever needed to use
for my online business had ConvertKit on the list of integrations.
Now I will also mention here.
Deadline funnel in this section, although it's not exactly an email provider.
It's a software that you might need to use if you sell products
and if you create landing pages and evergreen funnels on your blog.
So it's a pretty advanced tool
that you might need further down the line in your online business.
It's the best tool for creating real urgency
in an evergreen funnel, with countdown timers that can be added
and syncs across multiple platforms, including your website,
landing pages, webinar pages and your emails as well.
And once you've found some beautiful images
for your website and your blog posts, there may be times
when you need to edit them or make a collage out of them.
So I use Canva for everything.
Canva is a free, web based tool that allows you to easily create
and design images for your posts, for your product,
images , social media, graphics, and so much more.
And what's good about this
is that you can get tons of templates and graphics for free.
I personally love can, especially when I need to make plans for my blog posts.
And if you are still watching, just give me a look here to take a break
because I know it's a long video,
but hey, I promise that it will save you hours of research.
So even if it takes you ten minutes more to watch this video until the end,
it will definitely be worth it.
Now let's talk about keyword research and SEO tools.
It is not enough to just make great content.
If you want your website a blog post to rank up in Google search results,
then you should also focus on website SEO.
This means that you will have to do keyword research basically every time
that you make a new blog post or a page on your site.
In a nutshell, keyword research is especially important for SEO
or search engine optimization, which helps your content
get file in search engines like Google or Pinterest or YouTube.
Sure, you can do keyword research by getting search suggestions on Google,
but if you want to be really a pro at SEO, then here are some tools
that I personally use. first one is called keywords everywhere.
This is a browser extension that will show you keyword volume
and some additional keyword ideas right in the search results.
It's very affordable on a monthly fee, so it's great even if for beginners,
there are some pretty expensive SEO tools that will cost you over $100 a month.
But I'm not going to recommend them
to beginners because I know that you're on a tight budget.
The other tool I can also recommend is Uber.
Suggest it's a free keyword research tool that specializes.
Is in generating new keyboard ideas, aside from keyboard ideas,
you will be able to see the search volume, the competition
and even seasonal trends for each keyword.
This is perfect if you want to know more about your competitors
and you want to be on track with whatever is trending on the internet
now on your website.
You still need to have on your plug in most WordPress themes already.
Have you also installed by default?
But if your site doesn't have it, then just go ahead and install the plug.
You also see or is your best friend
when it comes to optimizing your content for keywords.
The plugin offers a premium upgrade, but you can do so much in the free version,
like adding your matter descriptions, which is important for Google issue.
Now that you have a well optimized website and a bunch of good posts on your side,
you need to attract more visitors and social media is a great place to start.
So for Pinterest,
you will need something that allows you to schedule pins up to 20 times a day.
Tailwind is officially authorized.
Pinterest's scheduler, T1, also gives optimized
and recommended time slots for scheduling your pins
when your audience is more active on Pinterest.
And aside from this, you can also use tailwind to schedule
posts on other social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook.
And if you want to get a free one month trial, check out my link
in the description below and what I use on my blogs for social media.
Sharing buttons is called Groll Plugin by Media Line.
It's highly customizable and allows me to choose where exactly in the post
I want to see the buttons above or below the content, but I really recommend it
because it's the best plug in to control your Pinterest, save buttons
and images that you want to be pinned and also pinned descriptions.
And I also want to mention a few other free blogging tools
which were hard to categorize, but they're very important.
So Pinterest is the main platform for bloggers and content creators.
When you want to gain readers and traffic to a website really fast, and Pinterest
is not just a social media platform, but it's also a search engine.
And as long you post eye-catching pins and use the strategies that I recommend
through my Pinterest is your traffic secrets course, then you're good to go.
Want to check out my course?
Look up there in the info icon, and let me know if you have any questions
about Pinterest in the comments below.
And the other thing
that you will need to have on the blog is something to prevent spammy comments,
even if you are just a beginner with less than ten blog posts.
You will still receive annoying spam comments
if your comments section is activated on WordPress.
The anti-spam B plan is the easiest and a free spam blocker for WordPress
anti-spam b block spam comments and track backs them effectively even
without capture, and it's also compliant with European data privacy standards.
And once you have a website, you will essentially become a writer, right?
And if you know that you can occasionally do typos or mistakes in writing,
then you may need a tool to suggest some corrections.
And this is where Grammarly will become your life saver.
This plugin can correct your grammatical errors and spelling,
and it can even suggest better words and some phrases and all for free.
And finally, Google Analytics.
This is a free tool that tracks how many people visit your site,
but they give you so much more than that.
You'll be able to track how much time your audience spends browsing on your blog
and the demographics, for example, countries their from their gender, etc.
And this is a really must have tool to see if your website is doing well.
Again, it's free as well.
I think I'm done with my list, but
you don't have to necessarily install everything that I mentioned at once.
Take it easy one step at a time.
Download the PDF upthere.
And if you have some questions, come back to this video and ask me
in the comments section and I will answer to the best of my knowledge.
With that said, I wish you all the good luck on your blogging journey,
and I will leave you with a few links to my other videos
that I created specifically for beginner bloggers.
So check them out here and there, and I'll see you in the next videos.