When it comes to blogging, we’re always looking for ways to make it even more productive and worthwhile. Much has been said about organizing your blog post, optimizing the content, or writing posts ahead of time, but let’s look at three tools that you may not have thought to use for your blogging.

Digital recorder

The mind travels faster than we can write, however, we can generally speak as quickly as we can think. Having a digital recorder handy makes it easy to take quick notes or recite a sentence exactly as we hear it in our head, which we might otherwise forget or get wrong if we had to write it down.

To make the best use of the digital recorder, you’ll want to take some time at the end of the day playing back your recording, and transferring them into your blog entries. If your recordings aren’t long enough for a full blog entry, then make a note and save it in draft for another day. This also means that you should have a back up stash of blog topics.

Mind mapping software

Mind mapping, for me and I’m sure many others, was first discovered in grade school. Before we started our book reports, the teacher had us take out a sheet of paper and draw a giant circle in the center. Inside the circle we were to write our main topic idea for the report, then we were to draw three more, smaller circles around the main idea and fill them with sub-topics, then join them with lines to the main idea. This became the general outline for the report.

Mind mapping software streamlines this process. Instead of being limited to one or two main topics or three subtopics on paper, the software allows for a more organic outlining process. Once everything is out of your head and into a mind map, it then becomes much easier to fill out the details and turn it into a blog entry.

I’ve personally been using ConceptDraw MINDMAP, however, there is a free option called Free Mind. Another well known alternative, though commercial, is Mindjet.

Speech recognition software

This entry is being dictated to and typed by Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  I’m a fairly speedy typist at around 60 words per minute, but speed isn’t the primary reason that I use it. I simply don’t care much for writing an entry twice, which often happens because I like to prepare blog entries using old-fashioned methods: ink and paper. Writing it, then dictating it saves time overall. (Plus, it allows me to throw some random thoughts into my blog entry from time to time.)

When all is said and done, and I’ve finished dictating the blog entry, I then go back and edit it for clarity and mistakes, which usually only takes about 5–10 minutes.

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