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Welcome back to another episode of The Marly Dice Podcast. This is your host Marly, and thank you for tuning in today. We are talking about five must-have tools as a blogger. I personally have invested in all these tools and use all of the tools that I’m talking about today on a consistent basis and I feel that each ONE of these tools has contributed to my growth as a blogger.
I remember even just a couple years ago that I didn’t feel like I needed some of these tools because 1. I was trying to be frugal with blogging expenses and 2. I thought I could use other methods, that is, free or cheaper tools, to achieve whatever it is that I was trying to accomplish.
As it turns out, I really should’ve used all of these tools, early on, in my blogging career.
Some of these tools are free and some are investments that I have found to be necessary for my blog.
The five blogging tools that I wish I’d used sooner for my blog:
ConvertKit is an email marketing software that is incredibly powerful for bloggers.
When I first started out, I used MailChimp, another marketing software that offers a completely free option for users, whereas ConvertKit is a software that you have to pay a monthly subscription fee for no mater which option you get.
MailChimp worked fine for awhile, but I was finding that there were so many things I couldn’t do that I wanted to be able to do.
Ultimately, MailChimp wasn’t able to accommodate my needs as a blogger once I started growing.
That’s when I switched to ConvertKit. I knew it was a great software immediately when I started using it. It was easy to switch over all my current subscribers and get going quickly.
It’s also very user friendly. It’s really easy to navigate and understand all the behind the scenes work you’re doing. You can easily see your analytics, like how many subscribers you’re getting, and when, and on which forms.
Early on, when I became a new user, I immediately knew it was a great platform, but what I didn’t realize early on was exactly HOW powerful ConvertKit is.
After having ConvertKit for at least a year, I really started delving into it, learning the ins and outs of the tool and how I could optimize it for maximum results.
I began learning its expansive functionality, and I started using it in different ways on my site. So, I’m not going to talk about the fact that it has forms and you can collect emails. Of course it has that. I’m going to talk about the features that WOW me as a blogger.
Now, I use ConvertKit in some pretty awesome ways, including:
-As a pop up form that is triggered by text. If you’re unsure what I mean by this, head over to my blog abrickhome.com and click on “subscribe” in my top navigation bar. Immediately a pop up box will appear with the ability to subscribe to my list. So, why is this so powerful?
For one, when you click on subscribe on my website, it doesn’t take you to a completely different page, what is called a landing page, to subscribe.
You’re able to keep the user on your site, and they can quickly sign up and be done or they can X out of the pop up box. This function greatly improves the user experience because they don’t have to click a “back button” after being taken to a landing page, if they decide they don’t want to subscribe.
It’s so user friendly, and that’s always my goal with my site – to make it the best possible experience for a reader.
It also looks really polished, and you know how important that is.
The functionality to trigger a pop up subscription box by clicking on text is amazing.
Also, while I’m talking about the subscriber pop up, let’s chat quickly about making it easy to subscribe!
Subscribing to your list should be the easiest thing for someone to do. If a user has to search for the subscriber box, you’ve failed. You’re making it harder for YOU as a blogger to get subscribers. Make subscribing the easiest thing for a user to do. It should basically be staring them in the face when they’re on your website.
Ok, had to get in that quick, because sometimes I find that it’s really hard to subscribe to people’s website because I can’t find a way to subscribe and that just shouldn’t be the case.
Another place you use the feature of a pop up triggered by text is anywhere in your text. For example, I say the word subscribe in my page content on my about page. The word “subscribe” triggers the general subscription box when clicked on.
And you don’t have to limit this to just a general subscribe. You could have a form for anything and link it to any word.
Another awesome feature of ConvertKit for bloggers is the landing page feature. A landing page is kind of like a form, in that you collect emails on it, but a landing page is more extensive. It’s an actual page which means you can have a lot more information and words on it.
So why is this so cool? It’s awesome because you can host the landing page directly on your site. This means that you have your URL attached to the landing page. So, for example, I have an e-course landing page that I made in ConvertKit and I’m able to host that landing page on abrickhome.com.
So the URL is abrickhome.com/start-a-blog-crash-course. ConvertKit also can host the landing page for you, if you prefer, but If you’re a blogger, I can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t host it on your site, so host it on your site.
Also, you can create all kinds of pop of forms, inline forms, and slide in forms.
And a quick side note about pop up forms. I know they are annoying but I have the biggest success rate with pop up forms, I get the most subscribers with them. I will say I don’t do generic sign up pop up forms.
You should be offering your readers something when they see a pop up form.
And, you want to make sure you’re catering to your mobile and desktop audiences separately.
So if you have a pop up form running on your site, you’ve probably made it for a desktop viewer. Make sure you check how that pop up looks on mobile. It probably gets cut off – the words get off, the image gets off. You want to make sure you check that because if you’re on mobile and you get a pop up and can’t even read it because it was designed for desktop viewers, then yes, that’s super annoying.
Make sure you’re creating ease for your user.
In ConvertKit, you can create a separate pop up form for mobile and desktop users. That’s what I do, and it works incredibly well, especially considering a lot of my traffic is on mobile devices.
It’s cool too because you can see if your mobile or desktop pop up is performing better since they’re separate forms. I can hear myself starting to sound really nerdy.
I just love email marketing stuff. Before I was a blogger, I was a full-time marketer so that’s why I really get into this stuff.
But one more thing I want to say about ConvertKit is that their customer service is awesome! I am impressed with their customer service, and that’s saying a lot because I am an avid question-asker and I constantly reach out to customer service support when I can’t figure things out, so anytime a company has great customer service, I become even more of a supporter.
Ultimately, just to kind of recap here, ConvertKit helps you grow an audience and connect with them in an easy way. It is an incredibly powerful tool that I love using.
I am a huge fan of Canva. It is a free graphic design software that allows you to create beautiful works of art. I create all my pins for Pinterest on Canva and all my images for my blog on Canva.
At first, I used the free version of Canva, which is great and it worked well for all my needs for a couple years actually.
More recently though, I made the decision to upgrade to Canva Pro. I think it’s a great investment because you can do so many more things, including
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- Creating folders. This is so necessary after you’ve been blogging for awhile because your designs start to accumulate and then you just have a mess of designs floating around with no organization method at all. It becomes almost impossible to find a particular design once you’ve created so many. The ability to create folders is an amazing feature of Canva Pro so you can get super organized.
- Adding a brand kit. This makes your life so much more convenient when you’re designing because you can have your font and colors easily accessible to ensure you’re always on-brand. In the free version of Canva you can’t add your own fonts, which is a huge bummer. That reason alone led me to investing in the paid version.
- Downloading designs with transparent backgrounds. This is critical for good design work. If you’re creating a logo, for example, you need to have the ability to create a design with a transparent background. This allows you to put your logo or watermark on your images for Pinterest. If you don’t have a transparent background, your logo will have a white background surrounding it, which makes for really poor design if you’re putting it as an overlap image on a Pinterest image you’re making. Canva Pro allows you to download your images with transparent backgrounds, which is a game changer if you need a watermark or new logo.
I’m thrilled with Canva Pro and I highly recommend it. If you’re not ready to pay the monthly fee, the regular, free-version of Canva is also still great to use!
The third tool that is critical for bloggers is:
Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduling tool and, in my opinion, is 100% necessary to have as a blogger.
I actually invested in Tailwind early on because most of my traffic came from Pinterest and continues to come from Pinterest. I knew there was no feasible way I could actually pin to Pinterest consistently, so I looked into a scheduling tool.
Tailwind is an official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner (it says so on their website), so you know they’re a huge asset if you want to grow your audience by pinning to Pinterest.
Tailwind has awesome features like the ability to:
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- Easily schedule your pins through a browser extension. In one-click, you’re able to schedule a pin from your blog or reschedule a pin that you’ve already pinned to Pinterest.
- Schedule pins to multiple boards in one-click. This is a huge time saver and a feature I use all the time!
- Discover which pins are doing the best so you can optimize those pins. You’ll also learn what your audiences likes and doesn’t like by seeing which pins are clicked on the most and least. And this is important so you can design better designs in Canva for future pins. You can see how these tools are starting to overlap with each other. You need one for the other, if that makes sense.
I use Tailwind often, but the best part of it is that I don’t have to check it often because it runs by itself once you set it up! That is the beauty of Tailwind. Set it and forget it, not completely though because you should check in on it every now and then. The main task you need to do after you get Tailwind is to to consistently schedule new pins.
There’s an awesome feature where you can shuffle your queue so your pins are mixed up and you’re not pinning the same pin over and over, so that is really awesome.
It’s a good idea to check your pin and board analytics as well.
I highly recommend Tailwind!
Google Analytics is a tool that I love using and is also necessary if you have a blog. The good news is it is free, so all you need to do is sign up for it after you start your blog.
Google Analytics will provide you with important data about your blog, including how many page views and sessions you get each day/month/year etc. You’ll learn where your traffic is coming from (i.e. Pinterest, Facebook, Google etc.) as well as which posts garner the most traffic.
You’ll learn about the demographics of your users, including their age group and gender.
And all of these stats are just scratching the surface of what types of data Google Analytics provides. It is extensive. It is powerful.
Make sure to sign up for Google Analytics as soon as you start your blog and then keep track of your website data from Google Analytics using a monthly spreadsheet.
Look are your year over year traffic as well as just month over month traffic.
Another reason you should have GA is if you plan on working with brands in the future. Those brands are going to want to know certain data and statistics about your blog.
You should also want to know how your blog is performing so you can make educated decisions about things you should change or keep the same. You’ll be able to understand your audience, such as what they like reading which will help you plan future content. You’ll learn how long your audience stays on your sight for, which is important to know when you’re creating pop up forms as I talked about earlier.
All of these tools begin to work together to help you become a better blogger by understanding your audience.
One quick tip here is to know your audiences session duration, which is how long users stay on your sight for. This will impact your settings when you create a pop up form, for example.
If you’re using ConvertKit and you are creating a pop up form, you can set it to display after a certain amount of seconds that someone is on your site for. Knowing how long a user is on your site AKA session duration from Google Analytics is important so you can pick a good time for the display to pop up. You wouldn’t want a display to pop up after 90 seconds if your average user is only on your site for a minute. That would be completely pointless.
This is why you need to understand how users use your site.
So take some time in your Google Analytics dashboard, looking at your site’s data and analyzing it so you can be a better blogger for your audience.
When I first started out blogging, I didn’t feel like I needed to invest in Lightroom, but I was so wrong! I had no idea the power of Lightroom and how it would help me transform my images.
These days, you have to have good images, not even to stand out, just to be in the majority.
Lightroom is a tool that can help you transform, even your dark iPhone images, to beautiful, light and bright images.
You can get the Lightroom app for free on your phone which is so awesome. I ended up investing in the paid version of Lightroom because I can access my photos from anywhere.
It makes it easy to snap a photo on my iPhone, set a preset to it in one click, and then it automatically saves in Lightroom on all my devices. This is so powerful because it makes it incredibly easy to download the images to my hard drive, then upload them in Canva to edit & add my watermark.
This is yet another example of all of these tools working together.
In addition to Lightroom, I think it’s important to have a preset.
What is a preset? It’s basically where you have different photo edits combined that are saved, so by clicking one button you can perform all those saved edits on your photos, which helps create consistency.
Your images are so important, especially if you’re a home decor blogger like me. If you have dark images that are hard to see, you’re not going to gain much traction from them.
Having a Lightroom preset allows you take a photo on your iPhone and, in one click, transform it into a beautiful, light and bright image.
The good new is you don’t have to come up with your own preset. You can buy a preset.
My favorite Lightroom preset is Liz Marie Galvan’s bear preset, which is what I use on my blog images.
My blog completely transformed after using Lightroom and a preset because my images completely transformed. Beautiful images make a huge difference!
This is the biggest thing I’d wish I’d done earlier.
Alright, so a quick recap of the five must-have tools for bloggers:
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- ConvertKit, which is an email marketing software that helps you collect email addresses and maintain communications with your subscriber list.
- Canva, which is graphic design software that you can use to create beautiful images for your Pinterest pins and blog.
- Tailwind, which is a Pinterest scheduling tool that helps you schedule your pins so you don’t have to pin manually throughout the day to Pinterest.
- Google Analytics, which is a free tool that provides you with data about your blog.
- Lightroom, which is a cloud-based photography service that enables you to powerfully edit your photos and share them across mobile, desktop and the web.
I use all five of these tools for my blog, and although I didn’t invest in some of the paid ones right away, I really wish I had. All five tools have enabled me to create a professional looking blog and help me show up for my audience in the best way possible.
I hope you learned a few things today, and as always, I want to thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. It gives me so much joy to do this and to talk about all things blogging-related.
If you loved today’s episode, please take a minute to subscribe on iTunes and leave me a review. It goes such a long way. Have a great rest of your day.
