Best Blogging Tools For Beginners

 

It’s only early 2021 and is it just me or are you also getting serious deja vu? Did 2021 not get the memo that it needed to up its game?  If 2021 isn´t going to give success to us on a plate, I guess it’s time to turn all these lemons into a big old batch of lemonade. Here are the 5 best blogging tools for beginners for just starting out to help put your best (virtual) step forward this year. 

Speaking from experience of trying to start a blog – it can be an overwhelming process if only due to the sheer avalanche of information you get with every google. Or maybe you´re hesitant for different reasons, I know I had doubts about my ability to stand out in what I worried was an oversaturated market. How would I pick something that somehow would make actual money, and more than just that, I wanted money to give me the flexibility and security to achieve my dreams and be independent.

Trust me when I say this – you can still make money blogging in 2021 – as long as you spend time honing your skills and understand there is a right and a wrong way to blog, but luckily this is a skill you can master. 

Firstly, I will say how it was important to invest in a blogging course, that’s when things got serious for me and I learnt the process to monetize my blog. All the best blogging tutorials (like this free guide here) will teach you a process to learn how to successfully monetize a blog, which is something that doesn’t happen organically.

These courses will teach everything about blogging and focus on important tools. I´m  saving you time from the start by telling you it´s not worth trying to suss it all out yourself, just skip the stress and commit to a course when you think you are ready to start hustling, the courses will offer you their experience and educate you in what you need.

I wasted heaps of time trying to figure it all out by myself before purchasing this blogging course.  I wrote a detailed review of the Launch Your Blog course if you would like to learn more.

Before you make the investment in a blogging course, there is plenty you can do for free to build the foundations of your successful blog!

Here are the best blogging tools for beginners you need to get started on monetizing your blog and get paid!

1 Bluehost

Before you start your blog, you need to choose a host. So a host is where your website will live, it is related to your domain. But be aware that some companies make you pay for a domain name as well as the monthly hosting fee.

If you plan to make money with your blog then you will need to go self-hosted. Self-hosted means that you own your website and can do what you like with it.

To put it simply – if you don’t pay for a hosting service then you can’t monetize your site.

I use Bluehost and I´m sure nearly every big blogger out there is with Bluehost.

Bluehost is the best hosting service out there but when I first started blogging a year ago, I wanted to go with an ever so slightly cheaper competitor. 

You can probably guess that I regretted my decision by the fact they aren´t being mentioned on this post. The competitors’ interface was so complicated, I couldn’t figure anything out, it was so techy. I couldn’t even do something basic like install WordPress. Luckily, I cancelled the service and managed to get a refund.

Well, fast forward to now and I’m still with Bluehost to this day. The hosting plan I use costs just $3.95/month. Which works out as the same price as one of my daily coffees – which doesn’t last me an entire month, let alone help me earn money.

RELATED: Find out more about Bluehost

 

 

2 Theme

I don´t need to tell you how important the first impression of your site is. We have all stumbled onto outdated or unorganised blogs and wondered what they were thinking. So you probably already know that a blog needs to look professional and easy to use with a sleek design.

Although lots of themes are paid for – an attractive blog theme doesn’t have to be expensive or hard to use. And, if money is tight, well then it is totally possible to download a FREE blog theme to get you off the starting blocks. 

Even if you are a beginner blogger, you need to think long term and if you want to make money blogging then a paid theme is well worth the initial cost.

I chose the Divi Theme because it is intuitive to use as a beginner blogger. I believed in myself so much more when I saw my blog come to life with the Divi theme, instead of being just some pipe dream, my blog was real – and most importantly – it looked professional.

The cherry on the top was just how easy it was to achieve the look I wanted.

 

 

3 Blogging Course

Blogging is a skill, and just like every other skill worth learning like rollerblading, playing the saxophone solo of ´Careless Whisper´, and cooking something other than frozen pizza, you need to learn how to do it. 

 

But before you start to worry there are heaps of blogging guides with helpful tools for beginners to learn how to earn money blogging in 2021.  

Now, there are lots of free options, and trust me when I say that I also signed up to an extremely large number of these in my journey to learn how to create a blog and how to make money blogging.

But ultimately sometimes the best things in life aren’t free. I actually think that looking back if I had just bit the bullet and made the investment in a blogging course earlier on, then I would have started making money a lot sooner. But oh well, you live and you learn, and now you hopefully won’t make the same mistake I made. 

So if I ´m going to recommend the best blogging tool for a beginner, then without doubt it would be the Create And Go course.

The Create And Go courses aren’t known for being the cheapest option, but they are definitely worth their weight in gold. Just make sure to do your homework to be certain it’s the right blogging course for you before you investing.

Create And Go! blogging course Launch Your Blog Biz. Review

To give you a summary of The Create And Go course I chose, it takes you through everything and gives you a step-by-step process on how to make money blogging in 2021. Of course, you will still need to make your own decisions along the way, but it tells you the steps to make.

(My honest review of the Create And Go blogging courses) 

 

 

If you needed an extra reason to choose one of their courses, the couple that created The Create and Go courses set up a blog that within 4 months had started to earn over $20,000 from their health and fitness blog. In part, it was reading their success story as well as the stories of other bloggers who had success from following their course that made me decide it was a good fit for me.

Check out my review of the How To Make Money Blogging course here.

 

4 SEO Plugin

When you’re just starting out as a blogger and getting to grips with your blog and only just learning how to drive traffic to you, it’s best to focus on social media to get those numbers up.

However, after a few months, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you just can’t afford to ignore. It´ll be important to consider SEO of your blog and organic traffic from Google. Despite it feeling technical and a bit tricky at first, trust me when I say you can master it with some help. 

Should you need help you know I do a lot of SEO Freelancer work and also provide free SEO information for beginner bloggers. 

I recommend using plugins, these are blogging tools that you download and add to your WordPress site. Yoast is a great example of one of these, even better yet, it is free. 

It is easy to use and Yoast SEO tools will help you optimize blog posts without needing to acquire any special knowledge.

Yoast is considered the favorite SEO  tool for beginners and seasoned bloggers alike. Yoast SEO is designed to make search engine optimization easier and more productive.

Once you´ve used Yoast for a while you will see why it is so popular. It gives you tons of flexibility over your site’s content, letting you set up titles, meta descriptions, and social sharing information on a per-post basis.

For secret SEO tips, check out this post I wrote all about SEO Industry secrets. 

 

5 WP Rocket

Once you start learning more and more about SEO and how to get your blog ranking higher on Google searches, one thing you’re going to appreciate is how important a fast website is in the grand scheme of your blog´s success.

You need your website to load in 3 seconds or less (test your website’s speed using Google Page Speed Insights here). Visitors to your site won’t hang around for your pages to load, you need everything to be lightning-quick if you want that sweet combination of low bounce rate and high engagement.

What´s that? You´re not an experienced web developer who knows how to code, and you aren’t sure how to optimize your site for the fastest speed possible? That’s crazy! Woah! Get out of here!

Well don´t worry, WP Rocket is a great tool to use to help speed up your site.

This is the best WordPress optimization plugin out there. It is consistently ranked as the most powerful caching plugin (caching creates an ultra-fast loading time, which is super important for SEO.)

It doesn’t have a free or trial version but they do have a 14-day refund policy, and that is something I appreciate,  it means you can buy it with confidence that you don’t need to commit if you aren’t impressed. 

Link To WP Rocket

Further Resources

Now you know all the best blogging tools for beginners. Check out these resources for further information on making money blogging! 

How To Start A Blog – FREE GUIDE

Create And Go Blogging Course Review

SEO Tips For Beginner Bloggers

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