7 Top Apps We Use for Blogging

One of our favourite things about blogging is that we have the freedom to work wherever we like. These mobile apps keep us blogging as we continue on our quest to be location-independent.

These days Mrs Romance and I are completely mobile*. We’ve published posts from all over the world and we love the freedom of being able to work on the move. This agility is a lot down to the apps we use on our phones and tablets.

*Ironically, our default office option will currently find us tucked up on the sofa.

Here are our top 7 mobile apps that help us blog successfully:

1. Instagram

Instagram was kind of my first introduction to blogging. It’s a microblog in itself, and initially I just used it to keep up with what Mrs Romance was up to on her jaunt across Italy a few years ago.

Now, I check my IG feed as often as possible. It’s a great way to connect quickly with all sorts of interesting people all over the world (and to keep in contact with friends and family while you’re away), and you can link your account up to your blog too.

We release an Instagram Diary on Mr & Mrs Romance every Monday of the past week’s IG antics. It’s fun, personal content, and the way the Instagram filters make your photos look is awesome too.

2. Little Moments

Chantelle from FatMumSlim.com is a bloody genius! From her photo-a-day Instagram photo challenge ‘#fmsphotoaday’, she’s developed one of the most incredible image editing apps we know of.

This app has so much integration, playing along with the FMS Photo-a-day challenge is so much easier. You can set alerts from the app to tell you what the day’s prompt is. Once in the app you can edit your photo with several great filters, there are some very cool overlays she’s developed to pretty up your pic and, best of all, you can then push the photo straight through to Instagram so the hashtag’s already there in the comments.

You can also crop and fit landscape and portrait pics to fit the 1:1 square frame of Insta.

The FMS Photo-a-day challenge is an excellent community, and a great way to cultivate new readers and make new friends.

3. iMovie

Making video for the blog is a new thing for us. But this app makes creating complete, well-edited videos a cinch. I’m still astounded by how easy it is (Mrs R still doesn’t believe me). This app works best on a tablet – unless you’re incredibly deft with freakishly small fingers, the screen of your phone is just a bit too small.

iMovie allows you to crop, speed up, slow down, split video, drop in segments and stills… I love using it. Mostly because it’s so easy but so complete as well.

Video is quickly becoming a much-sought-after content types for brands. If you can make quality footage to go with your regular stories – or if you can cultivate an audience on a platform like Youtube, you’re golden.

4. Dropbox

Dropbox really is the essence of cloud tech. We use Dropbox all the time to share images and files with each other. It’s so handy. Especially if the file’s too big to email, this app allows us to share whatever we want with each other.

Even better, if I’m overseas or out of town and Mrs R wants me to send her a set of images or files, I can save what she wants on Dropbox. That way it’s there forever, easy to search for and not lodged in some email we’ll never find again.

We can also share the link to files in Dropbox with our friends and family, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account. You can use this on your blog if you want to share an album with your readers but you don’t want to publish every photo.

5. Google Drive/Docs

These are two apps but they kind of work as one. And they’re both free. The difference is Google Drive lets you see documents created there, Google Docs lets you edit them.

We use both, but Google Docs especially. We have our editorial calendar up there so either one of us can edit it (and see what the other person has written), and we can check what’s planned Mr & Mrs Romance whenever we want.

This is really handy for our weekly meeting, but also if we have an idea for a post when we’re on the move, we can easily just edit the calendar and plop in our idea.

6. Feedly

It’s so hard to keep up with blog reading, but Mrs R loves the Feedly app. You can organise blogs into folders by topic or by your favourite daily or weekly reads. She reads blogs while she’s on the go, mainly on her iphone, though she also uses the ipad at home.

This app is one of the reasons she refuses the use the self-service checkout at the supermarket. She uses those precious few minutes of waiting time to read blogs on her phone. She wanted me to add that she never uses her phone when she reaches the front of the queue. It’s rude to use your phone when you’re actually at the checkout.

7. Uber

Mrs Romance is always out and about. I don’t know how she does it. Well, actually, I do. She uses Uber. A lot!

Uber is a car ordering app. You can choose the level of car you want: Lux, Taxi or Uber X. Lux is going to cost you your first born and a bale of spun gold, but Uber Taxi is at the rate and sometimes lower than a regular cab, and Uber X is just some guy in his car, so it’s much cheaper.

It’s an exceptionally safe, reliable way to get around. And if you really need to be somewhere, Uber’s your friend. It’s connected to your credit card and sends you an e-receipt of your ride, including the route it took. You rate the driver out of 5 (the driver rates you as a passenger too, by the way).

If you haven’t joined Uber yet, pop this promo code in and we’ll both get a little kick-back from Uber when you join for being nice to each other: ‘dgvlf’

Do you use any of these apps? Do you like them? What other apps do you use to get your blogging done? Tell us in the comments!

Images by Mrs Romance.