While the adage "you get what you pay for" usually rings true, sometimes what you get for free is pretty good! The digital marketing industry is blessed with an abundance of free blogging tools for beginners and professionals alike.
From writing tools, SEO, marketing, topic research, Analytics, and Monitoring, to artificial intelligence tools, there is no shortage of tools in any task.
Some of the tools listed here have premium versions. For beginners or marketers on a tight budget, the free version is enough to get you started with your marketing.
Note: This post was originally written by Dave Schneider as a guest post. However, the content has been modified/rewritten to fit today's blogging demand and environment. If you would like to see the original publication, here is the Wayback manchine.
Blogging is hard enough as it is, without having to add more expensive tools to the mix. You can start with the free edition and when you're certain you need a pro feature, only then you can purchase a paid account.
What are some of the top free tools I recommend for bloggers?
18 Free blogging tools in 2022
1. Google Analytics
If you run an online business, you need Google Analytics - period. There are no two ways to do this.
Google Analytics lets you know what's happening on your site. How users interact with your content, where they come from, device type, location, gender, traffic source, landing pages, and time on site.
It goes deeper into the technical aspect of your content. For instance, you can see the average page speed of each page on your site, the operating system used by visitors to browse through your site, and a lot more.
For anyone looking to run a successful online business, Google Analytics is one of the MUST-have free blogging tools. Whether you're a large-scale enterprise, medium size, or small business owner, you need Google Analytics.
2. Google Search Console
Another free tool for webmasters from Google.
Google search console is an indispensable SEO and keyword analysis tool for business owners. This tool gives you an overview of your site's SEO status - you can check to see if there is any SEO issue detected on your site. You can also see a number of your website backlinks indexed by Google.
There are more features in the search console that are very helpful to SEOs:
- Sitemap submission.
- URL inspection tool.
- Mobile usability report.
- Page Experience report.
- AMP pages validation.
- Request Page removal.
- Google index coverage report.
- Keyword analysis.
- Keyword position tracking.
- Impression analysis.
- Track Google organic clicks by devices, country, website pages, position, dates, etc.
Like Google Analytics, the Google search console is one of the must-have free tools for online marketers.
3. Grammarly
Grammarly is a writing assistant that uses artificial intelligence to detect typos, wrong use of words, spellings, punctuations, clarity, tons, engagements, etc...in your content.
It is a powerful writing tool that let you write error-free and makes your content looks better and easy to read for all user grades.
Grammarly is available as a Google Chrome extension, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Android App, Word Docs, Google Docs, and more. If you write for the web, Grammarly is one of the tools you need especially if English is never your first language - like me.
4. Canva
One of the best media content creation and editor tools on the web today.
Canva makes image creation easy for beginners and professional image designers. The drag and drop features, pre-made custom templates, millions of elements, and over 60 million premium images for your design projects.
Canva is no doubt, your one-stop solution to everything image editing and creation. Whether your design need is for infographics, images, video editing, meme, gif, ebook cover, invoices, social media posters, blog posts, flyers, receipts, desktop wallpaper, photo collage, etc.., you can use Canva to bring your message to life.
The good thing? There is a forever free account and you can always upgrade anytime, or buy a one-time premium image as per your need.
5. Tailwind App
Tailwind is a social media marketing, email marketing, and automation tool. One of the best if it's kind.
If you want to save time managing all your social media activities, let Tailwind takes care of your social media marketing so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
The tool lets you auto-post to Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. Also, you can schedule a post to go out at a specific time of the day that best suit your marketing strategy. The hashtag is a very useful feature that let's discover interesting content easily.
It also gives you a detailed analysis of your marketing activities so you can understand how your efforts are paying off.
Tailwind now includes email marketing - you can design a beautiful email campaign in the app that increases the open, click, and engagement rate.
6. SEO Powersuite
If you're one of my regular readers, do you know how important SEO Powersuite has been to the growth of this blog?
SEO powersuite is one of the best SEO tools I ever used for competitor analysis, link building, keyword research, optimization, and website audit. It is a desktop-based SEO tool that consists of four independent toolkits.
A desktop-based SEO tool that lets you achieve amazing SEO results faster, increase productivity, simplify complex SEO tasks, and get accurate SEO data.
The software is regularly updated to align with the search engine algorithm changes and best practices. This keeps you safe from getting penalized by search engines like Google.
7. SEMrush
An SEO tool used by over 7 million professionals and businesses worldwide.
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool for marketers - it comprises SEO and marketing tools that let you start and complete SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing tasks from within the SEMrush user account.
From an entire domain analysis, site audit, competitor analysis, link analysis, and keyword research, to social media marketing; SEMrsuh has many of the tools you need to run a successful online marketing campaign.
You can sign up for the free account and use it for as long as you want. The Pro, Guru, or Business account gives you more access to explore the entire SEMrush toolkit.
8. WordPress
As of 2022, WordPress powered more than 43% of the entire web. This means that more than 43% of the website on the internet are built with WordPress.
If you want to start blogging, look no further than WordPress for a content management system. It is the best website builder for nearly 2 decades and the easiest free blogging platform to use for beginners.
WordPress is the only website builder that is supported by most web hosting companies today. It is a user-friendly, one-click installation process, SEO optimized, secured, regularly updated, great support, extended features, etc.
WordPress is free, you need hosting and a domain name to get started.
9. Blogger
Blogger is another free blogging tool that has been around since 1999. Originally developed by Prya Labs before it was acquired by Google and provides an easier way to start a free blog.
Many beginners started with the blogger-free blogging platform before moving on to a more customizable and secured website builder like WordPress.
You can build a completely free blog on Blogger. And even host your blog for free. Though blogger provides fewer customization features, it is one of the best user-friendly blogging platforms.
Plus Blogger is completely free.
10. Wix
If you're looking for alternatives to WordPress and Blogger to do blogging for free, Wix is a good blogging platform.
It is a website builder that offers beginners and business owners an easier way to create an online presence. With over 800 pre-made website design templates, getting started has never been this easy.
The drag and drop built-in features make Wix beginners-friendly. It offers great features such as a mobile app, e-commerce tool, title animation, logo maker, and more.
11. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Your content headline is the determinant factor between content that gets read and the one that gets ignored.
If your content headlines fail to get users to read the copy, it will be difficult to generate leads, increase conversion, and get sales.
The CoSchedule headline Analyzer is a powerful tool that lets you write headlines, analyze them, and score them for best headline practices.
It analyzes your headline for SEO opportunities, emotion, word count, length, readability, and click. You can see how your headline score on a scale of 1 - 100 so you can pick the winner.
The headline analyzer is now available as a WordPress plugin and an online tool on the CoSchedule website. You can download the plugin from the button below.
12. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing and free blog topic research tool. If you need to discover the best content on a topic based on social shares, links, and engagement, this is the right tool.
It helps marketers find niche topics with the potential of going viral based on what's already working for their competitors.
The forever-free account gives you limited access to the tool. If you want more features, you need to subscribe to a paid plan.
13. Awario
Awario is a web and social listening tool that lets you monitor web mentions of your brand or relevant keywords.
The tool gives brands the access to explore marketing data, monitor competitors marketing strategies, find and participate in relevant discussions, track mentions, etc.
You can track mentions from all major social media platforms including YouTube, blogs, and the web.
Awario crawled more than 13 billion pages daily, excluding API integrations with other third-party platforms. This makes it one of the market's best social media listening tools.
Though there is no free plan, you can take advantage of the free trial period to see if it is worth the investment.
14. Broken Link Checker
You can't prevent the occurrence of broken links on a website but you can help minimize their impact on user experience.
The best way to make sure the broken or dead links on your website are not causing you bounced traffic or poor user experience is to fix them on time.
The Broken link checker plugin runs continuously in the background to find and reports all dead links on your website. It reports the links as warning, broken, redirects, or dismissed so you know how to fix them.
15. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft clarity is a free analytics tool that lets you monitor user behavior through session recording and heat maps.
Unlike Google Analytics which focuses more on website traffic patterns, Microsoft Clarity focuses on website user experience - how the user interacts with your website.
It let you know what part/elements of a page get the click, scroll depth, and engagement level.
This information is very helpful to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages. It is available as a WordPress plugin and script you can install on your website. The plugin download link is in the button below.
16. Awesome Screenshot And Screen Recorder - Google Chrome
If you write on tutorials often, you'll need step-by-step visual instructions to show your audience.
The awesome screenshot is my go-to tool for taking screenshots to further drive home the message. It lets you take professional screenshots with annotations.
There are lots of annotation tools to make your message clear. You can draw, blurry, add shapes, crop, add text, erase, etc.
You can take screenshots of an entire web page, selected area, or the visible part. Also, it lets you take delay-timer screenshots and record screen videos for tutorials in mp4 format. And it also provides backup storage access for your screenshots.
The Awesome Screenshot is available in Google Chrome 36 and later. If you use Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Firefox, you can use Awesome screenshots.
17. Microsoft Editor
Like Grammarly, Microsoft Editor is a browser extension AI writing assistant that helps with making your content read better.
It is available in more than 20 languages. The free Microsoft editor account helps with spelling correction, the use of capitalization, punctuation, and grammar checking.
If you want more writing features, you can subscribe to the Microsoft 365 account and get the editor's premium features included.
Whether you're writing for the web, email, word doc, or social media sites, Microsoft Editor works equally well.
18. Grow Social by Mediavine
A very lite weight WordPress social media sharing plugin.
There are lots of WordPress social sharing plugins, but I've found Grow by Mediavine to be more effective and with minimal impact on your server load.
It doesn't slow down your server performance which is something common in other plugins like AddThis and Sumo.
The free version allows for a floating sidebar and an inline sharing button. You get more features in the pro account like custom Pinterest image, sticky social sharing mobile button, unlimited click-to-tweet boxes in content, etc.
Conclusion.
Without a doubt, many paid tools should be considered as well. That said, I always like to see if there is a free option available before shelling out a ton of moola.
What free blogging tools for beginners do you recommend?
About The Author.
Dave Schneider is the marketing manager at Albacross, the free B2B lead generation platform. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me and runs the churn reduction app, LessChurn.
