Google Chrome Plugins for Book Bloggers

I. love. plugins. Any kind of plugin. They make life so much easier. Chrome plugins. WordPress plugins. They all can do wonders for productivity, and I’m a big advocate of working smarter, not harder.

Today, we’re talking about Chrome plugins. Specifically, ones that I think you fellow book bloggers will find helpful. I’ll cut right to the chase and tell you a little about what’s in my browser lately. I keep separate Chrome profiles for the blog and for everything else

LastPass Password Manager

Between my work accounts, personal accounts, and blog accounts, I’ve been trying to use better passwords. I feel like you’re hearing about security breaches more and more, and I used to be one of those people who used the same password for everything, because that was as much as I could remember.

Well, no more. I don’t use the password generator that comes up with random numbers and letters that LastPass offers, but it’s not a bad idea. But I feel more secure just having a place to store my passwords.

ColorZilla

I like to make quote images to go with some of my longer book reviews, to break up the chunks and text and make it easier to read. Because I am also very matchy-matchy, I try to make sure the graphics match the book cover. But since I’m using a free tool called Canva instead of something fancy, I don’t have an eyedropper tool there. Plus, it would be a pain to pull the book cover into my design software just to pull colors for a completely separate graphic

The ColorZilla Chrome plugin is an eyedropper for the web. Go to any web page, pull it up and hover it over whatever you want, and it will copy the color’s hex code to your clipboard so you can paste it into whatever you use to make graphics. Great for pulling up Goodreads or Amazon and finding the colors of a book cover.

Buffer

I’ll go more into this in a separate post, but you can’t expect to just share a blog post on the day it’s published and expect it to get continuous traffic. I share any given blog post several times, spaced out. That’s where Buffer, or as I like to call it, The Social Scheduling Holy Grail, comes in.

Buffer is my favorite social media scheduling option, and I’ve been around the block more than once. You can create a queue schedule that makes it possible to type up a post and schedule it with one click. It will automatically add it to the next open spot in the queue. Alternatively, you can also schedule it for a specific date and time. It also gives you great analytics on each tweet, and with the plugin, you can do it from any website or from your Twitter stream.

Wisestamp

Wisestamp makes really awesome email signatures that allow you to promote your blog. Instead of throwing in a thousand text links that look cluttered, you can add icons for your Facebook page, Twitter profile, blog, stuff like that. My favorite part is that you can add your blog’s RSS feed to show your latest review or blog post and updates it automatically.

Feedly

Feedly is an RSS reader, and a damn good one, so it’s pretty self-explanatory. I subscribe to my favorite blogs via email so I get the posts right away and easily accessible, but the other blogs I read go into Feedly for catching up on a few times a week.

So this post was pretty short but sweet, but if you want to know some of my other favorite plugins, you can go here. I can also always do a follow-up with other categories of plugins I like.

What do you have added to your browser?

About Bumblings Blog Tips

Bumblings Blog Tips answers all of your questions about growing your book blog. From designing your blog to promoting posts on social media, these weekly posts will make you a better book blogger. Read all Bumblings Blog Tips.

The best part? You have a say in what posts I write. I keep all my ideas for this series in a public Trello board. If you create a free Trello account using this link, you can view the idea board, vote for topics you’d like to see sooner rather than later, and comment with your own ideas and questions on the suggestion cards at the top of each list.

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