5 Top Productivity Tools That Will Change How You Blog - Classy Career Girl

5 Top Productivity Tools That Will Change How You Blog One of the biggest issues we face as bloggers is that there’s never enough time in a day to get everything done â€" from planning your blog’s content to creating it and promoting it, there are numerous daily tasks that a blogger can’t escape. As an avid lover of tools, I’ve experimented with a plethora of tools and apps to find the ones that will actually help improve my productivity and make me a better, more efficient blogger. In this blog post, I’m going to share my 5 favorite tools that will help improve your blogging productivity â€" perfect for those who want to scale their business with blogging, as well as those who simply want to improve their blogging. 5 Top Productivity Tools That Will Change How You Blog 1. Use Trello to Organize Your Blogging Tasks As far as task management tools go, Trello is definitely one of the best. It’s easy to use and very intuitive, which is essential for a task manager in my opinion (after all, it is there to make your life easier!). Basically, you create different boards (or dashboards), and then, on each board, you can add different lists. Under each list, you can add tasks â€" which you can customize, color code, add attachments, add stickers, and tag other members or set due dates. You also have the option to use Trello as an editorial calendar template for your blog. And the best part: it’s free! 2. Use Agorapulse to Promote Your Blog on Social Media If you have a blog, then you’re most likely also using social media to promote it. Its an amazing source of referral traffic that can help explode your blog and a great way to connect with your readers and build up your online profile. So if you’re looking for help putting your social media strategy into place, look no further. There’s no shortage of great social media management tools, but my personal favorite is Agorapulse. It has a social media inbox where you can see all of your social media notifications in one place, at a glance. You can easily see if you have any new updates that need your attention so you don’t lose yourself in updates you’ve already checked and replied to. If you get a lot of mentions and want to filter them out to save time, you can use the automated moderation feature, where any matching updates will be tagged, flagged, hidden, or assigned to a member of your team. In terms of publishing, you can post updates and schedule them to go up on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. There is also a queue function, which basically means that you can add your best, evergreen content to be republished on a regular basis. Among other features, you can set up monitoring searches, check your social media analytics and use their CRM tool to organize your followers or see which of your followers are your brand ambassadors or social influencers. If you want to use influencer marketing or build stronger relationships with those who support you and your blog, then this is the perfect tool. 3. Create Beautiful Visual Content Quickly With Canva Visual content is extremely important, even if you mostly write blog posts. Every blog post needs some images to break it up and make it easier to read. In addition, it’s a good idea to diversify the type of content you publish on your blog (presentations, ebooks, infographics, etc.). I’ll be the first to admit I’m no design expert. So when I first discovered Canva, I was extremely surprised to see how easy it is to find and create beautiful images, infographics, and the like with little to no experience. It’s free to use (although some images, illustrations, etc. are $1 each) and they have a ton of templates that you can use, such as blog images, images for different social networks, infographics, presentations and much, much more. You also have the option to upload your own images and customize them with all kinds of illustrations, shapes, icons, charts, and text. [RELATED: The Top Ten Online Tools I Cant Live Without] 4. Save Awesome Content to Read Later With Pocket As a blogger, you need to be up to date on all the latest articles, the news in your niche. An easy way to do this is with a tool like Pocket. The way it works is very simple: log in with your Google account or your email, and then, as you find great content that you want to save and read later, you can simply add it to your pocket. You can also use the Pocket app for your smartphone or tablet and read the articles you’ve saved in your Pocket whenever you have the time. 5. Automate Your Tasks and Save Time With IFTTT IFTTT is a really cool tool that allows you to set up automatic functions so that you can save time and improve your productivity. IFTTT (standing for if this, then that) can be connected with all kinds of other tools, such as Skype, most social networks, Gmail, Pocket and so much more, it’s impossible to list them all. You can set up hundreds of different automated tasks for anything you can think of, basically â€" and some things you probably never even considered. In terms of blogging, you can set it up to automatically tweet new posts, add new YouTube videos to your blog, share your latest WordPress posts on your Facebook Page and much, much more. A word of warning, though: as helpful as this tool can be, you might be in danger of exploring all of the different IFTTT applets for hours. Blogging is a tough job that involves hours of work every day. So why not make use of tools to help speed up the process and even help you get better results from blogging?