Blogs have become an essential part of business communication. Business blogs are very often the backbone of the content marketing strategy, at least they should be. To streamline the daily work of business bloggers, tools and plugins can help to make your workflows more efficient, increase productivity and boost success.

We manage 5 corporate blogs for our company and products: Adenion blog, Blog2Social German blog, Blog2Social English blog, Influma blog and PR-Gateway blog. And we connect our business blogs and websites with as many social media channels to promote our contents and to connect with our customers and communities. We create and publish all of our contents on our blogs: help content, infographics, checklists, tutorials, videos, FAQs - everything can be found on our blogs. Here, we also communicate with our customers and prospects, connect to our social media channels, share our posts on social media and collect valuable feedback.

Our daily content marketing and blogging routine looks something like this and so will yours:

Planning and organizing your content projects
Creating content
Proofreading and optimizing content for search and readability
Creating visuals
Scheduling and publishing content
Promoting content: sharing, seeding, and re-sharing
Capturing and converting leads
Analyzing performance and results

All these tasks take up a lot of time.

To streamline our team communication, we constantly generate and exchange new marketing and content ideas and keep track of results and collect feedback on our blog posts and campaigns. With a small team, it is also important that we use our resources efficiently.

In order make our daily work easier and our marketing strategies more effective, we have tried out a multitude of tools and plugins over the years. The following tools and plugins for our business blogs have become our most valuable daily helpers.
1. Slack (free & premium from $6.25/user/month) for an easier way of communicating with teams and projects


Slack

Slack is a messenger app that simplifies communication, giving everyone a shared workspace where conversations are organized and accessible from everywhere and every device. It's much faster and easier than email. You can integrate other productivity apps to streamline your workflow even more.

With slack, we create separate timelines for specific products or topics and share important information on current events and developments, collect content for reading or content curation, or we can chat with specific team members with a direct message.

The messaging app "Slack" enables us to communicate in real time, create group chats for specific needs and share images, documents or links.

Check out Slack here
2. Trello (free & premium from $9.99 per user/month) for organizing projects and editorial calendars


Trello

Who does what, when and how? Is the post approved for publishing? What suggestions are there?  Trello helps our team stay organized and get more done in less time.

Trello lets you organize, prioritize and schedule your projects and campaigns on flexible boards, lists, and cards. You can create a separate board for each of your products and projects. Within these boards, you can create lists and maps in order to make workflow as smooth as possible.