The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit is on sale this week (October 26-November 1).  It’s packed full of quality blogging resources, but none of my must-have favorites are in it!  So I took it as the push I needed to share this updated list of my own favorites.  (The bonuses in the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit are pretty awesome, though — like ConvertKit and BoardBooster, which both look really good, but which I’ve been hesitant to drop the funds on.  I might buy the Toolkit just for the bonuses.)

Before we get going, here’s my old list of recommended blogger resources.  It still has some great tools in it.  Just because something didn’t get carried over from that list to this one doesn’t mean it isn’t useful; it just means I didn’t want to duplicate myself. 😉  This post shares a couple of old favorites that still stand out, as well as some new discoveries.

Overall Blogging Resources

Elite Blog Academy is the creme de la creme.  It’s not cheap, but this is a full blogging course, covering every aspect of blogging.  Think of it as boot camp for bloggers.  I honestly haven’t finished it yet (silly me; I signed up at the same time I was starting back to college — talk about biting off more than I could chew!) but what I have done, I’ve been quite impressed with.  There is a ton of information here, and you will be walked step-by-step through everything from creating a tag line to branding to content creation to social media.

DIY Blog Critique is just what it says: instructions for critiquing your blog on your own.  This ebook covers all the questions you need to ask yourself about your blog. It’s great for when you’re designing or redesigning your blog, or for periodic spot-checks.  This is now FREE from the author of Content Brew (see below), so when you click through, just look for the newsletter signup.

Content Creation

Content is (still) king.  But how do you figure out what to write, week after week?  With content and headline tools like these.

Content Brew is an ecourse from Blog Clarity.  For me, the organizational method offered was, alone, worth the cost of the course.  Of course, you’ll also learn methods for generating post ideas.

(Bonus tool: If, like me, you’re not very spreadsheet-savvy, you might like Airtable.  I’m not super-familiar with it yet, so I can’t really call it a favorite at this point, but it’s like spreadsheets with lots of extra features and not so much of the math/algorithms.  They even have a Blog Editorial Calendar template.)

The #BlogStrategy Planner and Content Planning Workshop from Goff Creative.  The #BlogStrategy Planner can be used on its own but in my opinion it really shines when paired with the Content Planning Workshop.  The methods here are somewhat similar to those in Content Brew, but the beauty of this pair is the way it breaks down the process from the big picture to the everyday nitty-gritty, so you don’t get derailed between planning and execution.  (Sara’s blog is chock-full of super-helpful content, so be sure you check it out.  Don’t just head straight to the product pages and then leave.)

CoSchedule’s free headline analyzer is a handy tool for tweaking and improving your post titles — and learning from the process.  (CoSchedule is another routinely-useful blog, although they’re more business-oriented, so you might have to do a little cherry-picking in terms of examples.)

Headline Hacks is a free download offering ideas for the kinds of headlines that do well.  (There are other, similar headline lists if you search around.  They can be really helpful for generating ideas.  Especially for those of us who are inclined to go overly simple, like “New Breakfast Cereal.”)

If you need to generate headlines (either for existing posts, or as a way to come up with new post ideas), there are two that particularly stand out to me.  Portent’s Content Idea Generator is pretty popular, but it isn’t one of my favorites.  It can be fun to play around with, but I find it usually generates somewhat “odd” headlines that aren’t a good fit for my content.

SumoMe’s “Kickass Headline Generator” has the handy feature of letting you choose what type of headline you’re looking for.  (See the partial screenshot below.)  Title-generator.com takes a totally different tack, generating 700 headlines with a single click, based on the keyword you enter.  There’s bound to be one from among the the 700 that will work for what you need — and as a bonus, the remaining 699 should provide plenty of ideas to keep you writing!

Growth and Social Media

Pinning Perfect is an up-to-the-minute course (Melissa & Anna keep it updated) about making the most of Pinterest.  Pinterest tends to be great for driving traffic, so it’s an especially good “social media” platform to pay attention to.  (I put social media in quotes because it’s not really “social” like other platforms.)  There’s a bonus available if you sign up for the course by November 30 – a Holiday Season Quick-Start Guide.  This is a super-handy ebook that’s kind of like a crash course in effective Pinterest use, with a particular focus on seasonal pins.

Skyrocket Blog Pageviews Using Google Analytics is an amazing ebook.  The authors refer to it as a “printable course,” and I’d say that’s accurate.  I was skeptical that it would deliver, but boy did it!  There are 30 exercises in the book (although that’s really selling it short, since there are multiple variations on most of them) that will help you make changes.  They can be used over and over and over again to continue to grow and improve your blog.  And they walk you through what it is you need to look for in Google Analytics, so it’s okay if you don’t know much about GA; this is actually a good way to learn the tool one baby step at a time.

byRegina has yet another fabulous blog that’s full of useful content.  She also has some pretty great-looking courses, like Monetize and Market Your Mind (about creating information products with what you know).  And the ebook I really want to highlight here: the bran-new Content Funnel Cake.  It’s new enough (out less than a week!) that I haven’t really gotten a close look at it yet, but it looks like it’s going to address my own biggest challenge: what to send to my email list.

Photography

Courtney from Click it Up a Notch has an ebook called The Unexpected Everyday.  It’s really geared toward parents who want to capture their kids, but the lessons apply to pretty much all photography.  It’s an accessible introduction the manual mode of a camera, with lots of tips for improving composition — all the way from basics like the Rule of Thirds to tricky things like “catchlights” (those sparkly little reflections of light in a subject’s eyes).  There are actual photographic illustrations for each one, so you can see exactly what she’s talking about.  (I also think these are handy, for reminders of settings.)

I’ll be honest; I don’t have a SHOTBOX yet, but I really want one!  That’s the nifty collapsible lightbox you see above.  Our house has terrible lighting, and I’m constantly hacking things together to try to get a decent shot.  This simplifies that a lot, at least for relatively small subjects.  (Right now you can get $40 off the Deluxe Bundle with code FRIENDS40.  [UPDATE: I did get a Shotbox, and I love it!]

Right now they have an add-on project on Kickstarter.  They’ve created some pretty awesome-looking background panels designed to be used with the SHOTBOX.

(By the way, this is not only useful for bloggers.  If you sell on eBay or Etsy, have family heirlooms to photograph, etc., it can be a beneficial tool.)

Related: $2 photography boards

Platform, Plugins, & Tools

I still rely on WordPress — the .org variety, which means it’s installed on my own hosting rather than hosted by WordPress itself.  (There are a number of reasons for this, but one key factor for many bloggers is that you can’t monetize on a WordPress.com site.)  It has its faults — in particular, they’ve made several changes over the past few updates that I think make it less user-friendly but, all things considered, I still don’t know of anything else that compares.  (Depending on your hosting, you probably don’t have to actually download WordPress from their website.  Most hosts have a one-click WordPress installation option.)

Black Chicken Host.  I can’t recommend them strongly enough.  I tried to go with “cheap” hosting for a long time, and it was fine — as long as everything was going smoothly.  But every time an issue popped up, it became a huge issue.  (Consider, for instance, the time I had a post go viral.  My host had my site down for five days before I could even get them to talk to me so I could figure out what I needed to do.  Not cool.)  I switched to Black Chicken and have never looked back.

They cost a little more than what I was paying before but, honestly, not by much.  Downtime has been minimal, their communication is good, and their tech support rocks.  And when dealing with a temporarily-viral post, they work with me through it and determine whether we can ride it out, or what’s the minimal upgrade I need to keep things running smoothly.

Domain registration is up to you.  I like my registrar (Aplus.net) well enough, but there are other good ones, too.  Shop around for pricing, though.  If you’re paying more than about $15/year per domain name, you’re overpaying.

My theme is built on the Genesis framework, and I’ve been happy with that.  It makes a lot of semi-techie stuff simpler.  (For the curious, I use the Lifestyle child theme.)

I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin.  It has a lot of features, so don’t let that panic or overwhelm you.  For the most part, you can skip over anything you’re not ready for, and you’ll still derive benefit from the parts you’re using.  At it’s core, this plugin helps you know where you could do better at optimizing your posts for search engine traffic.

If you post recipes, EasyRecipe is also a handy plugin.  It automatically formats the recipe as needed for Google and for Pinterest’s “rich pins” (the ones that have the ingredient list embedded), and it really is easy to use.  (BTW, I also downloaded their newer EasyIndex plugin, but I do not find it easy.  I still haven’t figured out how to make it work.)

Last on the list, because it’s an external tool, but definitely not least, is Easy Product Displays.  I only learned about this just before the new year, but I love it.  Its main purpose is making it easy to make (surprise, surprise) easy product displays.  (And they’re embedded in your own code, so if you ever stop using the tool, your displays won’t disappear or break.  Although you will have to replace the button images, because EPD hosts those.)

It also, however, is a very easy-to-use tool for searching Amazon or Zazzle (or ShareASale, if you have that version of the tool) for links with your affiliate code already embedded.  It’s much easier to use than searching Amazon directly.  And with a little extra effort you can use it to make neat displays for non-product purposes like, for instance, if you wanted to round up a number of your blog posts with image thumbnails.