Since I began writing online several years ago, I’ve discovered many tools along the way that I use daily, weekly, or monthly to share content on my blog and on social media. As a former teacher, I’m a huge believer in not reinventing the wheel, so if you, too, are a writer, I hope you can save yourself some time, money and effort by using this list. Feel free share other ideas in the comments!
Websites
I use this when I want to feature several different books and need to include them all on the cover. You can I see examples in this post on race resources and this one on book recommendations (for the Pinterest image on this one I also used Canva–see below).
I mainly go to Canva to create Pinterest images. If you’re new to blogging or writing online, then you may not know that your Pinterest images should all be oriented as portrait, not landscape. Canva can also be used to create images with text for any type of social media.
When Facebook is not showing the correct image for my blog or if it’s not showing any image at all, this site will help reset it so it will display the correct image (I have NO IDEA what “debugging” means, I just know it works!)
When links are too long to include on Twitter, this will make your link a more reasonable length. For example, Amazon links are incredibly long, so when I want to share about a book, I usually shorten the link before posting it.
This is a great site for free images where you won’t have to worry about impinging on copyright laws.
I use this a ton when I’m writing. I think it offers more options than just using thesaurus.com.
I prefer this to Pixabay mainly because I think the images are a bit more artistic, but it tends to have more upright (portrait) images, which is good for Pinterest but not best to use for blog images.
Programs & Apps
This free little program strips away formatting before you copy and paste text to use on your website, in emails, or social media posts. I use it daily.
I started a newsletter list in 2018 using Mailchimp and I think it’s been a great tool for connecting with readers. It’s free up to the first 2,000 subscribers (which I am far from hitting, so this is not an issue for me).
I wrote my book using Scrivener last year and LOVED it. You can easily move between Word and Scrivener. The advantage is that you can see your whole book at once and move pieces around like a puzzle. As a visual person, that was super helpful as I wrote.
Though this seems to be unrelated to writing and blogging, I have connected with many writers using Voxer. Most people don’t have the time to sit down and email you, but they are usually more than willing to leave you a five minute message about their writing process, tools they use, or to share their expertise.
I started my blog with a free site in Blogger and wish I had started it in WordPress so it would have been easier to transfer over when I started paying for my site. It’s been fairly intuitive and I haven’t had any issues in the three years I’ve used it.
Which websites and programs make your life easier as a writer? Let me know in the comments! For more writing resources, check out this list of books on writing and podcasts for writers.
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