THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO
We’re trying to do a lot more in a lot less time, right? The blogger life is a multi-tasking challenge. In a matter of minutes, you can go from brainstorming ideas for the next blog post, creating graphic designs and then jumping into working on your daily backup.
A blogger faces a number of daily tasks and after some time, they are just a repetitive and monotonous chore. The way to dodge these time-consuming tasks is by using easy apps, plugins, and tools.
I always spend a few hours per week to improve and automate as many blog tasks as possible so that during the coming week I have more time to spend on the things that really matter, like writing content.
Related post: How to start a making money blog step-by-step
During my 2 years of blogging, I’ve come up with a list of tools which saved me up to 40 hours a week. Crazy eh?? Try it yourself and voila! 40 extra hours a week!
#1) Get A Logo Custom Design
Designing your own logo can be a stressful task, it will take many hours and probably you will not be happy with the final result (unless you are a pro with design image software).
Paying a company or freelance to design your custom logo design will save you a lot of time and headaches.
About the price, it really depends on how much you want to invest on it, but you have a couple of options below.
48HoursLogo offers an affordable price and very quick delivery for custom logo design (delivery in less than 48 hours). It also provides a while labelling service for design agencies.
99Designs provides a wide variety of design services for your business, including logo design, brand identity, website design, packaging design, T-shirt design, and PowerPoint template design.
For new bloggers, I always recommend 48HoursLogo because it’s affordable and prices are very competitive. However, if you want the best quality in the market, go for 99Designs.
Time saved: 15-25 hours
#2) Use Tailwind To Schedule Your Pinterest Pins
Using Pinterest to schedule your pins in your boards on a daily basis takes quite a lot of time.
I used to do it regularly every morning, afternoon, and evening, I was spending the whole day in front of the screen until I found Tailwind.
This tool allows you to schedule all your pins across all your boards with only a few clicks.
Since I started using Tailwind I went from spending 2 hours a day to 5 minutes. I schedule all my weekly pins (nearly 800 across 60 boards) in less than 30 minutes and then I forget about it.
If you want to try, Tailwind offers 30 days free trial.
Time saved: 14 hours per week
#3) Manage All Your Social Media At Once
Using a tool to manage all your social media will save you a lot of time.
With HootSuite you can manage up to 10 social media channels using just one interface. HootSuite Pro ($9.99 per month, billed annually) is ideal for small to medium size businesses.
It provides real-time analytics, automatic content scheduling, content suggestions, social sweepstakes, lead capture campaigns, and unlimited RSS integrations.
The Pro version also includes 150+ free apps, in-dash live chat support, and group training. They also have a free 30 days trial.
You can try the 30 days free trial here.
Time saved: 6 hours per week
#4) Bring Your Website Design to the Next Level
Creating you own picture designs, finding fonts, and templates for your blog takes quite a lot of time. I personally try to avoid spending too much time in creating graphics, especially since I can purchase them for a couple of dollars elsewhere.
The Hungry JPEG is a graphic design-based marketplace offering a wide range of fonts, graphics, and templates.
You can get amazing free fonts or blog templates and infographics bundles starting at $3.
The cool thing is that you will receive the Photoshop and Illustrator files so you can reuse and modify as many times as you want.
Time saved: 4 hours per week
#5) Automatic Backups
If you are a blogger, you will know that doing regular backups of your blog is a must. If one day something goes wrong with your website, you don’t want to lose all your hours of hard work, right?
Daily backups are highly recommended. In my case, I work on my blog every day, so for me, it is important that I back up my work after I input any new entries or do any editing. I can’t afford losing more than one day of work if something goes wrong.
Manual backups are a headache and it takes at least 15 minutes, so I use a tool to do automatic backups of my blog.
If you are looking for a free plugin, I recommend using BackWPup. It’s very basic and it works well, it is a great way to start learning about backing up your blog automatically
If you are looking for something more professional and reliable, I highly recommend Carbonite. They use cloud backups and their price is very competitive with plans starting at $5/month.
You can try Carbonite 15 days free trial.
Time saved: 2 hours per week
#6) Use Grammarly For Proofreading
When I started blogging, I spent a lot of time reviewing my spelling looking for grammar typos. Sometimes I even hired a professional to do a proofreading for me (I’m not native English speaker).
Last year, I found Grammarly and since then, I’ve never spent a dollar in hiring anybody.
Grammarly is an English language writing-enhancement platform which you can add as an extension to your browser. It is a proofreading and plagiarism-detection tool which is a must for every blogger.
The service is free but if you are taking blogging seriously, I recommend buying the premium package for $11.66/month (billed annually). It corrects typos, grammar mistakes, punctuation, and things which don’t make any sense.
Install Grammarly to your browser for free here.
Time saved: 5 hours per week
#7) Use Software to Scan and Analyse Your Receipts For You
There are many software programs out there that extract the key information from your receipts and documents.
Neat will scan your receipts, it will recognize the text and plug in the results into its database so that you can use it to generate expense reports and information for taxes. They have developed a system of intelligent solutions that transform information into something that works for every customer. It integrates with popular accounting and business software and simplifies how you work.
They have developed a system of intelligent solutions that transform information into something that works for every customer.
Each product uses patented software to digitally capture and organize key information from paper to be managed, shared, or securely stored.
You can try the 30 days free trial here.
Time saved: 2 hours per week
Bonus: #8) Create Engaging Facebook Videos in a Few Minutes
Using professional software for video editing is time-consuming (Premiere Pro, iMovie).
If you’ve ever wanted a simpler and faster way to create killer videos for your business, you’re going to love this!
Content Samurai is the first web-based video creation system. It will allow you to create amazing full-length videos from scratch in just minutes. I use it almost every day.
I’ve created a review post about Content Samurai with an example at the end to see the results.
Time saved: 7 hours per week
For those of you who want more tools to improve your blog, I have a list of my top recommendations that every blogger should use.
Do you have any more blogging hacks to save time? Share with me and leave a comment below.
If you are thinking about starting your own blog, I created a tutorial-guide that will help you start your own blog for cheap. You need very little investment, starting at only $3.95 per month (this deal is only through my link) for blog hosting. Additionally, you will get a free blog domain (valued at $12-15) through my Bluehost link, only if your purchase is for at least 12 months of blog hosting. My recommendation is for you to be self-hosted. This is important if you want to monetize your blog because your website will look more professional.
Hi there! This is some definite useful information! I just started using Tailwind and it has saved me a lot of time! Also, kudos on your 2016 income! 🙂
Hi Catherine! Thank you very much. Yeah, I found out that Tailwind save me on average 1 to 2 hours per day, incredible!
I’m just starting out and have many little quirks that will be helped by your post. I appreciate it! I think some of the services that cost will have to wait until I start cash flowing. Thanks you
It’s very nice you find it useful., that’s the purpose!
Sometimes cash flowing takes a bit of time and doing some small investments can speed up the process.
By the way, nice blog you have!
It’s really an awesome collection of tools which help me a lot. I am using Grammarly to increase my writing skills. It has a great functionality to detect the misspelling or other grammar issues.
You have listed all the great tools.
Is there any tool which is free of cost because I can’t afford it.
Hi Shailesh!
Grammarly is a must if you are a blogger and write on a daily basis, I manage with the free subscription, but paying the membership (which is not much) you can have access to more tools. In particular good for content creating, it will detect if your text makes sense or not and how to correct it.
Also, I use the plagiarism tool!
For you, the free version should be enough, it does pretty much all the important work and unless you are a freelance writer or you make a living out of writing, you don’t need to pay for the annual membership.
When you ask about if there is any free tool, what for do you mean?
Heya Fransisco!
Thanks for posting such an useful time saving post regarding blogging.
As a freelance writer and blogger, Grammarly has helped me a lot.
I am planning to utilize Tailwind in the next few months for saving time in terms of pinning posts.
Looking forward to your next posts!
Thanks!
Hi Nabankita,
You are welcome! Grammarly is one of the best ones, and if you get the Premium version is great for freelance writers.
If you have any question about Tailwind please ask. =)
Sure. Thanks a lot!
Thank you for this list! I love Tailwind, it saves so much time with Pinterest! The Facebook video info is also really helpful, it is something I haven’t gotten into yet, but keep thinking about! Your blog is awesome! Cheers!
Hi Vicky!
Thank you for your comment. I love saving time when I do blogging, it allows me to focus on what is important, writing content. If you are serious about the Facebook videos, you should try Content Samurai.
Cheers!
I just started my blog a few months back and this is super helpful. I can’t wait to try some of the tips to blog more efficiently and get more content out there!
Welcome to the blogging paradise Kelly! I hope you can increase your productivity =)
Btw, your new blog looks pretty nice.
Good list, I can’t knock it. Especially since I haven’t been on top of updating my blog (I’ve been to damn focused on social media!)
So for me, the piece of advice about using BackWpup is gold! I’m going to install that right now!
Thanks again.
Thanks Otis
Hi there. Great Info but I noticed a number of text errors. For example, one paragraph starts ” Since” then nothing else and a new paragraph starts. There is also a stray “e” where you obviously had to delete text…… so why doesn’t your proof-reading plugin pick things like that up….. Sorry, not trying to be picky but things like this need to be tidied if you would like me to sign up…I think you maybe damaging your credibility otherwise
Thank you Helen. Grammarly picks up grammar errors, if there is something wrong with formatting it will not pick it up 🙂
I first know that Hootsuit give 30 days free trial. I just signed up for it.
Thanks for the helpful tips! I look forward to using them as I prepare to launch my website and my blog!
Good luck with it Carol 🙂
Thanks for the informative post. The advice about installing a backup plug in is solid gold. I’m going to make use of it right away
Great and very helpful tips! Love Grammarly and Tailwind myself, really save a lot of time indeed! Thanks for the post!
Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without Grammarly and Tailwind 🙂
Thank you for sharing these resources!
You’re welcome Cynthia
Great tips for my new blog. Thank you.
Hey Francisco!
This is great info every blogger should know! I use TailWind and absolutely love it. Thank you for the awesome tips for bloggers.
Hi Jennifer! I’m happy you like it.
Thanks for posting, and I love Tailwind, it saves so much time with Pinterest!
Looking forward to your next posts! Goodluck
These hacks are awesome and so useful, especially Tailwind, it does save lots of time.
Thank you for those tips! Grammarly seems to be very efficient.
It will really save me a lot of time! Thanks for the post!
Hi Pierre. Yes, Grammarly is a must-have, and the best is that the free version is good enough 🙂