28 Free Resources For Blogging On A Budget

When you're starting out as a blogger you may not have a lot of money to put towards your blog. Or you may not want to invest too much money into it until you know you'll get a return on your investment.

Either way, you don’t want your blog to look like a fly-by-night operation. You want it to look as professional as possible so that you can attract visitors and grow it so you can start investing money in it. I know I did.

(This information is not meant to be advice and is just for educational purposes. I am not a financial or content expert. This post includes affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and purchase, I will receive a small commission.)

When I first started my blog it was purely a hobby. I wasn’t too serious about it and I didn’t have any money to invest in it. Especially when I was laid off the month after I started my blog.

But as I’ve spent more time blogging I’ve become more serious about it and can see it has the potential to become a viable side business. Additionally, while I've come to realize that to make your blog into a business at some point you need to start investing in it there are still some areas where you don’t have to spend a lot of money or any money at all.

Related read: Shop Blogging Tools To Grow Your Blog

As I dive more and more into the blogging world I’ve found several free resources for blogging on a budget. Some are ones that I’ve used to help grow my blog, and others are ones that I’ve read good reviews on. So I decided to create a list that other newbies or even established bloggers can reference. Because who doesn’t like free things!

Blog Templates

1. Premium Blogger Templates
This is a site with several blog templates available for download for free or for a fee. The templates you pay for are supposed to come with more features and customer support. I’ve used a few free templates from this site over the years and was able to easily edit them with my branding.

2. Themexpose
Like Premium Blogger Templates you can either download templates for free or pay for more features and support. The templates at Themexpose are made to work with the Blogger platform.

3. Sora Templates
This site has fewer Blogger templates than Premium or Themexpose, but they have several sophisticated templates. The templates come in free and paid versions.

Writing And Content Creation

4. Google Calendar
This is what I use to create my content calendar. It’s really easy to use and I can color code my blog and social posts so I know what's supposed to go live when.

5. Google Drive
I love Google Drive. It allows me to house most of what I need to run my blog. I’m able to create and house printables that I use for my content upgrades. I can also write and organize my blog posts in Google Drive, and access them from multiple devices.

6. Coschedule Headline Analyzer
I don’t use this tool as often as I did, but it’s been very helpful when I’m stumped on what would make a good post headline. This free online tool uses research to help determine if your headline would perform well.

7. Grammarly
This is an online tool that helps you edit your content. I do a decent job of editing my own posts when I spend the time to, but Grammarly is like a great backup because it will catch any grammar or spelling errors I didn’t have.

8. Payhip

Payhip has a free plan that makes it easy to sell and promote digital downloads (ebooks, design assets, music, etc.) and membership directly to customers. 

Stock photos

8. Styled Stock Society
These are pretty, bright, and stylish stock photos created with the female entrepreneur in mind. Though this is a paid site you can still sign up to get 10 free photos.

9. Stock Snap
The photos on Stock Snap are free from copyright restrictions and don't require any attribution. The photos I've used from this site are lifestyle photos or interior shots.

10. Stockvault
This site offers free photos for personal, educational, and non-commercial usage. I have to admit I don't use Stockvault that often when I search for stock photos because much of what I find I don't like.

11. Death to the Stock Photo
This stock site is a free subscription service where they email you photos on a monthly basis.

12. Ivory Mix
Get access to an extensive free image library that has images that fit many types of styles and blog niches.

Photo Editing

13. Fotor.com
With this free online design and editing software, I can do all kinds of things. From basic photo editing to adjusting brightness, contrast, and cropping, to adding filters and frames. Fotor can be accessed from a computer or an app on mobile devices. The one downside of the free version is you can't save your edited images in the software, so I make sure to download them before I move on to something else.

14. Snapseed
This is a free app that I love! Just by using my phone, I can do some serious editing to images such as adjusting exposure, changing brightness, adding blur, and cropping. I've been able to use Snapseed to make dark images look light and airy.

15. A Color Story

This is another free photo editing app but it's also an app that has free image filters.

16. Tinypng
Having a slow-loading blog is the worst. It can turn away potential and current readers and also negatively impact your income if you've monetized your blog. One of the biggest culprits can be large images. I've started compressing my images using tinypng.com. So my images aren't so big that they have slow download time.

17. Remove Image Background/remove.bg

Have you ever had an image that you wish you could remove the background from but didn't access to photoshop? Well, Remove Image Background can help with that and it's free to use! All you do is go to the site and upload your image. Once the background has been removed you can download the image and use it how you'd like.

Graphic Design

18. Pixlr

With this free online tool, you can edit photos and design graphics for your social media channels.

Social Media

19. Later
This is my go-to app for managing my Instagram feed. With Later you can plan and auto-schedule up to 30 images a month and track your stats all for free. Plus, you have free access to their link in bio tool where you can add links to your feed images.

20. Planoly
This is another Instagram management app. With Planoly’s free plan, you can upload 30 images that you can then schedule and auto-post to your feed. One additional feature that Planoly has and Later doesn’t is scheduling your Instagram Stories so you get a notification reminding you to post.

21. SocialPilot
With SocialPilot you can bulk upload and see all your scheduled posts in a calendar format. Additionally, with Facebook, you can use the repeat post feature and pretty much set it and forget it.

22. Recurpost
This is a social media management platform for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn that doesn't just post your content once but saves it to post it again. I'm currently using the free plan for Recurpost which allows me to save 100 pieces of content for posting.

Email Lists

23. MailerLite
To manage my email subscribers and send emails I opted to use MailerLite. Several bloggers use other newsletter services, but MailerLite is the one that fits best in my budget and also provides the types of features I wanted. I love how easy the interface is to use and the reporting that I get. MailerLite's free plan allows you to have up to 1,000 subscribers and send unlimited emails each month.

24. Kit

Yes, the popular Kit has a free plan that you can sign up for. The free plan includes unlimited landing pages & forms, the sending of email broadcasts, and the selling of digital products & subscriptions.

Courses, Guides, and Printables

25. 5 Types Of Content That Will Boost Your Blog Traffic Ebook
This ebook is offered by Abby Lawson of Just a Girl and Her Blog. In it, she outlines the 5 types of posts that have consistently brought her high pageviews.

25. 101 Free Website Traffic Ideas
Especially when you’re starting to outgrow the traffic to your blog is very important. So having a list like this one from Redefining Mom can help make it easier to find out what ways work for your blog and audience.

26. Weekly Social Media Planners
Helps you keep all of the weekly tasks and ideas for your social accounts in order.

27. Ivory Mix
Here you can find several free courses that can help you as you manage and grow your blog. Such as getting traffic from Pinterest and creating graphics with Canva.

28. Brand Response and Outreach Templates

Once you gain a following brands will start noticing you and may reach out to see if you collaborate. You may also want to reach out to brands for collab opportunities. Either way, it can be hard to figure out what to write. I've found some great brand response templates that I've used as a guide for my responses to brands. Here are my favorites

• Emma's Edition - How To Respond To A Brand When They "Don't Have Budget" For An Influencer Campaign
• Boss Girl Bloggers - How To Finally Make Money Blogging

Originally posted 1/30/16

Updated 6.21.23