"Free" is the most awesome price of all. "Free" gets you started when you have nothing. "Free" took me from 0 to the first 1,000,000 visitors to my blog.
"Free" is also the price that most people gravitate to when they are first starting out. But, the trouble is, most of those people also think that you have sign up for some big, expensive service once your audience numbers get serious.
Nope.
You don’t have any excuses, because free web services and products available today are so good that you can easily use them to build up your own blog to 1 million visitors. You can start today, from scratch, and use every single one of these every day along your journey. From idea creation, to producing, publishing and designing your content, to sharing, marketing and promoting your brand, you'll find these tools free and accessible. Here are the 17 best ones I myself used to grow my blog :
1. Quora
At its most basic Quora is a Q&A site -- you go there, ask a question and get an answer. It offers a seemingly infinite array of knowledge. But, when you start using the site properly, and you're interacting with others, Quora blossoms into so much more.
Quora is a great place for content ideas. You can search for a topic, see what others are asking, and answering and then write it up, adding to the conversation. But there's more: Kevan Lee at Buffer recently set out all the ways you can use Quora to market yourself for your business. Quora helps you establish yourself as a leader in your area, if you use it right. If you have a product, you can use the site to get feedback from users and to generate new feature ideas.
2. Feedly
Feedly is the best blog reader around. You have to be reading a lot of other blogs if you want yours to stand out. Once you start reading the top blogs from key influencers, you will learn the right style that drives traffic, and what sets top blogs apart from the rest.
When Google Reader shut its door a couple of years ago, almost everyone flocked to the then-new Feedly app. You can sign up for blog feeds from the app, share your favorite posts, bookmark the ones you still have to read and read them, in Feedly's intuitive, magazine style.
3. Buzzosumo
BuzzSumo is an awesome tool,with one simple aim: It helps you find what articles people are sharing, and who is sharing them. From this simple start, you can gain a wealth of information: the best length, type and content for a POS. With the free account , you can only get limited information, but definitely enough to find out what works and what doesn't.
The site can also help you target the key influencers in your area of expertise. One of the reasons I love BuzzSumo is that data is at the heart of it. The folks behind the site recently analyzed all their data to find out what goes viral. They found that having just one key influencer share your post can increase your number of shares by over 30 percent. Just having three will double the number of times your post is shared.
4. Quip
There are a trillion word processing apps available, but Quip has my vote as the easiest and most intuitive app to use. It is by your words that you are going to live or die. So, write them in style.
What's unique about Quip is that it was designed, from the ground-up, to be a mobile-first word-processing app. Bret Taylor, the co-founder, says that, “Offline and online are no longer separate binary states.” Quip works as quickly as a local app, but everything is in the cloud. This particularly works well for companies likeiDoneThis, where team members might be thousands of miles apart but working on the same post. With Quip, we can all edit documents as if they were on our local machines.
5. Hemingway
The Hemingway app is all about making your writing clearer and more accessible. For some people, writing flows naturally through their fingers; for the rest of us there is Hemingway. The app helps you avoid complicated, hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and adverbs. Hemingway is ideal for people who have to explain complicated ideas to a lay audience.
6. Trello
Trello is an organizational tool, letting you organize work via "boards" where different ideas, pitches, outlines, drafts and articles are in your publishing pipeline. Richard White, CEO of UserVoice, described Trelloas “a very open-ended product.” Yep. When you first open Trello, it seems both simple and daunting. But what wins me over to Trello is that so much of the organization is left up to you -- there is no right way to use Trello, just your way.
7. WordPress
There are countless content management system (CMS) options, but WordPress is still the best. Once you have got your site up and running, you need a way to publish your stories. Somewhere like Tumblr is great for your own personal blog, but if you are looking to get north of a million visitors, then you need the type of platform WordPress provides.
On WordPress you can customize your site and add plugins for a ton of different needs, from SEO optimization to image presentation, from email forms to capture. Plus, other apps on this list, like SumoMe and Google Analytics, have one-click setup plugins to get you up and running immediately
2 comments
free tools to help you grow your html thanks by admin
When I’m writing, I tend to repeat myself. Or worse, if I use bullet points, I might repeat the same structure over and over again for each point. Hemingway doesn’t look out for this kind of repetition. If anybody else suffers from the same problem, INK has a feature that tags repetitive sentences.