Having a blog for your business has tons of benefits: it helps you build an engaged community, establish yourself as an expert in your niche, gain leads and email subscribers, and sell products or services. But launching and maintaining a blog isn’t exactly a walk in the park. If you’re committed to doing it well, blogging can be a lot of work. And that’s exactly where blog automation tools come in.
Blog automation tools save you time by performing blogging tasks for you. Unlike general blogging tools, which may only make a blogging task easier, blog automation tools take care of a key step in your blogging process for you.
Check out these 11 blog automation tools that make it easier to maintain a successful business blog.
Want a version of this list that’s easy to save or print?
Download my blog automation tool resource list.
Identifying blog post topics
1. Google Alerts
Want to find out what people in your niche are writing about these days so you can use the info to come up with a topic for your next blog post? Create Google Alerts for topics relevant to your niche. When this blog automation tool finds new content related to the topics of your alerts, it’ll automatically send them to you by email.
Price: Free
2. BuzzSumo
Google Alerts won’t catch everything on a topic that gets published online. That’s why it’s helpful to use it in conjunction with other blog automation tools, such as BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo shows you the online content with the highest engagement based on a topic or web domain you type in.
Price: You can do a few limited free searches a month. Full plans start at $79/month.
3. Feedly
Feedly is another blog automation tool that makes it easy to find inspiration for new blog post topics by keeping track of hot content in your niche. Instead of visiting individual blogs and sites to check out what’s new, you can get Feedly to aggregate their content and place it all in one easy-to-scan place.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $6/month.
Related: How to generate blog post topics your readers will love
Writing your posts
4. Gboard
We may not be at the point where you can have a machine write a blog post for you while you take a nap. But there is a way to speed up the writing process by removing typing from the equation. Enter Gboard.
Gboard is a keyboard app for iOS and Android. In addition to performing a variety of typical functions, this blog automation tool has a voice-to-text function that lets you dictate your blog posts. Save time by using Gboard to draft your posts and manually editing them afterward (as you normally would).
Price: Free
5. Check My Links
Most SEO tasks, such as keyword research and on-page SEO, require some amount of manual work. But there is one important SEO task that you can automate—checking for broken links. If you want to optimize your blog posts for Google and other search engines, you want them to include high-quality, valuable internal and external links. But it’s also important to ensure that these links work because broken links can negatively affect your SEO.
Check My Links makes it easy to quickly identify broken links on a webpage. Available as a free Chrome extension, it can crawl through your entire blog or website and identify any broken links within about 30 seconds.
Price: Free
Publishing your blog posts
6. Wordable
Hate writing a blog post and having to reformat it when you transfer it to WordPress? Wordable lets you export posts from Google Docs to WordPress while keeping all that precious formatting intact. Place header tags, bold, italics, and even images in your Google Doc and Wordable will seamlessly transfer it all to WordPress when you’re ready.
Price: Plans start at $19/month.
7. Scheduled posting
If you want to publish your blog post at a particular time of day, you don’t need to log on to WordPress or Squarespace right before you want it to go live. These days, most blogging platforms come with a feature that lets you schedule your blog posts to be automatically published at a future day and time you specify.
Price: Typically included as a feature of your blogging platform.
Promoting your blog posts on social media
8. Buffer
Want more traffic on your blog? Of course you do! That’s why you’ll want to promote your new blog posts on social media. Unfortunately, your optimal posting time on social media may be when you’re normally in a meeting, driving your kid to soccer practice, or sleeping. What can you do? Use blog automation tools like Buffer that automatically post your social media updates for you.
Currently, Buffer lets you schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/month.
9. Later
Originally created to help users share posts on Instagram, Later is now a powerful scheduling tool for Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. Depending on the type of plan you have, you can also get access to handy features like hashtag suggestions, Stories scheduling, and analytics.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $7.50/month.
10. Tailwind
If Pinterest is one of your top-performing social media platforms, you might want to consider using Tailwind. An official Pinterest partner, Tailwind lets you schedule pins, loop pins, and optimize your reach by sharing your pins in tribes. It’s because of these features and more that it’s the most popular scheduling tool for Pinterest. And now, you can use it to schedule Instagram posts too!
Price: Plans start at $9.99/month.
Related:
- The 5 best social media platforms for promoting your blog
- 9 places to share your blog posts for more traffic, leads, and sales + free Pinterest profile cheat sheet
Gaining email subscribers
11. OptinMonster
Developing a following on social media can be useful. But it’s your email list that should be your holy grail. Use this blog automation tool to grow your email list by creating opt-in forms on your blog that convert like crazy.
Price: Plans start at $9/month.
12. MailMunch
Want to grow your email list but can’t afford OptinMonster? If you’re a WordPress user with a MailChimp account, you can use MailMunch. This blog automation tool lets you create simple opt-in forms so you can leverage that blog traffic to gain subscribers.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $6.99/month.
Related: How to write a strong call to action for your website + free cheat sheet
Creating landing pages
13. Leadpages
This blog automation tool sure is popular, and it’s easy to see why. Leadpages is packed with powerful features: in addition to creating opt-in forms and boxes that help you grow your email list, you can also design effective landing pages to sell products or services.
Price: Paid plans start at $25/month.
Related: 11 tips for writing landing page copy that converts + free template
Monitoring your blog’s performance
14. Google Analytics
You can’t figure out what’s working on your blog and what isn’t unless you’re keeping an eye on your analytics. Google Analytics serves as a blog automation tool by collecting your analytics, aggregating them, and making it easy to view them in lots of different ways.
Price: The version of Google Analytics that’s appropriate for small- and medium-sized businesses is free.
Save time with these 14 blog automation tools
Maintaining a growing blog for your business is no small feat. But it also doesn’t have to take over your life. Use the 14 blog automation tools on this list to free up time in your calendar by taking key blogging tasks off your plate. In some cases, you can even do it for free!
Want a version of this list that’s easy to save or print?
Download my blog automation tool resource list.
