The Best FREE Tools to Grow Your Blog Quickly
There are so many incredible FREE web services, applications, and products available today that are so powerful and effective that you can easily use them to grow your blog quickly to thousands or maybe even millions of views and start sending a flood of traffic to your target audience. You can start today, from scratch, and use every single one of these free tools every day along your journey without money coming out of your pocket. From idea creation to producing, publishing, and designing your content, to sharing, marketing, and promoting your brand, you’ll find these tools free and accessible.
Here are 20 of the best ones I’ve used myself to grow my own blog and get millions of readers:
This post contains affiliate links which means I get a small referral fee which helps keep the site running with great info with no extra cost to you! For more information please view my disclosure for more information. Thank you:)
1. Quora
Before I had a blog I used Quora to ask so many questions! It was pretty cool to ask questions about anything whether it was health-related or technical or household or about your child’s behavior etc.. then you’d get answers back from a variety of people. Some are experts, and some not so much.
Quora is a great place for content ideas. You can search for a topic, see what others are asking, and answering and then write it up, adding to the conversation.
But there’s more!
Quora helps you establish yourself as an authority in your area.
And you can link your website to your profile.
If you have a product, you can use the site to get feedback from users and to generate new feature ideas.
2. Feedly
When Google Reader shut down everyone went over to Feedly. Feedly is the best blog reader around. You have to be reading a lot of other blogs if you want yours to stand out.
Once you start reading the top blogs from key influencers, you will learn the right style that drives traffic, and what sets top blogs apart from the rest.
You can sign up for blog feeds, share your favorites, bookmark the ones you have yet to read.
Be careful though, if you’re a new blogger you really don’t want to get sucked into sucky comparison mode that potentially hinders your progress.
However, if you can view things objectively and you don’t suffer from inadequacies then by all means look at these blogs with an eye towards inspiration.
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3. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is my secret weapon of choice!
Crowdfire is a Social Media Management tool that helps Social Media Managers, Small businesses, brands and individuals drive Social Media results. We offer Social Media scheduling, engagement, Analytics, Social listening and CRM services.
You can easily share your blog content across the board automatically.
Connect Social Networks: Facebook Pages & Groups, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, LinkedIn pages, WordPress, Etsy, Shopify, Medium, 500px, Vimeo and many more platforms.
See what articles and news people are sharing on the web, and who is sharing them. From this simple start, you can gain a wealth of information.
With the free account, you can only get limited information, but definitely, enough to find out what works and what doesn’t.
With Crowdfire you can
- Monitor your Social conversations and listen. Reply to all your Social mentions from a single dashboard.
- Deep dive into Advanced Analytics, download ready-to-present beautiful reports.
- Build custom reports and schedule the export of these reports.
- Compose your own posts and schedule them to go out later.
- Automatically find and recommend articles and images your audience will love, so you can share them to all your social profile and keep your timelines buzzing!
- Keep an eye out for any updates on your website, blog or online shops; and create quick, beautiful posts about the update to easily share on all your social profiles
- Schedule all your posts in advance and post them automatically at the best times or at a time chosen by you. Saving you tons of time and effort!
- Take away the headache of crafting separate posts for each individual social profile and automagically customize your posts for all your profiles!
- Use the Crowdfire Chrome extension to share your favorite pages from the internet to all your social accounts in 2 easy clicks!
- Add your favorite websites and blogs as your source for new content using the RSS feature!
- Manage multiple clients using Crowdfire profiles.
Try it for free here.
The site will also help you save tons of time while driving massive engagement and growth.
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4. Canva
Canva is a design service for people who can’t design, like moi.
An image in a post will increase shares, and increased shares means more visitors.
Especially on Pinterest! 67% of my traffic comes from Pinterest which shows you how vital it is for bloggers.
So if you can’t design, no problem!
Anyone can use it for virtually any design asset you need.
The site uses simple drag-and-drop principles to help you create art and design for your site, allowing you to choose from thousands of images, fonts and colors to get exactly what you need to illustrate your story.
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5. Hemingway
The Hemingway app is all about making your writing clearer and easier to read. For some people, writing flows so naturally. I am not one of those people. My writing tends to be choppy and sometimes all over the place.
Thank goodness for Hemingway. The app helps you avoid complicated, hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and adverbs. Hemingway is ideal for people who have to explain complicated ideas to anyone.
6. Google Keyword Planner
The google keyword planner is still one of the most accurate SEO tools available out there and it’s FREE! You can find suggested terms that relate to all your keywords and all their metrics too. It let’s you choose and discover easy to rank for terms (or highly searched for terms) to place in your work.
7. WordPress.org
There are countless content management system (CMS) options, but WordPress.org (not to be mistaken from WordPress.com) is still one of the very best.
Once you have got your site up and running, you need a way to publish your stories. Sites like Wix or Blogger are great for your own personal blog but if you’re looking to get thousands or millions of visitors, monetize your content etc…, only the WordPress.org platform can handle this.
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On WordPress.org, you can customize and monetize your site and add plugins for a ton of different needs, from SEO optimization to image presentation, from email forms to capture.
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8. SEMrush
SEMrush is free for 14 days but I think it’s one of the top SEO marketing tools out there.
They give you a complete SEO audit of your site including content suggestions, alerts, toxic warnings, backlink profiles, anchor texts and you get a complete view of who your direct competitors are, what keywords they’re ranking for so you can start assessing them appropriately.
It’s a lot of information they give out for free!
You can check your site right here with this handy tool, do an SEO and site analysis and see how you stack up against your competitors!
Images are also the best way to share ideas on social media, and Stencil lets you create amazing text-based images, helping you get more engagement and shares on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
You can create quotes and daily inspiration messages, or just have a line from your latest blog post as a teaser.
You can also take in information from images ten times faster than from text alone; and because visual processing is what our brains are designed for, sharing ideas as images immediately invokes a reaction in your audience.
10. FREE Stock Photos
Stunning images are a must for essential blogging tools.
Anyone can have awesome image content on their site for free. Images increase shares, and having great images will definitely get your blog noticed more.
26 Of The Best FREE Stock Photo Sites for Your Blog
11. Typeform
Typeform helps you build contact forms and surveys, meaning you can interact with your audience and become a meaningful place for dialog.
A lot of Pinterest and FB users are using Typeform now to get potential members to sign up for their group boards. It’s also an awesome way to conduct surveys.
Responders can easily navigate it on a desktop or mobile, and users could stay on the page throughout, rather than wait for the next page to load — one of the main reasons people bug-out on a survey.
12. TinyLetter
TinyLetter is a super-simple app that lets you create and distribute email newsletters, which is a perfect way to get your posts into everyone’s inboxes each week.
Brought to you by MailChimp, TinyLetter is for people who don’t need all the business features that come along with MailChimp.
It’s simple, free and easy to use.
13. Sumo
Sumo is a suite of free blogging tools that can be used to grow your website’s traffic.
The Sumo tools are easy to install and work on any website. It also helps you build up an email list with popups, and can even tell you where people are clicking on your site.
SumoMe gives you an in-depth analysis of what works on your blog and what doesn’t.
It also integrates with other services’ email lists like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, etc. .so you can seamlessly build your email list and grow your ROI.
14. Google Search Console
Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console allows you to check indexing status and optimize visibility of your website. A must have blogging tool for everyone!
Speaking of must have blogging tools I also recommend Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, MonsterInsights and Google Trends.
With MonsterInsights you get a clear view of who is coming to your website, which posts are most popular so you know what to write more of, and where they came from! All from your WordPress dashboard. It’s amazing!
The Structured Data Markup Helper helps you mark up elements on your web page so that Google can understand the data on the page.
Once Google understands your page data more clearly, it can be presented more attractively and in new ways in Google Search.
In addition if you send HTML-formatted email to your customers, Markup Helper can show you how to change your email templates so that Gmail can present the data to the user in new and useful ways.
15. Print Friendly and a PDF
Print Friendly is a Chrome extension that will transform your blog into a PDF, getting rid of all the extra crap and just leaving your audience with a well-formatted booklet of your posts.
They even have a print and download button you can put on your site that is GDPR compliant. Very cool!
A great way to gain a following is to create an ebook that’s a “content upgrade,” in the form of a PDF that visitors can download and read offline — in exchange for their email address.
Voila! A perfect little blogging tool!
16. Medium
Medium.com which was launched in August 2012, is a great blogging tool for getting your published work and blog posts out there! It’s a hybrid collection of amateur and professionals who write about a wide range of subjects.
They have a huge audience and if you want to make your content go even further this is definitely one of the places to be!
It’s very easy to do because you simply have to copy your URL and post!
You can connect your social media following and even take your audience with you! In addition, if you join their partner program you can get compensated for your writing.
The competition is tough to make money but it’s still a great way to gain exposure to your website and social media accounts with very minimal effort!
P.S. Thriveglobal.com by Arianna Huffington is another great publishing platform!
17. Google Analytics
To say you need Google Analytics for a blogging tool is an understatement.
You should be checking out your visitor numbers from your very first post, analyzing what posts get the highest views and where those views are coming from.
Then, you can start to tailor your operation around those ideas. Keep what works, and delete the rest.
Google Analytics is the most extensive suite out there, and even the biggest sites are still using it.
Google obviously knows its numbers, and if this is a major place your visitors are coming from, who better to tell you the good news?
18. Email Marketing
A great email marketing program is a vital blogging tool in your marketing arsenal that you must have.
Pound for pound email has 3.9 billion more accounts than social alone.
Every day you don’t have a list is another day you’re losing out on potential sales, networking and connections.
After all the expression the “money is in the list” is indeed a true one.
However, the true goal of a great email marketing campaign is to build trust, loyalty and brand awareness.
One of the best ways to grow your list and attract new subscribers is through an automated Email marketing platform like Constant Contact.
They are so secure in their services they offer a 60 day FREE trial with no credit card, along with email templates, beautiful designs, and powerful integrations to put your business on autopilot.
You’ll be hard pressed to find another that offers as many services.
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19. Hubspot FREE CRM
This free blogging tool can help you keep track of all your leads from your website, social media, email automatically and turn your site into a revenue generating machine! See everything all in one place with total visibility.
I love their Social Media content calendar and Email Templates!
And best of all it’s 100% FREE!
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Your turn!
What do you use to grow your blog traffic? I’d love to hear about what you think the best free services and products out there are to grow your audience and build your online business.
Don’t forget to like and share on social!
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Thanks for the very extensive list!
You’re welcome! Thanks for taking the time to comment!:)
These are great tools! I’ll definitely be implementing some very soon. Thanks!
Hope they help! Thanks for taking the time to comment! 🙂
Thank you for creating this comprehensive list. It serves as a reminder of what I need to implement. Some of them I had not heard of but said prior that I’d like to use quora.
Quora’s a great tool for generating more traffic! Thanks for taking the time to comment! 🙂
Thanks so much for this list. Some I haven’t heard of and the sites I have heard of, I did know their capabilities.
Glad it came in handy for you and thanks so much for commenting! 🙂
Helpful & informative tools for blogger.
Thanks for your comment!
Nicely written concise and clear as well
Nicely written content concise and clear as well
Thank you for commenting! Have a wonderful day!