It’s easy to write a lackluster blog post, one that doesn’t provide useful information, drive traffic to your website or help generate your dream client. So what can you do to boost your blog content?

Luckily, the internet is full of resources for getting the most out of your website, from user-friendly graphic generators to a wealth of SEO tools. Among these, there are a few I love for a successful beginning to your blogging journey.

The best part? All of these are free! Some offer paid versions — which you may choose to upgrade to if you find you really like them — but the free versions are the perfect low-barrier resources for new bloggers or even more experienced ones who are in need of easy-to-use tools to make their blogs (and even websites!) look good and attract new clients.

Ready to learn more? Here are my top three free tools to help boost your blog content:

For Beautiful, High-Res Images: Unsplash

A generous community of amateur and professional photographers all over the world upload their images to Unsplash for people like you and me to use however we want (yep, even for commercial purposes!). Use terms like themes or colors to search through their database of more than 2 million high-resolution images. 

Photographers are tagged and you can choose to credit them or not — How you display photos once downloaded is totally up to you.

Before paying for pricey photo databases I highly recommend searching for what you need at Unsplash, especially if you’re only using photos to blog or build your website with.

For Pre-Built (and Modifiable!) Graphic Templates: Canva

Canva is graphic design software for people who don’t do graphic design, which means it’s incredibly easy to use. Their database has hundreds of pre-designed templates in the correct size you’d need to, say, create an Instagram story, a Facebook cover, or printed materials like postcards and flyers.

Once you’ve found a template you like, editing is a breeze. You can move items around, insert new images from Canva’s library, upload your own images (like your logo!), change fonts, and so much more.

They offer several different options for downloads, so you can save your image as whatever resolution or filetype makes the most sense for you.

For Managing Your SEO: Yoast

Yoast makes SEO super accessible for those of us who are not SEO experts (and you don’t have to be one to start blogging, though I’ve got you covered on the basics here). For those of you who blog on WordPress, Yoast has a great plugin you can install directly onto your website which appears at the bottom of your new post page.

The plugin allows you to search for SEO keywords, and gives advice on ways to improve the SEO of each individual post. You can also use this plugin to tell Google exactly what your post is about and create excerpts for sharing on social media.

Even More Ways to Boost Your Blog Content

I’ll be sharing more about how to get set up for blogging success as we count down to this year’s Dog Trainer NaNoWriMo blogging contest — It’s 30 days of writing, with fun prizes to encourage you to get most of next year’s blog posts done, easy.

If you’re starting from scratch, I’ve got just the thing for you: In my upcoming online course, I’ll be teaching all the tools you need to build a stunning website that brings customers to you, no coding experience required. Learn all about it here.