Apps I use for blogging

There are plenty of tools to help you promote your blog and your blog posts. Mobile phone apps or websites are a great help. Here I will detail which apps I use and what I use them for. 

This is the second post in my #BlogLife series where I aim to help new bloggers with the knowledge I have picked up in the last several months. You can read the first post on which social media formats I use by clicking here.

So, here are the apps I use to help with blogging

Crowdfire:
This is a social media engagement tool that I use mainly for Twitter. You can now use it for Instagram, facebook and Pinterest but I find it most useful for Twitter. When using Crowdfire you can input a few keywords to do with your interests, for example, my keywords currently are dad blogger, Disney and Marvel. The apps will then show me tweets based on these keywords and I can choose whether to like them or not. This then increases your reach. It will then show you, people to follow based on those keywords, you can follow up to 50 people per day using this app. Obviously, you don't have to follow them all as a lot of people that come up may not interest you. I have found most of the people I communicate with through this app. I don't think I would have ever found them if not. This app will also you show you a list of inactive accounts from people you follow, it will show you people who don't follow you back (allowing you to unfollow them if you wish) and it also shows you the people who are following you but who you aren't following back (called fans). I love this app, you can use it every 24 hours, I get a notification each day and it has really helped me go from 0 followers to 2800 in 7 months.

Followers Insight:
This app is linked to your Instagram account and does similar things to Crowdfire. I use this mainly to unfollow people who don't follow me back if I'm not that interested in their content and to also unfollow all the people who, follow me, wait for me to follow them back and then unfollow me the next day. Instagram is crazy for this. I don't like the follow then unfollow and hope they don't notice game so for me this app is perfect.

Textgram:
This app enables you to choose backgrounds from their own database or use your own photos and add text to them. I use this to create a template with my blog title on, which I then post to Instagram with a link in the comments. I use the same design, text and colours to keep it looking nice. You can check out my Instagram account here to see what I mean.

Social oomph:
This is a site I sometimes use on my laptop to schedule my tweets. I don't use this a lot but I do know plenty of bloggers schedule their tweets or at least schedule their blog post tweets. This does save you a lot of time and you can schedule it for any time of day. This would enable you to get views from plenty of people in other countries, especially if you schedule your tweet for 3 am whilst your sleeping. It can be a bit time consuming, depending on how many you do but it is worth it. This is something I will be doing more of in the future. Here is a link to their site.

Pixabay:
Pixabay is a free images website. As I work full time and know nothing about photography, using great photos in my blog is very difficult. This is where Pixabay comes in. You can search through thousands of images to find the right for you. Click download and then upload it to your post. It's as simple as that. You don't even need to sign up. Click here to go to their site. This site is a godsend and saves me so much time. Of course, I would love to have more of my own photos in my posts but unless I know several weeks in advance what I want to write, it's difficult to go out and take a photo.

Canva:
With this site, you can create designs for free such as infographics, facebook/twitter headers, blog title headers etc. They have lots of designs and fonts etc. If you aren't very savvy with graphic design like me then this can be a real lifesaver. I haven't played around with it too much but I know a lot of people love it. You can visit the Canva site here

Photo Editing:
If you are using your phone the Snapseed is a great free app with lots of options to edit your photos. If you want a website then Picmonkey is the place to be. I have not used this yet but it is saved to my favourites for the next time I need to edit a photo. Plenty of people swear by it. Visit their site here.

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