Whether you’re running a blog for fun, have started your own company and want a business blog to help you get more visibility online, or write content for a living, everybody who writes will go through a period of time where they’re stuck for ideas, have forgotten a certain word that would just make sense, or are struggling to put together a jumble of ideas in their mind into cohesive words. The good news is that no matter what topics you are writing content about, there are plenty of tools that you can use for better brainstorming, researching, writing, and editing.

HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator:

You know that it’s about time you published a new post on your blog, but there’s one problem – you have no idea what to write about. You could trawl the internet for ideas, but the problem there is that you only end up writing about a topic that’s been covered a thousand times before. That’s where HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator comes in. If you have a general idea of what you’d like to write about, you can use it to come up with titles and topic ideas that you can turn into a new post. All you need to do is enter up to five different nouns into the generator and you’ll get five potential blog post titles. If you’re willing to provide your name and email address, you can get a massive 250 title ideas.

Unpaywall:

You’re writing about a topic that’s requiring a lot of research, and you’ve finally come across a research paper or article that has some great information you can cite and link to in your own content. But the problem is that you can’t read it because the site you landed on is asking you to pay to access the full version. Instead of spending money to read an article that might not even have the information that you need when you’ve skimmed through, use the Unpaywall extension on either Google Chrome or Firefox to quickly and easily see if there’s a free copy of it available anywhere else online.

Google Docs:

If you’re collaborating with somebody else on your next blog post, eBook or another piece of content, all you need is a free Google account to access Google Docs where you can easily write, edit and archive your work for free. And, since your documents are autosaved in the cloud on Google Drive consistently as you’re working, you don’t have to worry about the risk of losing your work. Google Docs really stands out for its collaborative features, as you can share your document with others and give them the option to edit or comment on your work. Everyone you share the file with can work on the document together at the same time, without overriding the changes that others make.

Grammarly:

Imagine you’ve written a perfect social media update and after spending some time waiting for it to eventually go viral, you realize that you made a silly grammar mistake. If you’re on Facebook, you can probably edit it quickly, but when it comes to Tweets, there’s no edit function and the last thing you want is to have your mistake the center of attention rather than the Tweet itself. Thankfully, Grammarly is a tool that helps you avoid any embarrassing grammar or spelling slips. All you need to do is simply install the browser extension and it will check the spelling and grammar of anything that you write online. There’s also a desktop app version that you can use for writing offline using programs like Microsoft Word. If you are a writer working with clients who want you to use different versions of English, Grammarly has a handy feature where you can switch to check spellings in British, American, Canadian, and Australian English easily.

De-Jargonizer:

If your background is in software development or another technical field, it’s usually fine and expected to use industry-specific jargon that everybody understands if you are writing content for people who are also experienced in your field. However, if you’re putting together content to explain things to ordinary people, using all that technical jargon can just end up being confusing for your audience who might not understand it all as well as you do. However, when the terms that you use on a day to day basis in your role are so normal to you, it can be difficult to recognize when you’re using too much jargon in your content. That’s where De-Jargonizer comes in; just paste your text or upload the file into this tool and it’ll highlight potentially problematic words that might be difficult for your audience to understand.

Evernote:

Keeping track of all your research when you’re writing content can be tricky to do. You could compile notes by taking screenshots of your research and compiling them in a Google Doc, or you could keep handwritten notes or a custom bookmarks list. But all these options can be quite time-consuming, so make your life easier using Evernote. This web clipper allows you to capture full articles with just a couple of clicks. They are then added to Evernote, where you can then organize all the research you collect into a variety of different notebooks. There are several tools you can use for organizing your research, including saving all of your collected research at once, read the full saved articles, automate your note-taking with Zapier, and share the research you’ve collected with others.

WorkFlowy:

Good writing starts with a well-structured outline. WorkFlowy is a tool that makes putting together an outline easy. You can quickly put together an organized summary of any writing project that you are about to start with the option to add nested lists and bullet points. When you hover over a bullet point, you can add notes, share, complete, duplicate, or delete the item, making it easier to keep your projects on track and going smoothly as you work on them.

Whether you need ideas, help with avoiding mistakes, or want to improve your research when writing content, give these tools a try.