My Favorite Blogging Tools I Recommend for 2024
Blogging Tools for 2024
Blogging is the best way to increase organic website traffic to your Squarespace website.
It’s also the best way to build a loyal following, demonstrate your authority with potential customers, convey to them that you understand their pain, and provide helpful solutions for them that build trust with your brand.
It’s more effective than social media marketing and it’s also quicker.
Yes, that’s right, I just said it’s quicker. It takes FAR less time to blog than it does to post regularly to social media platforms (that don’t drive website traffic, btw) making blogging a much better investment of your time.
Not to mention that your blog posts can be repurposed for social media, so blogging is a great start to your entire content marketing strategy.
I’ve been doing it a while now, and I’ve sped up my process and optimized my SEO even more by using some really great tools to help me blog.
In this post, I’m going to share with you the tools I recommend, some paid and some free, for blogging with Squarespace in 2024.
The SEOSpace Plugin by SEOSpace
The SEOSpace plugin is the tool created by Henry Purchase of Rough Waters Media that simplifies SEO for any Squarespace user, regardless of how much or how little you know about SEO.
This plugin is great because you don’t even need to know anything about SEO to use it. Henry is great about keeping all of his educational material (and there’s a lot of it on his YouTube channel) jargon free so that even a newbie can grasp it.
That said, if you never want to learn the ins and outs of SEO, you don’t have to!
With the free version of this plugin, you can scan any page of your website and the plugin will audit the page and make suggestions for optimizing its SEO with easy to follow instructions.
The free version also comes with a community of SEOSpace plugin users. You can post any questions here and Henry or someone from his team will pop in with some helpful advice. There’s no limit to the sorts of SEO questions you can ask.
I love this plugin, and for me, paying for the DIY version is totally worth it!
With the paid version, you can add keywords to scans (and I know that Henry is working on a new version of the plugin where you can easily do keyword research—that’s coming soon).
You can also use it’s function for making blog post suggestions that will help you outrank your competitors which is SUPER helpful when you need some inspiration.
Word Counter
Word Counter is a free online tool that counts words and characters.
I use this tool every single day, whether it’s for my own website or a website for a client.
As I’ve learned from SEOSpace, there’s a sweet spot for the number of words and characters when it comes to SEO. I go into more detail about that in my SEOSpace cheat sheet for ranking Squarespace blog posts.
In addition to making sure your H1 title, SEO title, and meta description fit within the recommended word/character count (don’t obsess over it—if you’re off by a few characters here and there it won’t kill your rankings) the word counter can be helpful in determining the total word count of your blog post.
The “recommended” length of an average blog post is between 1500-2500 words, or at least as long as the top-ranking blog post for the topic you are blogging about.
That said, I don’t always use it myself. My focus is on quality content, and if I find myself adding words but not adding value to my blog post, it often diminishes the quality of the content, so be careful with this.
Some of my most popular blog posts are really short because they quickly answer questions for my audience, and my audience appreciates this.
ChatGPT
Where do I even start with this?
ChatGPT can be used in a variety of ways when it comes to blogging.
Here are a few ways to use ChatGPT for blog posts:
Research: Ask ChatGPT random questions if you need to do a quick fact-check. Be sure to fact-check these results too. (*See note below)
Create Briefs: Ask ChatGPT to create a brief (or outline) for your blog post. The more information you can provide ChatGPT, the better and more specific the brief will be.
Ask ChatGPT to Write Your Post: Careful with this. Everything on ChatGPT is sourced from the internet, so you never want to do a “copy and paste” from ChatGPT because you just might be plagiarizing. Edit whatever ChatGPT spits out to make it your own, and be sure to fact-check it. You don’t want to be telling people stuff that’s wrong or outdated.
Ask ChatGPT to Refine Your Blog Post: Copy and paste your own blog post content into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it. This is good for people who question their grammar, for example, people for whom English is a second language.
Use ChatGPT for inspiration: Maybe you’re having a brain block. Just start asking ChatGPT for suggestions. Tell it what your business is, who your audience is, and what you’re trying to accomplish in your business and then ask it to make 10 blog post suggestions.
You can use ChatGPT any way you want. In fact, I’d love to hear about some of the ways you are using it, so please tell me in the comments below.
*Note: If you find yourself doing a lot of research on a topic, chances are it’s a topic you don’t know a lot about, and therefore you shouldn’t blog about it. Why? Because you want your blog to highlight you as the expert at what you do. If you’re doing a lot of research on something, it’s a red flag that you’re blogging about something that won’t move the needle in your business.
Descript for Recording YouTube Videos
Adding YouTube videos to your blog posts is the quickest way to get out of the Google Sandbox.
What is the Google Sandbox you ask?
Google Sandbox is an unofficial term that refers to the theory that Google puts new websites on hold until they have proven their credibility and relevance.
In other words, until you can prove the authority of your website to Google, you aren’t going to show up in search results.
Lucky you! The best way to do this is by consistently adding valuable content to your website—blogging!
Because Google owns YouTube, adding YouTube videos to your blog posts speeds up the time it takes to get out of the sandbox, but it also drastically improves your chances of showing up in Google searches.
Even if you’re struggling to get your blog posts indexed by Google (guilty 🙋🏻♀️), your YouTube content will still show up—YouTube is NOT in the sandbox.
YouTube is also a search engine, and people often go directly to YouTube to find answers, and if you’re not there, well, you know the rest.
Descript makes recording videos for YouTube sooooo easy!
They describe themselves as the “AI-powered, fully featured, end-to-end video editor that you already know how to use,” and I feel this is accurate.
What makes Descript so great is that it cuts your editing time down DRASTICALLY! And remember, time = money, my friend.
In Descript, you can edit your video by transcript, meaning, delete the text from the auto-generated transcript and you’re deleting that portion of the video.
You can also ask Descript to shorten word gaps and eliminate filler words like “um” automatically.
They have an entire library of stock photos, videos, and gifs as well as templates, audio music and sound effects, and the list goes on and on.
I could not live without this tool, I would go nuts!
ConvertKit-Soon to Be Kit
If you are blogging, then having at least one lead generator in every single blog post is an absolute must.
You need a lead generator (lead magnet, opt-in, click bait, freebie, call it what you want, it all means the same thing) so that you can grow your email list.
Your email list is extremely valuable, as these are your future customers who have expressed an interest in your brand and have committed to getting emails from you.
Email marketing is still #1. In fact, it’s 3800X more effective than any other type of online marketing, and if you don’t believe me, Google it.
This means you need to have a good Email Service Provider (ESP) and, sorry Squarespace, but Squarespace campaigns doesn’t cut it.
There are several good ESPs out there, like MailChimp, FloDesk, and others, but ConvertKit-Soon to Be Kit, is my favorite.
It’s extremely intuitive, there’s nothing you can’t do with it from an email campaign standpoint, and their customer support is top notch.
If you’re new to email marketing, I recommend starting with the free plan, which actually includes a lot and really helps you get your feet wet with email marketing and familiarize yourself with the platform.
Once you’re ready to start automating an email campaign, upgrade to the paid version, which is (in my opinion) totally affordable and worth it. Lots of value here.
Was this helpful?
Did you learn something new in this post? Are you using some or all of these tools already? Is there a tool you’re using that you love that’s not listed here? Share your thoughts in the comments 👇
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