As the old jungle saying goes – There’s more to blogging than just blogging. There’s a whole laundry list of activities that you need to perform consistently if you wish for your blog to stand out and fulfill its objective. But this requires time, a commodity always in short supply. This is where blogging tools can be of immense help. There are many out there, we bring you six tools that can really help you improve not only productivity but also the quality of your blog.

1. If you’re not using  to track breaking news and evergreen content from your favorite blogs, then you’re wasting precious time searching for inspiration on search engines. Feedly has admirably filled the void created by the demise of Google Reader.

2. InboxQ is a multipurpose tool that keeps you informed on questions asked on twitter that are of relevance to your business. The real-time stream of questions that you can answer allows you to engage with an interested audience and drive that traffic to your website or landing page. Not to mention its usefulness as a content idea generator. Apps are available for Chrome, Seesmic, Hootsuite, and Mozilla.

3. Content created with planning and thought goes the farthest. Social Crawlytics is a great tool for “content and influencer research”. You can find out about the content that is generating the maximum buzz for your competitors and use it as food for thought. If there’s a gravy train running through your niche, are you on it? You can schedule and monitor your social media activity from one single dashboard for huge time savings as well!

4. Visual media elicits response and can really make your content stand out. If you’ve been shying away from creating flyers, presentations, and touching up images because these are time-consuming activities and require technical skill, then it’s time that you looked up Canva. It’s a free online tool with a million images and hundreds of fonts for you to drag and drop your design into place. I use Canva all the time and love it! Best of all, it’s super simple and intuitive for non-creatives like me.

5. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful tool that sits on your desktop. It scans pages checking for SEO anomalies and furnishes a detailed report that you can filter, analyze, and also export to Excel. The number of parameters checked is impressively exhaustive. And the best part about this tool is that with its help you can rectify old existing posts, get them on the right side of the search engines, learn from your mistakes and save hours of work doing an individual SEO audit on each post.

6. Contemplating an email marketing campaign? Hit the ground running with MailChimp; the free version is a wonderful tool to educate bloggers on how to build a list, create arresting headlines that can clear spam-filters, and much more. Add an email sign-up box to your blog and you can reap impressive returns from your content and ad spend.

From ideas for articles to creating a community around your blog, you can accomplish a lot with the tools mentioned above. New tools are released frequently and existing ones get new features fairly often. A little research online every now and then is sure to throw up exciting options for you and your business.