Blogging is a staple of building an online brand. Whether you're an individual trying to build your own brand or a communications executive managing the brand of a Fortune 500 company, selecting the tools used to create and organize content is just as important as the content itself.
Here are some of the more popular tools that bloggers are using these days and ones that will make the content process seamless.
Evernote
Evernote is the go with you anywhere note book. Whether you are using a PC or Mac, Blackberry or iPhone, you can access your notebook anywhere using their applications or web site. Your notes will be synced across all points of contact.
For bloggers, Evernote can be used as a place where you save interview notes; hoard links for later review; conduct free association around post topics; and, be an offline home for post archives. You can also store voice notes and images as well (very handy when storing business card information).
There's a reason why the service has an elephant silhouette as its logo — you won't forget a thing with Evernote.
Dropbox
Dropbox acts as your virtual server. A free account allows you to store up to two gigs of data (paid service gets you more space). Anytime any files are added, removed or changed on Dropbox, it'll sync the files across all the points of access you may be using. There's also an iPhone and iPad app that comes in hand when you need to save images or documents while you're on the go.
MarsEdit
MarsEdit is a great blog authoring tool for the Mac platform (Sorry PC peeps). It's simple, yet intuitive user interface allows bloggers to draft posts (and keep local drafts); post drafts to your site; or, post live to your site. It has full tagging and category functionality as well as media integration (video and photo uploading). The post preview window is key as it allows you to "see" the formatting of the post as you're writing and adding in HTML code.
Posterous
Posterous is a simple blogging platform that enables you to post via email or web. The benefit here is that there are no templates to worry about and posting is as simple as composing an email and sending. Users can sent to Posterous and automatically update their Twitter status as well as Facebook. The service provides users with specific email addresses to post — one that will send the post to Posterous, Twitter and Facebook and three others that send to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr individually (as well as Posterous).
Posterous can be a good micro-blogging platform for those times when you want to elaborate past 140 characters, but not want to write War and Peace.
Skitch
Skitch is a very cool webservice that works hand in hand with their desktop application (Mac only) that gives users 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing. It allows users to quickly grab a screen image and drag to a post (or send to a weblog).
There are other ways to get screen grabs, but this is the first that is pretty seamless and has social integration.
What tools do you use and recommend?
Article first published as Five Content Creation and Organizing Tools for Bloggers on Technorati.