Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash
As a full-time writer and digital entrepreneur, some tools are inevitable in my daily workday. Without the right blogging tools, I’d probably not be able to write +5,000 words every day.
When I started writing two years ago, I thought that it’s all about coming up with exceptional ideas and writing them down. Yet, I soon realized that ideas don’t matter as much as the quality and quantity of your work. Even the best ideas aren’t worth anything if you don’t execute — no matter if it’s an idea for a life-changing company or a headline idea for your next post.
What matters is turning them into actual articles and hitting “Publish”.
The following tools helped me to write 350 blog posts in less than two years and build a consistent writing routine in the past six months, and I’m sure they might also help you to level up your writing game:
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Without a fantastic headline, your article can’t get much attention.
The title of your post is the very first thing people see, and based on it, they decide whether they even open your article or not.
You can write the most amazing blog post of all time, but if your headline sucks, nobody will care because they won’t even open your article.
The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a free, simple to use tool that grades your headlines and tells you how to improve them further.
Through this simple, quick analysis, you know how to improve your headline to impress more readers and make them click on your post.
If you, for example, score 0% on emotional words (as shown in the example above), you can check their list with 180 emotional words and find an additional word that makes your headline even more appealing.
The Headline Analyzer won’t replace studying how to write great headlines, but it’s a fantastic way to test different options and see which ones score better according to CoSchedule’s algorithm.
Grammarly
If I’d had to choose only one of my favorite tools, it’d be Grammarly. Typos and little mistakes can happen to all of us, and I still find errors in my pieces every now and then. Yet, as a prolific writer, checking your spelling and grammar are indispensable.
If your pieces are full of mistakes and hard to understand, people won’t invest time in reading them.
Grammarly is user-friendly, simple to use, and helps you to check your writing for mistakes quickly.
Through the Chrome plugin, you can even use it inside Medium and don’t need to copy your text elsewhere, which saves you tons of time.
Even though the basic version is free, I highly recommend signing up for the Pro version (around $12/month) as it will add so much more quality to your work.
Copy Clip
Along with Grammarly and the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, CopyClip is one of the tools I’ve been using daily for the past two years.
CopyClip is a simple clipboard manager that helps you to save tons of time by caching everything you copy. It runs discreetly from your menu bar and stores everything you copy or cut, allowing you to quickly find the right snippet of text when you need it again later:
By clicking on the snippet, you can instantly paste it again and don’t have to get back to the original page.
CopyClip only works with Mac, yet, numerous similar tools do the same and also work on other devices.
Trello
Trello is a project management tool I use for various areas of my life. My entire business, as well as my private life, are documented inside Trello. It’s not only visually appealing but also incredibly simple to use. Plus, collaborating with team members and working on projects is so simple.
Trello allows you to organize and prioritize your tasks and projects in a fun, flexible way.
Besides collecting all my ideas, I also use it to document the process of my current work.
When I start writing a piece, I place it in a list named “In process”. When it’s written, I move it to “Written”, once I’ve run it through Grammarly and edited it’s in “Ready”.
Through this simple process, I’m fully aware of my work and make quick progress if I don’t have too much time to get stuff done.
For me, managing my ideas in one proper system is inevitable, and Trello is the ideal solution. However, there are tons of other tools that can help you do the same, you just need to find one that fits your needs and is easy to use.
Hemingway
Last but not least, a few weeks ago, I started using the Hemingway editor to simplify my sentences and make my writing more bold and clear.
Even though the web version is free, I paid for the application ($20) because I was immediately convinced that it would further improve my writing.
While Grammarly helps you to find spelling and grammar errors, the primary purpose of Hemingway is to improve the readability of your text: It helps you to shorten sentences, replace the passive voice, and get rid of complicated words and sentence structures.
The editor is based on the writing style of Ernest Hemingway, who is well known for his simple, yet effective way of communicating ideas. He refused complicated words and sentence structures and instead made use of simple, straightforward writing.
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
― Ernest Hemingway
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