52 Free Tools and Resources to Superfuel Your Freelance Blogging

You know most people think we’re idiots, right?

I mean, why would we go through all the trouble of starting our own business when we could just get a job?

We could do as we’re told, quit working at 5pm, and watch TV for the rest of the night. Why make it hard for ourselves?

To be honest, they’re right.

It is a stupid thing to do.

Starting your own business requires a ton of hard work. It takes time and dedication to learn all the skills you need to get off the ground.

You have to know how to write. You have to know how to market. You have to know how to sell.

And we don’t have the luxury to stop thinking about our work when the clock hits 5pm. Once you choose this lifestyle, it creeps into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it all the time.

But once it starts working, man does it feel good. Seeing that hard-earned cash roll in makes it all worth it.

But again, it takes time. Lots of time.

To help you speed up the process, I’ve put together a list of tools and resources for you to use to supercharge your freelance blogging. It ranges from tools to get ideas quicker to resources that will give you a kick in the butt.

All of them are free or have a free plan.

Become an idea machine

1. Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique

It’s required reading for anyone who has to write. It teaches you how to come up with ideas that are guaranteed to succeed.

2. Quicksprout

This free tool will help you see what content did well on other sites. You can use this info to get ideas that have a high chance of succeeding. The blog is also a great resource if you’re interested in marketing.

3. Buzzsumo

It’s similar to Quicksprout in that you can see what content got shared a lot. You can search for the most shared content on a certain topic and see who shared those articles. This is useful when you want to promote your post.

4. MindMeister

This free mind mapping tool will help you organize all the ideas that you have floating around in your head. Also useful for outlining blogposts. The free version allows you to have up to 3 mind maps at the same time.

5. Answer the Public

This free research tool shows you the questions people ask about a search topic (similar to Google, but you get far more than 10 options). You get limited searches per day (up to 3), so be judicious.

6. Google Keyword Planner

It wouldn’t be much of a resource list if I didn’t include Google’s keyword tool. If you’re going to spend hours writing good posts, you might as well spend the extra 20 minutes finding good keywords.

7. Content Idea Generator

Ever get stuck coming up with a good headline? This free tool can help you with that. Just fill in your subject and watch how it generates headlines. Some headlines are better than others, but it will get your creative juices flowing.

Write like a pro

8. Free University Grammar Course

If you need to brush up your English grammar, the University of Ottawa provides a free course. Great if English isn’t your first language.

9. Technical Writing Guide

You might get an assignment that will make you write about a boring topic. This presentation about technical writing tells you how to write about boring topics without being boring.

10. Hemingway App

This free app will check if your sentences are easily readable. It tells you which sentences are becoming hard to read and what parts of your text can be made clearer.

11. Grammarly

This free tool is an advanced spelling and grammar checker. Not only does it check if you wrote everything correctly, Grammarly looks at the context it is written in. For example, it can detect whether you should use “you’re” or “your” without any difficulty.

12. The Power of Storytelling

In this article, Alex Turnbull explains how telling a story at the beginning of Buffer’s blog posts boosted their engagement by 300%.

13. These 801+ Words Will Instantly Make You a Better Writer

You can’t make a list about writing without mentioning Jon Morrow at least once. The guy knows how to write. In this post, he lists 801+ words that will make your posts a lot more powerful.

Market like the best

14. SumoMe

This free email app is the Swiss army knife of marketing tools. It has pretty much every tool you need to market your website: nice-looking share buttons, pop-ups, contact forms, and more. It’s free and I highly recommend it.

15. How We Reached 1 Million People by Guest Blogging

Groove is a startup that’s incredibly open about what they do and how they make money. In this article, they explain how they got featured on major blogs and show you the results of their posts.

16. Email1k

If you have a good email list you can sell pretty much anything online. This free course will teach you the best and fastest ways to grow your email list.

17. How to Get 1000+ Subscribers from a Single Post

This is a great case study about how a good post combined with the right promotion can lead to massive success.

18. How to 100x the Effectiveness of Your Next Guest Post

This one’s clever and I recommend it a lot. The author, Bryan Harris, often gets 500+ emails from a guest post. This article explains how he does it.

19. The Definitive Guide to Copywriting

Copywriting is everywhere. You have to use it when writing blog posts. You have to use it when writing to clients. You have to use it for seemingly simple things like writing an email. Copywriting is the difference between getting a reply and getting ignored.

20. How to Craft Contagious Content

Learn how to write can’t-stop-reading-it content for free from a viral marketing expert Jonah Berger. You can buy his best-selling books too, but this course is 100% free.

21. Why Content Goes Viral

Ever wonder why viral content happens? The guys from Buzzsumo analyzed 100 million articles to see if popular content has things in common. The results are pretty interesting. They talk about how long your posts should be, what the most effective headlines are, and much more.

22. Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing

Like I said before, if you have a good email list you can pretty much do anything online. This guide takes you from setting up the technical stuff all the way to optimizing your email campaigns.

23. How to Network with People

Networking has a bad rep. It’s often associated with schmoozing and manipulation. Jordan Harbinger shows you how to build networking into your daily life (and it’s way easier than you think).

Get stuff done

24. How the Hell Does Buffer Create So Much Content?

Buffer (a social media tool) has a team of content creators that produces four 1500+ word, highly researched articles every week. “Team” might be a bit of an exaggeration, as there are just two of them. This article explains how they get so much done.

25. How Writing 1000 Words a Day Changed My Life

To get good at writing, you need to write a lot. Once you commit yourself to write a certain number of words every day, the results can be incredible.

26. RescueTime

This free writer tool will show you what you’re wasting your time on. You’ll know exactly how much time you spend watching cat videos. Gives you a good kick in the butt.

27. Tomato Timer

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Pomodoro technique. In short, it’s periods (usually 25 minutes) of highly focused work followed by 5-minute breaks. This handy little timer will let you know what to do and when to do it.

28. Writer

A.K.A Kryptonite for procrastinators. Just pick the number of words you’d like to write and press start. Writer will block everything (and I really mean everything) until you have reached your quota. You’ll get a lot of writing done because, well, you won’t have a choice.

29. Cold Turkey Blocker

This writing tool is Writer’s less dramatic older brother. It allows you to block distracting websites for a certain amount of time. Once you hit start, there’s no way of turning it off until the timer ends. You’d be surprised how much you can get done if you block Youtube for 3 hours.

30. Pocket

Ever had to do research for a post and end up wasting hours reading a bunch of articles? Instead of reading them right away, pocket lets you save articles so you can read them later. That way you stay focused on the task at hand.

31. IFTTT

Also known as “if this then that”, it’s a way to put the internet to work. Let’s say you want a text message when someone comments on your blog. Just set it up and IFTTT does it for you.

Get motivated

32. How to Get Motivated When You Don’t Feel Like It

Some days you’re going to feel like a mess. That’s ok, though. It’s pretty normal to have an off day every once in a while. This article by James Clear helps you through it.

33. Transform Your Habits

Working on pure willpower alone isn’t going to get you very far. To get lasting success, you’ll need to build habits that will support your business.

 34. The GetMotivated Reddit

Sometimes you just need a little boost. The GetMotivated Reddit will help you with tons of inspiring quotes and images.

35. How to Stay Focused When You Get Bored

It’s always exciting to start a new project. After a couple of weeks, when the excitement starts to wear off, it becomes harder and harder to stay motivated. This article shows you how to do it.

36. Mindtools

This site has a nice collection of mental techniques you can use to perform better. Topics range from how to make decisions, to how to get motivated.

37. Steve Pavlina

I was pondering whether or not to link to a specific resource of his, but then I remembered that his whole site is awesome. You’ll find articles on a lot of different topics.

Supercharge your freelancing

38. Hacking Elance

Elance may have changed names (Upwork now), but these hacks still work. Why? Because the same people trying to squeeze work out of you for as little money as possible are on Upwork too. Daniel DiPiazza explains how to get the best jobs on Elance/Upwork and make a good income.

39. Double Your Freelance Rates

Brennan Dunn created this free course after he grew his freelancing business into a fully-fledged agency. He develops apps, but his techniques apply to any kind of freelancing.

40. How to Get Started as a Freelance Writer Without Credentials

This comprehensive guide by Carol Tice takes you through the many steps (and nagging questions likely in your head) when starting out as a freelance writer.

41. Yesware

There’s nothing worse than sending an email, only to get ignored. You start wondering if your email ended up in the spam folder or if they’re just not replying. Yesware is a Gmail plugin that lets you track if people opened your email.

42. HelloSign

Sign contracts over the internet using HelloSign. It has a free plan that allows you to get 3 documents signed per month. Documents signed with Hellosign are legally binding. Maybe now the fax machine will finally die.

43. Freedcamp

It’s an open-source (a.k.a completely free) collaboration tool. It allows you to create a workspace where you can share files with different people.

44. Streak

Organize your outreach efforts with Streak. Originally a sales plugin for Gmail, you can use it to keep track of your conversations with (potential) clients.

45. Followup CC

This free tool reminds you to follow up with people. Great for when you’re sending out a lot of pitches and you’re not getting replies back.

46. Different Types of Clients and How to Deal with Them

While freelancing you’re going to meet a lot of different clients. Some can be good, some can be bad. This resource tells you how to handle the under-valuer, the family friend, and much more types of clients.

Use visuals

47. Vecteezy

This free image tool allows you to search Flickr images. You can filter out by license, meaning that you can see which images are free to use.

48. ILoveIMG

Need to create a social media or blog graphic? ILoveIMG lets you convert, resize, crop, and edit most image files for free.

49. Picjumbo

Another alternative to horrible photographs. You can filter by category and the images are free.

50. Unsplash

Like death to the stock photo, you get images sent to you. The difference with Unsplash is that you get access to their previous images as well.

51. Gratisography

provides high-quality images free of any copyright restrictions. Great if you’re looking for images to use on your blog.

52. Canva

It’s like Photoshop but for non-techy people. You can just drag and drop different parts. You also have access to a whole library of different design elements. Plus they have this handy guide to 74 stock photo resources.

What to do next

Now you have a bunch of tools you can use to become better at freelance blogging. Don’t get caught up in trying them all out at once. Take your time, pick one you like, and try it out. Here’s what I want you to do now:

1. In the comments below, tell me what resource you liked the most.
2. Save this post in your bookmarks or favorite notes tool
3. Remember those people who think we’re idiots? Go tell them to stick it.