Lifestyle, food and drink, and our family life and travel adventures.
I use lots of different tools and websites to help me with my blog and to help promote it. I thought I would bring my favourite recommended tools together in one place, and tell you why I love them too.
Some of these links are affiliate links, which means I make a small amount if you sign up through my link. Thank you!
I currently use Bluehost to host my website and have done for years, but honestly, I would probably not recommend it anymore. My site was down for days and days in 2016 and it took a really long time and a lot of faffing to get it resolved. I have heard a lot of negative things about them too. That could all change of course but right now I wouldn’t want to recommend them.
*Update – it is now November 2019 and I haven’t had any problems with Bluehost for a very long time so I am still with them but I cannot be sure whether I have just got lucky more recently or if they have improved, so I am still not willing to recommend them yet.
If you are looking for somewhere to host your WordPress blog I would suggest looking at either Lyricalhost, Vidahost, Siteground (cheap to start off with year – gets very expensive after the first year), or Stable Point – I have heard a lot of good things about all of them, particularly great customer service if something goes wrong (which it will sometimes).
Update, July 2021 – I am still using Bluehost for my main blog (this one) but I have recently set up some other websites and decided to use Lyrical Host and I probably going to switch this one to Lyrical too as I am so happy with them and I don’t want to be paying for two lots of hosting.
Lyrical Host have amazing customer service and they have got back to me so quickly over the last week whilst I’ve been setting everything up. After adding a first site then you aren’t currently able to add further ones yourself, so I’ve had to contact them to do it for me and it has been so smooth and quick – I’d highly recommend them. You can get 10% off your hosting package at Lyrical Host by using my code LOUHEG.
If you are looking to buy a new domain for your website then I would suggest looking at either 123reg or GoDaddy – both of which I have used in the past. I would prefer to only use 123reg due to the questionable ethics and promotion of GoDaddy, however, there are always discount codes available for GoDaddy and so it is usually pretty cheap. Unfortunately, that sometimes has to take priority.
I would not recommend GoDaddy for hosting though – I have only heard negative things. But do your own research if you’d like.
I have recently discovered NameCheap to buy domains from and they are now my favourite. They seem to generally be really good prices, and it’s all easy to use and get set up.
I love Buffer. It allows me to share my blog posts quickly and easily at times and dates of my choosing. It is also very easy to then reshare those posts after they have gone out if you don’t have much time to rewrite a social media post, which is useful.
I pay $10 a month for Buffer on the ‘Awesome’ plan, and with that, I can schedule up to 100 posts at a time, across 10 different social profiles. On the free Buffer, you can schedule up to 10 posts on each account.
You can try Buffer free for 7 days here.
Missinglettr helps you to grow your social presence by quickly and easily creating dozens of social media posts for the year ahead, for each blog post that you write. It’s free to use for a standard plan, or you can get some great discounts on the pro plan with these offers:
30 days access to Pro + Curate for $5 (a saving of $103). New customers only.
50% off any plan for the first 3 months. New customers only,
Tailwind is for Pinterest scheduling and I think it’s brilliant. I’ve gone from a few repins each month to hundreds, all because of this little tool. Check it out here.
Another one that I am not currently using but that I think is great and plan to use again when I have the time and money to spend on it.
I use the premium version of Picmonkey as I use it so often and I think it is worth the £4.50 per month to remove the ads and be able to use my own fonts. I use it for pretty much every post that I write to edit my photographs and add fonts over some of them. It’s easy to use and there’s so much you can do with it.
I have only started using Canva recently and I definitely am not using it to its full potential – when I eventually get more time I will look into what it can do a lot more. Currently, I use it partly to create a Pinnable image for my blog posts – it’s easy to create a background image using one of the social media templates and there are hundreds of free and paid for backgrounds that you can use, which look great. I then tend to move the background image over to Picmonkey and use fonts there, just because I have my own fonts that I have purchased on there that fit with my style and branding.
I believe that you can add your own fonts to Canva but you have to have the paid-for version, which I do not currently have.
Trello is an organisational tool and it’s brilliant. I’m normally a pen and paper kind of girl for lists, but I’ve recently started using Trello and I love it. It stops me from having to re-write my lists every day when I haven’t managed to cross things off! Plus I can add dates, and labels and notes to my boards. A Trello board is a list of lists, filled with cards. Trello has everything you need to organise projects of any size. Get Trello here.
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
Contact: [email protected]
