Why Blog?

Between meeting with new clients and managing current client’s, a busy advisor’s day may leave little time for blogging. But blogging should be a key component of your firm’s overall marketing strategy. While 20 years ago blogs didn’t exist, today there are over 150 million of them. And 80% of businesses are using blogs to attract potential clients. Having a blog brings you many benefits including:

• Drive more traffic to your website
• Increase number of leads
• Establish expertise in your field
• Build trust with prospective clients
• Collect emails of potential clients

This being said, it’s not easy to make time for blogging. Between brainstorming, writing, editing, and promoting your posts, maintaining a blog can seem like a lot of work! Luckily, there are many free technology tools which make blogging much simpler.
 

5 Tech Tools to Help You Blog Better

Email Campaigns: Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s powerful analytics help you see how your email campaigns stack up against industry standards.

A great way to increase blog traffic is to create an email list of subscribers and send out your latest content to them.
Building a list of email subscribers may be your most valuable tool in getting the most out of your blog. When you collect someone’s email, they go from being a blog visitor to a potential lead.
By providing your email subscribers with consistent, high-quality content you can establish your expertise and build trust with these prospective clients.
Mailchimp offers powerful email campaign tools at no cost to those with under 2,000 email subscribers.
Features:

• Create and manage multiple segmented email lists
• Draft custom emails which include images, graphics, and other multimedia
• Supports both plain-text and HTML rich emails
• Detailed analytics on email opens and clicks

Learn more about Mailchimp.
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Social Media Management: Hootsuite‍

Use Hootsuite to manage all of your social media accounts in one place.

Social media is an important part of blogging. Without promoting your blog posts via social media, it’s likely they won’t receive many views. But by using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you can help promote your content and drive more traffic to your blog.
But when it comes to posting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on a daily basis, social media can become time consuming.
This is where a high quality social media management tool comes into play. Social media management solutions allow you to manage multiple social media accounts simultaneously. Also, they let you schedule your social media posts ahead of time. This means that rather than spending each day updating your social media channels, you can schedule an entire week–or even an entire month’s–worth of messages in one sitting.
Our favorite free social media management tool is Hootsuite. While Hootsuite offers a premier version, the free version is all you need to start promoting your blog on social media.
Features:

• Manage up to three unique social media accounts
• Schedule Tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn posts in advance
• Analytics on your social media posts performance

Learn more about Hootsuite.
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Content Scheduling: Trello

Trello’s calendar tool makes it easy to schedule all your blog to-dos in one place.

Keeping a content schedule is a great way to ensure that you’re posting on a consistent basis. The more detailed and organized your content calendar is, the more organized your blog will be! Not to mention, a content calendar is a great place to store your blog post ideas when you want to save them for later.
There are many content scheduling tools on the market, but a lot of them can be quite pricy. Luckily, Trello is a free alternative to expensive content calendars!
Trello is an online platform which allows you to create fully-customized digital boards and calendars to manage your content schedule.
Within Trello, you can add content cards directly into the calendar. You can then create to-do lists for each content card. For example: write blog post, find images to go with post, edit post, then schedule social media for post. You can even assign tasks to other people, if you plan on collaborating on posts. Trello lets you upload files like Google Docs, Word Documents, images, and videos right into your content cards.
Trello helps you better manage your ideas and to-dos, so you can consistently produce high-quality content for your blog.
Features:

• Customizable boards for content management
• Create content schedule and to-dos in an interactive calendar
• Manage tasks and create to-do lists
• Upload and share files
• Save multimedia content for later

Learn more about Trello.

Headline Analyzer: Coschedule

Determine the strength of you blog post’s title with CoSchedule’s headline analyzer.

Some bloggers underestimate the importance of creating a compelling title for you blog posts. A unique, engaging blog headline can create interest in your content, and lead to more blog views.
But sometimes it’s tough to tell if you’re blog title is just right or not. That’s where CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzercomes in! Simply plug in your blog post title, and CoSchedule will analyze it to determine its mass appeal.
Features:

• Analyze blog post titles for word choice, length, and crowd appeal
• Review suggested title edits and areas for improvement
• View past headline ideas

Learn more about CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.
 

Text Editor: Hemingway Editor

What do you expect from your text editor? The ability to create and format text, plus spell-check and basic grammar-check features.
Well, Hemingway Editor does all that plus much, much more.

The Hemingway Editor can help you write more clearly.

Hemingway Editor is a text editor which analyzes your writing to check for difficult to read sentences, run-ons, word choice, adverbs, and even passive voice! The text editor works dynamically, making suggestions in real-time as you write and edit your post. The app then gives you a “readability score” to help you determine how easy your post will be for others to read.
Hemingway Editor is an essential tool both for those who don’t feel great about their writing abilities and those whose writing is stellar. There’s always room for improvement and Hemingway Editor will make sure your blog posts are simple and easy for anyone to read.
Features:

• Full text editing with formatting
• Readability score
• Edits suggested in real-time
• Analyzes for readability, word choice, adverb usage, and passive voice

Learn more about Hemingway Editor.