A Guide to the Best Tumblr Features for Bloggers

It's Free!

Tumblr is completely free to use. You can make a new Tumblr blog right now without paying for anything.

At Tumblr, you can publish your content with no bandwidth or storage limits. You can also modify your Tumblelog's design, publish group blogs, and use a custom domain, all for free.

Customized Design

A wide variety of themes are available for Tumblr users that you can tweak to customize your Tumblelog. You can also access all of the necessary HTML code to make any changes that you want to your Tumblelog's theme.

Because Tumblr is so customizable, you can be sure that your blog is much different than the other ones you might run into. This is perfect for anyone wanting to stand out from the crowd or express their creativity on their blog.

Custom Domain

Your Tumblelog can use your own domain name so that it's truly personalized. For businesses, this enables you to easily brand your Tumblelog and make it appear more professional.

If you've already registered a domain name you love but you want to use Tumblr to edit your posts and actually host your website, it's really easy to do.

Publishing

You can publish text, high-res photos, videos, links, audio, slideshows, and more to your Tumblelog. Tumblr offers a variety of great publishing features that make it easy for you to publish any kind of content to your Tumblelog.

Here are some of Tumblr's publishing features:

• Publish to your Tumblelog from email
• Publish to your Tumblelog via a text message from your phone
• Publish audio posts to your Tumblelog via phone
• Schedule your posts to publish in the future
• Use the handy bookmarklet to instantly share anything you see online via your Tumblelog
• Keep your entire Tumblelog or certain posts private

Collaboration

You can invite multiple people to publish to the same Tumblelog. It's easy for them to submit posts, which you can review and approve before they are published.

Because Tumblr supports this type of collaboration, it's really easy to work together with business partners, family, and friends. Give everyone rights to your blog and they can post on Tumblr just like you can.

Pages

Make your Tumblelog look more like a traditional blog or website using customizable pages. For example, you might build a Contact Us page and an About page.

When you make pages on your Tumblr blog, it looks a bit more professional than a blog post. It's recommended to make pages on Tumblr if you're showcasing a product or service.

Search Engine Optimization

Tumblr uses a variety of functions to ensure your Tumblelog is search-engine friendly using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This happens behind the scenes without any additional effort on your part.

When the right SEO details are set up, you'll get more traffic to your Tumblr blog and, hopefully, more interaction, too.

No Ads

As if a free blogging platform isn't enough, Tumblr doesn't clutter your Tumblelog with ads, logos, or any other unwanted money-making features that can negatively affect your audience's experience.

This can't be said for most blogging platforms, so it's important when you're deciding on a blog platform, to realize that Tumblr can provide a clean interface for both you and your visitors by avoiding ads.

Apps

There are many experimental labs third-party apps available that can add even more features and functionality to your Tumblelog.

For example, there are entertaining apps that let you add speech bubbles with text to images, apps that can publish to Tumblr from an iPhone or iPad, apps that can instantly publish images from Flickr to your Tumblelog, and many more.

Social Media Integration

Tumblr integrates seamlessly with Twitter, Facebook, and Feedburner. Publish your posts to Tumblr and you can automatically publish them through your Twitter or Facebook account. If you prefer, you can pick and choose which posts to publish to Twitter and Facebook.

Tumblr is also an option in IFTTT. Connect Tumblr to IFTTT to do things like post a new blog update when a specific Twitter user posts something, or when a new item is posted to Twitter that matches a specific search term.

You can also easily invite people to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed and track analytics related to those subscriptions because Tumblr integrates with Feedburner.

Q&A

Tumblr offers a great feature that enables you to publish a Q&A box where your audience can ask you questions on your Tumblelog and you can answer them.

This is one of the best ways for your viewers to engage with you.

Copyrights

Tumblr's Terms of Service clearly states that all of the content you publish on your Tumblelog is owned and copyrighted by you.

You might think this is a common feature with all websites, but that's not true. Some blogging platforms might have you surrender the rights to your content when you post it on their website.

Support

Tumblr offers an online Help Center for anyone needing help understanding how to use Tumblr. There are tons of categories of help through that link.

It's also really easy to find help with Tumblr through that link. Just browse through the categories or search for something at the top of that page.

Analytics

Tumblr works with blog analytics tools like Google Analytics. Just set up your analytics account using your preferred tool and paste the provided code into your Tumblelog. That's all there is to it!

You'll be tracking your blog stats in no time.