England take charge after Day 1 in Mount Maunganui

Being a February baby doesn’t tend to afford you that rarest of luxuries of watching Test Match cricket on your birthday. Cricket may be a year round tussle of leather on willow these days and I’m…

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Necessary tools to become a better blogger

I am not a good writer and definitely a professional blogger neither. But as a hobbyist blogger for years I came to know some valuable tools that wished someone had shared with me without learning the hard way.

This post explains useful tools to help you to become a better blogger. Or even getting started with blogging without doing much of trial and error on your own.

When I started my blogging journey in 2013, I was unaware how goods tools could help to be a better blogger as well as gaining more audience.

At the beginning, I used to write mindlessly and publish. But was not getting the desired results (gaining audience). I blamed bad SEO on my site and overlooked the importance of content. Soon I became too frustrated that even gave up blogging for sometimes (January 2014 — April 2014). Then soon after I started to hate writing.

During that period, I went through each and every small process in my blogging workflow to know reason(s) of my failure. I eventually narrowed them down to multiple reasons. I figured that my posts suffer from (1) grammatical mistakes (2) bad headlines (3) poor knowledge representation and (4) not interesting topics.

Since then I focused on improving my blogging skills. Tried hard to find some good tools which definitely have helped me a lot that I am going to share.

Even though my skills improved compared with years ago, still I make the above mistakes but less frequent with help of good blogging tools. Yet, still, there is a long journey to become a professional blogger.

After reshaping my process, I started to gain some audience and better traffic despite publishing way less frequent nowadays.

Note 1: I discovered some of the following tools by myself and some from online courses. So, all credit does not go to me.

Note 2: I have no affiliation with any of tools mentioned in this post. I am not getting paid or receiving advertisement fee by putting their names here. I am not responsible for how well, good, bad, or evil they function. Use them at your own risk.

For simplicity sake, tools are divided into five categories and each is introduced separately in below.

Usually, good thoughts (ideas, a sentence, a quote) spark very quickly and gone in a blink an eye. Having a note taking application comes quite handy. There are numerous note taking apps, sites available. Below listed those worthwhile:

There are three downsides to it.

Above reasons motivated me to seek for an alternative solution (see custom recipe section). I moved away from Evernote and just kept some of my archived notes there.

Recommendation: The best tool for those who just want to get started or get the job down and does not care about having markdown feature.

If you feel adventurous enough, you could even deploy your HackMD instance. I must confess that I tried but failed to get it work!

Having all goodies, HackMD does not have native mobile app. This is a biggest missing part.

Recommendation: Use HackMD if you can live without a native mobile app. Or if you create lots of slides.

Well as the title indicates this is the workflow I established using four apps for note taking which so far works the best for my needs. Sharing it here so anyone interested can apply a similar approach or tweak it based their needs.

I choose Dropbox over other vendors because it has native (partially open source) app for Linux and makes syncing files fairly easy.

Recommendation: Use it at your own risk 😊 and if seeking ultimate flexibility.

Having a catchy headline is crucial to get more attention. If you take a look at most read Medium posts, you will see all have very strong headlines that encourage users to click and read. I have put some random examples of good headlines in below:

There are numerous tools available to help generating good headlines to get more attention. Keep in mind the headlines not only should be SEO friendly but also human-friendly. The latter has more importance because the ultimate audience is humans and will be impacted minimally by any changes on a search engine.

Note: Don’t abuse headline generators as click bait to promote low-quality contents or just to earn money. Good headlines make sense only when combined with high-quality legit contents.

Below is the list of some sites that could help to generate headlines.

Recommendation: It is very good and generated titles are very popular.

Most of the headlines do not make sense for technology-related topics such as Computer.

Once I attempted to get a good headline from Hubspot and supplied following keywords:

Consequently, received a list of garbage titles:

Recommendation: Judge yourself by the given example 😉. It is a handy website to get some ideas though.

Recommendation: So far is the best tool available to give some clues and help to generate titles based on facts not generated garbage words.

There are many sites are out there to generate titles. I didn’t find any worthwhile to allocate a dedicated section for each, so I put those encountered in past here with some example each generated for a given word which was “Linux”. Let’s have some fun :-D

SEOPressor

Tweak Your Biz

Portent

Not only you can generate headlines but also you can analyze headlines you came up with to see how good they are.

Unfortunately, I only found only one website to do headline analysis.

Recommendation: Use it to know more about how good your headlines are.

Adding more pictures to your articles is helpful to avoid boring readers. However, finding a picture from Google is very bad idea because in almost all cases they are copyrighted. Using them eventually can cause some troubles.

One option is to take pictures by yourself and use them. But not everyone is a photographer and for people like me, photography is tough and unpleasant.

The best alternative could be to use sites that offer pictures freely without any copyright. There are many sites available and all are good equally. Here, I just introduce two only.

Recommendation: Depends on topics you are seeking it can be good or bad. Picture qualities are reasonably well.

Recommendations: A large database for a variety of topics consists of 1.2 million high-quality pictures.

On the downside, the premium cost of Grammarly is too expensive and not everyone could afford easily.

If you are not confident enough to publish in Medium, you can first gain some confidence by taking some online writing courses to sharpen your writing skills.

To keep track of your articles that republished in other platforms, I highly recommend using Google Alert. You can easily know what sites republished your articles.

England take charge after Day 1 in Mount Maunganui

Necessary tools to become a better blogger

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