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 hats you'll 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 a blog hosting a website building platform a blog theme an email service provider and image editing software as social media a social media management tool a 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 gonna get like just look at this catalog of wordpress themes keep looking keep looking because you will have to choose just one of these 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 [Music] hi i'm anastasia of anastasiablogger.com and on this channel i share my online business tips my goal is to reach over a million 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 buttons 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 blogging 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 well actually creating your blog here you will need to first understand the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org wordpress is the number one most used platform when it comes to making blogs or websites 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.wordpress.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 a 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.com and you can also use ads wordpress.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 not 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 i 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 295 a month and you get a 24 hour customer support via chat plus you can get a free domain name for the first year and a free ssl certificate that's to have your blog on https 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 blogs bixcodes 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 a hundred dollars a month for blog 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 astro theme on one of my blogs it makes my blog fast and you can start with a free version i am using the paid version of this theme and there is a certain level of support but i would say there is definitely room for improvement in terms of support for astra theme and my next favorite premium theme is called divi it can make your site 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 to successfully 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 lifesaver and convertkit 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 synced 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 canvas especially when i need to make pins for my blog posts and if you are still watching just give me a like here to take a break because i know it's a long video but hey i promised that it will save you hours of research so even if it takes you 10 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 or blog posts 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 found 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 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 ubersuggest it's a free keyword research tool that specializes in generating new keyword ideas aside from keyword 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 an seo plugin most wordpress themes already have yoast seo installed by default but if your site doesn't have it then just go ahead and install the plugin yoast seo 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 meta descriptions which is important for google seo now that you have a well optimized website and a bunch of good posts on your site 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 scheduler taiwan 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 grow plugin by mediavine 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 plugin to control your pinterest save buttons and images that you want to be pinned and also pin descriptions and i also want to mention a few other free blogging tools which were hard to categorize but they are very important so pinterest is the main platform for bloggers and content creators when you want to gain readers and traffic to your website really fast and pinterest is not just a social media platform but it's also a search engine and as long as you post eye-catching pins and use the strategies that i recommend through my pinterest seo 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 10 blog posts you will still receive annoying spam comments if your comment section is activated on wordpress the anti-spam b plugin is the easiest and a free spam blocker for wordpress anti-spam b blocks spam comments and track backs them effectively even without captcha 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 they're 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 up there and if you have some questions come back to this video and ask me in the comment 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 vloggers so check them out here and there and i will see you in the next videos [Music]
