Essential Blogging Tools To Grow Your History Blog

Lots Of Useful Tools To Help Grow Your Blog

I only recommend products and services I’ve used myself to save time managing and grow blogs and online services. There’s no hype or pushy sales here —just the best blogging tools I’ve discovered to start, grow or monetise a blog.

Full Disclosure

Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals. Read the full disclosure page for more information.

Webhosting and Design ​

Bluehost 

Bluehost provides hosting and domain purchase options as well as easy 1 click WordPress install to set up your history blog. Great for beginner bloggers looking to host their own website. It offers 24/7 support,  as well as being one of the most affordable providers. 

Elementor

Elementor is a drag and drop page builder with over 3 million active installs on WordPress. Regardless of what kind of history blog you’d like to build Elementor has the tools to help. Free and Pro versions available.

WordPress Engine

The WP Engine platform provides WordPress users a hosting platform dedicated solely to WordPress websites. They deal with all the more complicated aspects of hosting to allow bloggers to focus on just building their website.

Generate Press

GeneratePress is a responsive WordPress theme to build your blog in. It’s currently one of the most popular themes on WordPress owing to it’s speed, user friendliness, and compatibility with page builders like Elementor and Gutenberg. 

Grow Your Blogging Skills With Expert Online Courses​

Skillshare 

Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people, on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more. Get two weeks premium FREE with my link.

Producing and Editing Videos ​

Adobe

Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite offers over 20 programs for photography, web design, audio and video editing. Their addition of phone apps and Cloud service brings all your tools for creativity to one place. 

Blue Yeti

A great affordable starter microphone for podcasters and Youtube videos. There’s a reason everyone, including me, is using these. With high quality sound, a durable design and a low price tag it’s become a firm favourite with content creators world wide.

Growing Your Email List​

ConvertKit

If you want to grow an email list, ConvertKit is a great email marketing solution designed for bloggers like us. And, they’ve got great customer support and free webinars. Sign up through my link and you’ll unlock 500 subscribers for free.

Graphic Design ​

Fiverr

Need a professional to design your blog logo? Make a jingle for your podcast? Need to find a guest writer? Fivver has thousands of freelance professionals with competitive pricing starting from, you’ve guessed it, a fiver! 

Canva

Canva’s generous free version offers drag and drop design templates for all the big social media platforms, letterheads, invoicing, webpage design, logo design and more. Easy to use, it saves me so much time on social media marketing posts. 

Photoshop

Photoshop is the leading program for photo editing and manipulation as well as digital art. It offers a huge variety of tools and presets to help you create high quality images. Like Illustrator it’s part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of programs.

Illustrator

Illustrator is a vector graphics program that’s an industry standard. The options to create in Illustrator are endless allowing you to make scalable graphics with no loss of resolution. Charts, logos, clip art, webpage buttons…the list is endless. 

Social Media Marketing & Schedulers​

Tailwind

Tailwind is a social media marketing and scheduling tool that organises and auto shares your posts to Instagram and Pinterest. It also provides you with up to date analytics, tells you best posting times and helps you grow your audience.

Word Swag

Word Swag turns regular photos into images with text designs. Super useful for making quick social media posts on the go. 

Bit.ly

Bitly is a link management platform that lets you harness the power of your links by shortening, sharing, managing and analyzing links. Great tool for Tweets when you’ve long URLs.

Writing Top Blogs & Mastering Search Engine Optimisation​

Grammarly 

Grammarly is your own digital writing assistant. It automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice and style mistakes in your writing. Available as a free browser extension and as an editor. 

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool that I use mainly to generate keyword ideas. Ubersuggest gives you insight into the strategies that are working for other bloggers so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge. Free and Premium versions.

Yoast

A WordPress plugin to help boost traffic to your history blog. It helps you with SEO within your draft post. And they have great online SEO courses. Free and Premium versions.

Simple Author Box 

Simple Author Box adds a professional touch through a responsive author box at the end of your posts. Add your name, image, description and social profile links. 

Staying Organised​

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google available on desktop and as an app. Perfect for reminding you about blog posts, block scheduling your time, creating an editorial calendar. As well as setting and sharing your working hours.

Apple MacBook Pro

After using Apple Macbooks for years now I can highly recommend them for their reliability. The base 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 1.4GHz quad-core 8th generation Intel Core i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 8GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory and 128GB SSD storage. It comes with a range of free software pre-installed software that mean you can get started with your laptop right away. 

Oxford Notebooks

I love these and use a different colour for each task like blog posts, making videos, course creation etc… Oxford products range from their ever popular campus notepads, revision cards and now the Scribzee app. Best of all they’re always striving to be a sustainable paper products company. 

Buy Oxford notebooks on Amazon through the link below

Google Drive 

Google Drive is a storage service that gives you 15gb of free storage space. Making it easy to save and share content for your history blog. 

Hi There,

I'm Elizabeth Hill-Scott.

I believe there shouldn’t be barriers to anyone sharing their love of history. So, my job is to help you cut through the noise to grow your blog and business in a way that is productive but never feels like work.

You’ll find me sharing my best blogging knowledge, as well as helping you grow your reach, promote and monetise. I’m here to guide, teach, listen and connect with whatever aspect of history lights you up.. Let’s get started.

Elizabeth from smart history blogging signature
Elizabeth from smart history blogging signature

Blogging Tips

01

desk with laptop watch and notebook

Free Download

7 Smart Time-Saving Steps
For Busy History Bloggers

Making Money

02

Free Download

15 Smart Ways to Make
Money History Blogging

Blogging Tips

01

desk with laptop watch and notebook

Free Download

7 Smart Time-Saving Steps
For Busy History Bloggers

Making Money

02

Free Download

15 Smart Ways to Make
Money History Blogging

The History Creatives Hub ​​

Enjoy and connect with bloggers, podcasters, authors, YouTubers and more from our super-talented history community. Just found this? Well, you’re invited to join and promote your history-inspired creations too of course!

Discover My Ultimate History Blogging Planners​

My planner packages are packed with templates and actionable tips you can bring to your new or existing history blog instantly. They are 45 pages, with multiple front cover designs. Plus, extras like 12 month inserts motivational device wallpaper, stickers, printable bookmarks and a 19 page blogging guide. They’re delivered to your inbox in minutes.

History Blogging: 35 ideas for blog posts

Whether you’re a beginner or have been history blogging forever coming up with ideas for blog posts is a constant issue. Do any of these sound like you? 

You have stacks of ideas (but no time)? You get overwhelmed researching a topic you love and struggle to create the actual blog post, which then drifts? You’re bouncing week to week writing blog post ideas that are just well okay? or perhaps you’re losing faith and need to add some variety and sparkle to your editorial calendar. 

Hi There,

I'm Elizabeth Hill-Scott.

A life-long history fan since I saw my first English castle on a school trip. I’m using my experience in blogging, marketing and communications to teach you how to grow a fabulous history blog and business.Â