It’s safe to say that it has never been more important to stay ahead of your competition. Using the right tools will give you an upper hand in today’s overly competitive world of blogging. Below I have listed some top tools for WordPress that every beginner should use.

15 Must Have WordPress Blogging Tools for Beginners

1. Google Keyword planner

Finding keywords is crucial and Google keyword planner is a powerful keyword research tool that makes finding low competition keywords to target on your website a breathe. It’s a blogging tool maintained by Google and you need to have an account with Google to be able to access and use the tool. Your good old Gmail account will do as well.

2. Longtail pro

Long tail pro is a good alternative to keyword planner, and a paid one. Even though it costs money it’s well worth it. It doesn’t just give you a list of nonspecific keywords just like the rest of keyword research tools. But it gives you long tail keywords, ones that don’t have a lot of websites competing for them, and thus are the easiest ones to rank. It also tells you the competitiveness, the amount of monthly searches, strength of the competition as well as the potential CPC for your keywords of choice. You can also use it to keep tabs on your competitors. All that is important in finding profitable keywords. The tool costs $27 monthly.

3. Infog.ram

Infographics are all the rage these days, and they’re actually good for catching the eyes of visitors and teaching your visitors stuff without being lackluster and boring.

Inforgraphics are in simple words graphic content that you use to present your articles or information visually. And Infog.ram is a free tool for creating infographics easily. It helps you turn written content into graphic or visual ones. You can even turn your articles into infographics and create fresh content out of your old article collections.

4. WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is another must have blogging tool, a WordPress plugin by Yoast and it lets you automatically optimize your blog for search engines. It is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. For those who are getting started in the blogging arena and learning to setup their very first blog, this is a plugin you almost can’t live without.

5. Fiverr

Blogging can be a pretty laborious task especially when you are a beginner. It’s going to give you a toil if you are going to do everything the hard way.

And outsourcing is a good way to take some burden off of you, and one of the places to outsource or hire others is Fiverr. Fiverr is a place where you can get logos, articles, banners, header, videos and many more tasks done for you. It is pretty cheap to get an article or a logo created for you this way. You can read reviews, turn around time, see ratings and all that before deciding to place an order. All gigs cost you $5 to order even though there are some that cost two, three or more gigs.

6. Gimp

Gimp is a must have if you are going to use images on your site. It is a free image editing software and can be used as a drawing tool and lets you retouch photos.

It can be used as a substitution to paid or commercial image editing software tools such as Photoshop. If you want to edit images, add text on images, or create one from scratch Gimp is the tool to use.

7. Disqus

Comments are the life of the blog and Disqus is a comment system to manage comments. It is one top blogging tool for WordPress to manage comments on your blog. It is also liked by commentors so you’re likely to get more comments.

8. Contact Form 7

We all know that contact forms are crucial for a website. A website without a contact form is like a hotel without a reception area. Contact Form 7 is a WordPress plugin that lets you create contact forms on your site and you can style them to get the look that you are looking for. You can create as many forms as you want and decide how many boxes you want to display on each form.

9. Commun.it

This is a tool to manage your twitter and other social media activity. It shows you who is favoriting your tweets or posts, who is engaging with you more, who have unfollowed you, and much more. It’s a nifty blogging tool that helps you build relationships on Twitter.

10. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social media and SEO tool to find and share worthy article ideas. You’ll be able to create articles that people will share on social media this way.

11. GetResponse

An advice that all beginners should take to heart is ‘build your list’, because a list is going to help you make the most out of your blog. You can use GetResponse to build your list and manage it.

12. Aweber

Aweber is a good alternative to GetResponse. It offers a $1 trial and it costs $19 per month for the regular membership, and the cost goes up as your list number grows.

13. Bluehost

Picking a good hosting is all important. You should pick one that supports WordPress, and comes with all the key features that you can ask for in a hosting service. A good choice is Bluehost.

14. Grammarly

Grammarly is another blogging tool for beginners, a grammar checking website to be specific. Although people argue that grammar isn’t all too much of a big deal when it comes to creating good articles, it doesn’t hurt to check.

15. Dropbox

Dropbox is such a nifty and handy tool for taking backups, transferring files to other people and much more. It lets you upload and store files and data and keep it there for so long a time.

What’s Your Feedback?

Let’s hear it from you now. Which blogging tools have you used and found useful? Which are the best blogging tools for beginners in your opinion? Please leave your comments in the comments box below.