Around five years ago, the world made an important transition. For the first time in history, the most popular device for accessing the internet was not the personal computer, but the smartphone. Since then, mobile internet access has taken off, and now a majority of people only use their phones. They don’t bother with traditional computers.
But what about bloggers? Can they ditch their PCs as well?
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Well, apparently they can. While typing out blogs on a phone isn’t as easy as doing it on a regular keyboard, developers have created a range of tools that allow people to run blogs without even having to sign into Windows again.
Browser-Based Blogging
Writing your blog in your browser is generally not a good idea. Despite advances in software development, most mobile browsers are still difficult to navigate – and even harder for blogging. Small screens and poor UIs make it almost impossible to format documents.
Blogger Apps
The good news, though, is that there are now a bunch of apps out there designed to make your life easier. In fact, there are around half a dozen that you could use.
What’s more, there are a bunch of different kinds of apps that let you do different things, replacing how you might use your PC.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the tools that you might want to use.
Traffic analysers: Do you want to find out how many people are reading your blog and where they’re coming from? If so, you might want to check out Google Analytics. The platform shows you how users are accessing your blog, how long they stay there, and where they go next.
Social outreach: There are also apps that make it easy for you to share your blog on social media. Buffer, for instance, lets you connect with Facebook, Pinterest, Polyvore, Twitter and many other sites. Instead of trying to post via clunky browsers on your phone, it uses easy push-buttons to do it for you.
Photo editing: Bloggers also need to edit their photos to accompany their writing. Again, there are apps with specifically-designed UIs that make this easy. There are many options here, but Pixlr is available on both Android and iOS. It is well worth checking out.
Text Editors: Text editors are your bread and butter as a blogger. And now there are many for mobile as well as desktop. Perhaps your best bet on mobile is simply Google Docs. This syncs with the cloud so if you want to edit your work on your computer, you can.
Blogging platforms: Finally, you’ll want to experiment with different blogging platforms. These are essentially apps that do all the work of organizing, managing and uploading your blog to your site. Two big ones right now are Blogger and WordPress. However, there are many other options available.
Getting Started
Before you start using your smartphone for blogging, you’ll need to learn how to activate new iPhone or Android handsets.
Once you’re set up, the next step is to download some version of all of the apps described above. You’ll then need to take additional steps to ensure that your writing is correct and that you’re able to distribute it to a large number of people.
Start off by signing up to a grammar checking service. There are many out there, some famous, some not so.
Then make sure that you have an SEO plugin so that you can determine whether your content is going to be able to target various niches and keywords successfully.
SEO plugins are actually extremely user-friendly. Many, for instance, evaluate your work for things like using the passive voice and constructing sentences that are too long. Others actually list the words that you need to include to target your chosen keyword and then check them off once you include them in the document.
You can also get advice on the length of articles that you should write on a given topic. In some cases, 5,000 words will be more than enough, but in others, you’ll need more.
Wrapping Up
Overall, you no longer need a desktop to manage a blog. It is something that you can do from your phone. On the plus side, this offers convenience and flexibility. No matter where you are in the world, you can work on your blog. On the down side, though, it is clunky. Even though mobile user interfaces are improving, they’re still not perfect. If you’re stuck, you can always ask blogger friends about the tools and techniques they use.
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