Top 5 Free Tools For Influencers & Bloggers
Mainstream media often portrays the life of social media influencers as glamorous and effortless. While the glamorous part is certainly true, we often don’t see the enormous amount of resources especially time and money that go into such carefully curated accounts with high quality content.
As many a veteran influencer would agree, the early days when collaborations aren’t necessarily free flowing are the hardest. Maintaining high quality, high frequency content on a shoestring budget can be tough – but not impossible…
Here are my top 5 free tools for influencers, to help:
- Grow and manage your accounts
- Create and share amazing content
- Secure the best collaborations
5. Hootsuite for content management
Posting regular content is really important when growing and maintaining your social media accounts. Hootsuite is great way to manage the regular posting, especially if you haven’t made the switch to professional influencer completely and still have a 9-5. As part of their free package you can manage up to three accounts, schedule content, and also get some basic analytics on follower growth and which content is most popular.
A really important strategy is to post every day, be consistent. I try to post once or twice a day. It’s also important to have really amazing content – Elena Sandor
4. Snapseed for easy photo editing
Snapseed is personal favourite at the moment – this one came in as a tip from ZINE blogger Elena Sandor at Eat Wear Travel in her recent interview. This awesome photo enhancing tool allows you to edit pictures and add character with its range of filters and enhancements.
3. GIMP for more complex photo editing
Photoshop is great… but it comes at a premium. GIMP is a remarkably close alternative that comes totally free. You get most of the features you get in Adobe Photoshop so you can edit and manipulate images without compromising the quality or resolution. This is really important when posting images to your blog, and if you have to share content directly with brands as part of your collaboration.
2. Lightworks for video editing
Lightworks is one of the best free tools out there for video editing – so great that it was event used for promoting Hollywood movies like The King’s Speech. The free version is pretty heavy duty so you may need a little trial and error to truly master the tech – but it’s definitely worth it for creating professional looking videos totally free.
1. ZINE Media Kit for connecting with brands
Finally… our most favourite free tool for bloggers and influencers… the ZINE media kit. You can use your media kit to introduce yourself to brands you’d like to collaborate with. Sign up for free and connect all of your social media channels. Your media kit automatically updates with your current content, follower number, engagement rates and audience demographics. You can even add your rate card press and past collaborations.
What’s more, when you sign up to ZINE you’ll be automatically included in our influencer database, so brands on the platform can approach you easily for collaborations.
Don’t yet have a ZINE media kit?
Join over 36, 000 influencers and bloggers already on ZINE
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“We love using ZINE because we can easily pitch new agencies and brand’s with a quick and easy link to our updated media kit in real time. Thank you so much!”
Two Trends
@twotrends / twotrends.com
Maeve Sugrue
I’m Head of Marketing at ZINE where I am helping peers and customers who want to revolutionise their influencer marketing strategy. I love food, fitness and Min Pins.