One of the most useful, most unique areas to look at when it comes to discovering great material to share on social media—the type of thing that grabs attention and encourages people to click, share, and comment—is your site and the content you generate.

So the questions become:

• How to make one-of-a-kind material.
• How to create blog articles that are both strategic and efficient.
• How to get your material in front of a large audience.

Starting with writing tips is a great place to start. And, in addition to the words you use to construct your blog entries, I’ve discovered a variety of blogging tools that assist with anything from coming up with ideas to disseminating the information widely.

Do you have a favourite tool for blogging? Continue reading to see whether it’s on the list, and let us know which ones you like in the comments.

39 Blogging Tools in One Huge List

Tools to brainstorm blogging ideas

1. Quora

The crowdsourced answer website can help lead you to the types of questions that real people are asking, questions that you can answer in-depth with a blogpost. Search for your keyword, and follow topics related to your blog’s focus.

2. BuzzSumo

Enter a topic or a URL into the BuzzSumo search box, and you’ll get a wealth of information on the content that performs best for social media sharing. BuzzSumo can be super helpful in fleshing out an existing idea to find the perfect angle or take a broad look at the content that does well (and the blogs that do it best) in your niche.

3. Quick Sprout

Enter a URL into Quick Sprout, and you get an analysis of the site’s performance and content. The “Social Media” tab shows you which posts from the site have been home runs, and you can take inspiration from the highlights on the list.

4. Portent Title Maker

Enter a subject into the Portent tool, and you’ll get a sample blogpost title, complete with helpful and witty breakdowns of why the title might make for a good read. Refresh as many times as you’d like for new ideas.

5. Blog Topics Generator

HubSpot’s title maker works similarly to Portent’s. With the HubSpot tool, you can enter three keywords, and HubSpot will give you five titles—a week’s worth of content—to work with.

6. Twitter trending topics

The trending topics section on your Twitter homepage can be a super spot for grabbing ideas from the latest news. You can tailor your trending topics to go uber-local (the big cities near and around you) or even receive fully tailored tweets that consider your location and those you follow. (Click the “Change” link at the top of the Trends section on your Twitter homepage.)

7. LinkedIn Pulse

Similar to Twitter’s trending topics, LinkedIn Pulse pulls content from the channels you follow on LinkedIn and the people in your LinkedIn network.

For additional trending topics on social media, you can check out Facebook’s Trending section and Google+’s What’s Hot page.

Tools to organize your ideas

8. Trello

We like to add all our blogpost ideas into Trello, turning each idea into a card to spec out with notes and move from list to list with a simple drag-and-drop.

9. Evernote

For super fast idea collecting, you can drop everything into Evernote—notes, snippets, photos, webpages, and more. The tagging system in Evernote is incredibly robust so that you can keep your ideas with a simple tag in several cool ways—by topic, by idea stage, and more.

10. Google Calendar

Calendar tools like Google Calendar can be repurposed as editorial calendars. If publishing one post per day, you can save your ideas as all-day events and move them around the calendar as needed. If you plan on scheduling multiple posts, add a calendar event to the specific publish time. Zoom in and out to see what you’ve got planned for a given day, week, or month.

11. Todoist

Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blogposts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on shared tasks with a team, too.

12. Wunderlist

Another useful to-do list tool, Wunderlist, can help you keep your ideas sorted into tasks and subtasks. Consider adding a listicle idea and creating subtasks for each of the list items you want to add.

13. Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the best spots to store and share things like pdfs, Word Docs, design files, photos, and more when your ideas come with files.

Tools to create well-optimized content

14. Google Trends

Is your blogpost idea a popular one? You can run the topic through Google Trends to see search volume for the different keywords and phrases you’re considering using.

15. Keyword Planner

How do you frame your excellent idea into a far-reaching blogpost (that people can easily find)? Check for popular keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner lets you enter a series of keywords, and Google returns results on search volume and popularity as well as related keywords that might spark an idea for you.

16. Keywordtool.io

An alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool returns up to 750 suggestions for every keyword you enter.

(For yet another keyword tool alternative, take SERP Stat for a spin.)

17. Yoast WordPress SEO plugin

SEO plugins can help you fine-tune your idea and blogpost into a specific keyword or phrase that will help search results and help keep your blogpost focused. With Yoast’s plugin, you can type in the keyword you’re after, and Yoast tells you how many different spots on the page the post appears and a nice green dot for when you’re ready to go.

Tools to help you write more straightforward and faster

18. Google Docs

Many bloggers go straight to the writing editor in their blog software (WordPress, Ghost, etc.). You can also consider writing in Google Docs for collaborating with others and tapping into the extra power of Google Docs’ spelling and grammar tools.

19. Egg Timer

A super simple timer, tell Egg Timer how long you want to work—15 minutes for research, 40 minutes to write a draft, etc.—and Egg Timer will count down the time. When time’s up, a popup appears, and the timer sounds.

20. Toggl

One of the most straightforward and fun time tracking tools you’ll find, Toggl lets you add a task, push the Start/Stop button, and check back in to see a whole dashboard of stats on how you spend your time. It could be beneficial for bloggers who want to focus on the time they spend writing, researching, and editing.

21. Hemingway

An exciting free marketing tool, Hemingway analyzes your text for readability, highlighting sentences that are a bit too complex or dense. The readability for the list post you’re reading now: A seventh-grade reading level.

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Buffer is the all-you-need social media toolkit that lets you focus on doing what you love for your business.

22. Grammarly

Please copy and paste your article into Grammarly’s online grammar checker to how it performs against checks for spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, style, and more. The initial score is free to see. The specifics of what to change (and suggestions from Grammarly) come with their paid plans.

23. WordPress Distraction Free Writing

This helpful tool is baked right into the WordPress editor. To access the Distraction-Free editor, click on the four-way arrow icon in the top right corner of any WordPress post you’re writing.

24. Desk

Download the Desk app (currently Mac only) to write straight from your desktop in a clear and uncluttered editor (with markdown support), then connect directly to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, and a host of other online publishing sites.

Tools to create beautiful blog visuals

We previously covered an extensive list of 23 tools and resources for creating unique visual content, many of which appear below. For the complete list of image creation tools, check out our related post.

25. Death to the Stock Photo

Every month, receive an email with links to a new collection of free, high-res lifestyle photos. The site offers a premium subscription as well to be able to access and search its full archive.

26. PhotoPin

One of the 53+ places we scour to find free images, PhotoPin lets you search millions of Creative Commons photos from Flickr.

27. Skitch

Grab screenshots and annotate with notes, arrows, and icons. Skitch connects directly to your Evernote account so you can save all the screengrabs you take.

28. Meme Generator

Sometimes a simple meme says more than any other image could. Meme Generator lets you create a meme from scratch or use an existing meme character to add your saying.

29. Canva

Probably our most-used image tool at Buffer, Canva, makes image creation super easy (especially for non-designers) with their premade templates, custom image sizes for every social media channel, drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and more. Almost every original image you see shared from our social accounts was made in Canva.

Other great options include PicMonkey and BeFunky.

30. Gimp

Photoshop is the king of image software. Gimp is like a free version of Photoshop. Most all major features are there, and amateur designers can get all sorts of things done with layers, masks, photo effects, and more.

31. Share as Image

Turn text from any webpage into a shareable image with the Share as Image browser extension and bookmarklet. The Pro plan ($8/month) even lets you add custom branding to the image and choose from many background photos and fonts.

Tools to distribute your content far and wide.

We wrote about the topic of content distribution tools in more depth in a separate blog post. Click through that post for even more ideas for tools and resources to try when promoting your content.

32. Buffer

Once your blog post is written and published, you can set up an easy sharing schedule with Buffer. Schedule your new article to go to your social channels multiple times with different headlines or images attached to each update.

33. EMV Headline Analyzer

Emotional Marketing Value checks for emotional words in your headline, and the analyzer tool returns a score of EMV words compared to total words in the headline.

34. Click to Tweet

Built by the team at CoSchedule (which also makes a helpful WordPress calendar and scheduler), this WordPress plugin makes it simple to highlight snippets of your blog post for readers to share on Twitter easily. For sites not running WordPress, consider a tool like a click to tweet.

35. Filament

Filament contains a group of valuable features in a single WordPress plugin, including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blog post on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

36. Digg Digg

Digg was built by our Buffer engineers a couple of years back, and it’s been a staple on the Buffer blog ever since. We’ve found most helpful with Digg Digg integration is the flexibility of placing the share buttons. Floating to the left or right of the article (see our Open blog), pinned to the top or bottom of a blog post (see this Buffer Social blog), or manually wherever you wish inside your theme.

There’s a great list of social sharing plugins reviewed here if you’d like more options.

37. Google Webmaster Tools

Signing up for webmaster tools can reveal a lot of SEO opportunities for your blog posts. For instance, see where you rank in search engine results for specific keywords, then build links to your most popular keyword posts to increase rankings.

38. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the biggest and best (and free) ways to send email to your list of contacts. You can set up automated campaigns that deliver each new post you write or create campaigns from scratch. MailChimp offers free accounts for those with fewer than 2,000 contacts in their list.

39. Headlines

Run A/B tests of your headlines with this WordPress plugin from KingSumo. If the cost is a bit steep ($ 99-lifetime charge), you can try out the other Sumo plugin, SumoMe, which offers some handy tools for growing an email list, analyzing your blog posts, and sharing content to social media.