Blogging is awesome. It can be fun, creative, and even profitable – but it can also be a time drain plagued by disorganization and procrastination. The right tools, however, make all the difference.
There are a million apps that do a million different things to help the blogger on his or her journey. Many of them are gimmicky, and many are redundant. Here are a few of the best apps you’ve never heard of.
The right tools can make a good blogger great.
Focus Booster
Focus Booster is all about building the one thing that is the bane of so many bloggers: attention span. Lack of focus equals lack of productivity, and Focus Booster gets you into a rhythm of breaking up your work into 25-minute chunks, which are separated by five-minute breaks. This strategy, the app’s designers believe, creates a barrier between your brain and interruptions, both internal and external.
OmmWriter
Another great productivity tool is OmmWriter, which works by streamlining the writing interface. A text editor with a clean and simple, yet artful layout, OmmWriter offers sleek backgrounds and inundates you with smooth audio. Its number of features are limited by design to create an environment that is designed for bringing out your best writing.
Photo Pin
Photo Pin gets bloggers out of the boring redundancy of Google images – not to mention the deep water of copyright infringement – without forcing bloggers onto a subscription stock photo site. Photo Pin lets you search for Creative Commons photos, find a preview of an image you like, and then download it at will in any size you like. All you have to do then is cut and paste the provided attribution html, and your blog will look amazing in no time.
Trello
Sick of Basecamp already? Join the club. Trello is a free project management alternative to the popular but quirky remote collaboration site. It’s easy and much more intuitive and is perfect for remote meetings and work distribution with far-away collaborators.
Digg Digg
Buffer’s Digg Digg app is arguably the best tool available to make sharing your posts easy for your followers. Anyone with a working brain can install and use this simple, yet muscular, tool. Add – in any combination – the social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and all the rest without having to download the individual plugins for each one.
InboxQ
InboxQ is all about busting through the wall of writer’s block by helping you come up with awesome subject matter and relevant topics by harnessing the power of Twitter. By creating keyword “campaigns,” InboxQ finds out the questions people are asking and tweeting about, and puts you in a position to answer them on your blog.
There is an app out there to improve every blog.
Every good blogger needs a little help. Whether it’s a weapon in the constant war against distraction and procrastination, or a tool to help isolate and streamline the writing process, there is something out there to make you a better blogger. Start with these, and then continue your search to find the right app to make your blog the best it can be.
About the Author: Andrew Lisa is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. He writes about the blogosphere and profiles business leaders. To see one of the professionals he has recently profiled, follow Tim Broas on Twitter.
