We all have our favorite tools that we use in our business. When it comes to planning, creating and scheduling Social Media or blog posts. I too have a few favorites. I don’t use all of them all the time, but depending on the type of posts I create, or the amount of posts I create in advanced or if I have something special that goes along with the post, I will use these tools in different ways.
Dollarphotclub
At Dollarphotoclub you can get good quality stock photos at a reasonable price. You pay $10 pm and then get 10 credits or 10 photos so it works out to $1 per photo. The quality of photos are great for blog and social media posts and they have a huge range to choose from. It’s very easy to get what you need by searching for your topic. I also like buying a series of photos if I’m doing something that needs more than one photo.
Canva
Makes it easy to create Blog post photos and images to use in social media. The pre-sized templates are easy to change. I also use Cava to add text to photos like adding your headline and website address to a blog images. This ensure that your images will always stay connected to your site and post no matter where it ends up. Images with headlines are more popular on Pinterest and better searched in Google Images.
PicMonkey is another great photo editing and imaging tool. You can create more advanced images and even work in different layers.
Fiverr
Although not strictly a tool. No Social media site list is complete without Fiverr. Here you can get an endless amount of content, images, infographics, transcripts or eBooks done that you can use in your posts or as an opt-in upgrade. Having an upgrade to a pdf or infographic available in your posts is a great list building tool and really help you segment your list into different niches.
Co-Schedule
This tool probably need a post all by itself. This is by far my favorite tool to plan, create and schedule both blog and Social media posts. It comes with a calendar view that makes it easy to plan out your editorial content. You can create you content all inside the tool and even share creation tasks with a team. You then schedule your blog posts and can decide if it should go out to your social media platforms as well. You can also schedule Social Media posts by itself and schedule it to go out every week, month etc.
Another legendary automated scheduling tool is Meet Edgar. My only problem with this tool is that it is a bit expensive to just play around with. Here you create your social media posts into different categories or buckets. You then just decide when buckets should be posted and Meet Edgar randomly takes from the bucket. It’s a great way to re-use content and a way to always have content on hand.
ITTT
ITTT is an automation tool and you can use it for free to do all sorts of automations. When it comes to social media you can use it to automatically post blog post to social media platforms and also to post from one platform to another one. You can setup any recipe you want to and customize as needed.
REvive old post plugin
This plugin resides on your blog site and does what the name says it takes all your old posts and bring them back to live by randomly sharing them to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. This solves both the problem of having old posts that never gets read even though they might be great content and also coming up with good quality content for social media on a daily basis.
Popup ally
I’ve included this plugin in this list as this is an excellent free plugin to be used with blog posts for opt-in upgrades to receive an infographic or pdf version of your post. You can have a beautifully designed opt-in box at the bottom of your post, encouraging the reader to opt-in for more information or a value added document
Pictochart
Is an online tool that can be used to create infographics and other graphics for social media. Infographics are very popular to be shared on social media platforms and people opt-in to get a nice infographic that summarize a post especially if it is a valuable post. There’s a free version but it’s a bit limited, it’s more valuable to get the paid one.
Hope you’ve found my Top 10 list valuable. This is of course by now means exhaustive and I am sure you also have you favorites. So please share with us what tools you like to use!
Thanks for sharing Anchen!
Awesome list, Anchen and for once, I saw ones that I use too. My own personal favorites are Pixabay as a first stop for images and Buffer for scheduling my posts on social media.
What great resources in this post, Anchen. Thanks so much. I had never heard of ReVive Old Post and LOVE the idea of what it does. I already have 17 plugins on my site, which slow it down considerably, so will proceed with caution with adding more, however, both this one and Popup alley sounds like fabulous tools to optimize your blog even more. I do use PicMonkey (and love it) and never took to Canva, so am happy to hear that PicMonkey allows more layering for designs. Appreciate you sharing all these resources and for broadening the tool kit we can draw on.
Nice set of tools. I like quotescover.com, buffer.com and buffer.com/pablo. quotescover is great for creating quote images. It’s free and lets you upload photos and has some great features. Buffer let’s you schedule tweets, facebook posts, linked in posts, google+ posts, etc. The free version caps you at 10 in the queue. Pablo is also by buffer.com and is similar to quotescover. It has some different features to play with. Have fun!
Thanks for sharing your list of resources, Anchen. I use some of these, but not all. I wanted to make a quick comment about PopupAlly – it’s a great plugin we use on our site to increase email subscriptions. We actually got the premium plugin as it allows so much more customization. However, the free version is as good at the beginning.