Picking the right tools to help you manage your Shopify blog work can be a heavy lift, as there are many options to pick from (and more popping up all the time). Hopefully this overview proves helpful as you pick the best-fit products for your store!

Blog Creator by Matcha

What it is: 

Matcha makes ecommerce blogging simple for any D2C brand using blog content as an element of their marketing strategy with its all-in-one blogging functionality. It takes less than a minute to connect your store’s blog and begin optimizing and measuring existing posts or creating new content with the help of guided templates.

Whether you have a large supply of existing blogs that you’re looking to optimize, you want to start blogging from scratch, or even if you simply don’t have time to write everything yourself–Matcha’s Blog Creator is designed to make the blogging process efficient while creating clearly measurable results for the Shopify business.

There are five primary components of the Matcha Blog Creator, each solving a specific piece of your Shopify blogging process:

• The Blog Content Creator:
Matcha’s Blog Creator makes building great Shopify blogs easy, from copywriting to SEO optimization to content-to-conversion enablement. For those who want to increase their publishing frequency or who don’t have time to write enough content to fuel their social, email, and on-site experiences, Matcha’s Content Library also offers thousands of professionally-produced articles that can be licensed, lightly customized for your brand, and published to your site in seconds. 

• Blog Optimization Tools for SEO & Conversions:
When the Matcha Blog Creator is integrated with a Shopify account, merchants and marketers can immediately access conversion tools to get the most out of each blog, including in-line product listings and email capture forms. Users can optimize both new and existing blog posts, even if blogs were created before implementing the Matcha Blog Creator. These tools can be easily customized to each blog post, only gating certain pieces for email collection or featuring the most appropriate product listings for each article and selecting “Add to Cart” or “View Product” call-to-actions. Matcha’s Blog Templates also provide SEO guidance as you write.

• Blog Promotion Tools
Matcha drastically simplifies the process of incorporating articles into your email newsletter and Facebook feed. Any article can be promoted at any time directly from your Matcha account.

• Targeted Email Segmentation
When you grow your email list with the Blog Creator’s conversion tools, Matcha’s Subscriber’s features will track your email subscribers’ data, including information on their purchase history and key content interests. Marketers can easily export this segmentation data to their Klaviyo or Mailchimp account to inform targeted, psychographic-based email campaigns to drive more personalized customer experience.

• Content Analytics
The biggest weakness of any blogging effort is the inability to prove how the blog influences the business, and therefore make the right decisions on what to blog about next. Blog creation is a time-consuming process, so marketers want to be sure they only create content most likely to help them achieve their goals. Matcha’s Insights feature proves the influence of your blog on your full marketing funnel without any setup or data manipulation required. Traffic, email list growth, engagement, time on page, and even revenue influence data will help you validate the effort and make data-driven decisions for your future content marketing

What it isn’t: 

Matcha is not a page builder, so you’ll only be building blog articles with this product.

Where it shines: 

• For lean marketing teams that want a better blog creation experience than the basic one Shopify provides and clear actionable insights for their content strategy.
• The blog optimization tools allow the entire funnel to be more accurately addressed (from promotion to revenue influence)
• Publishing is fast, either through the Blog Creator for an original article or through the Library if a licensed article makes sense
• Pulling actionable insights and validation from blog performance takes seconds, including revenue attribution that proves how your articles influence your buyer’s behavior

Price:

• Blog Creator CMS: $9/month
• Blog Creator + Licensed content subscription: Starting at $49/month

Free trial access:

Matcha offers a 7 day free trial here.

DropInBlog

What it is: 

DropInBlog allows merchants to add a functional blog feed to any website, without the need for WordPress (or without the need for a Shopify blog, even). To set up, copy and paste various provided blocks of code into your page’s HTML in order to sync blog posts, recent post menus, or any other widgets that you wish to pull from DropInBlog’s copy-and-paste code library.

There are three main attractions of DropInBlog for Shopify users:

• The setup is designed to be simplified through the use of pre-made code that is ready for you to drop into your theme. 
• As you write articles, DropInBlog simplifies the process of understanding the standard SEO attributes of the article (while making sure your page URLs are SEO-friendly).
• You can “inject” products into articles

What it isn’t:

This is a product that focuses on convenience around setting up and maintaining a blog, but doesn’t focus on analysis or optimization of a complete blog strategy.

Where it shines: 

• This is for the busy business owner/marketer who typically has issues with formatting blogs on tricky WordPress feeds or customized Shopify themes
• The basic SEO checker to makes sure you’re making the foundational SEO moves you need to make

Price:

Pricing ranges from $19-39/month for annual payments, or $24-49/month for monthly payments.

Free trial access:

There is a 14 day free trial.

Shogun

Shogun has become a dominant app in the Shopify ecosystem due to its robust ecommerce pagebuilder functionality. Because Shogun has become a favorite of mid-to-large sized Shopify merchants, if you can dream it, you can probably do it with Shogun.

The most valuable feature from a blogging standpoint is the ‘drag and drop’ editor format. Instead of having to manipulate code in order to achieve custom designs, Shogun allows users to select elements and drag them straight into the page.

While this is helpful and much faster than fully customizing a blog experience, the Shogun Page Builder product is far more focused on ecommerce functionality and overall site design than the blog specifically. This means that it is unlikely that a user would use Shogun specifically for the blog and the blog alone.

What it is: 

Shogun’s Page Builder is designed for the brand that wants a beautiful storefront that is easy to get ‘just right.’

What it isn’t: 

Shogun can be used for blog creation, but blogging isn’t the core motivation behind the product. This is also not a product to ‘get in and get out,’ but instead is for someone who wants to put in some proper design effort. 

Where it shines: 

• Shogun has excelled at building tools that help Shopify merchants better design a beautiful digital experience
• This is a fantastic product for building landing pages, about us pages or product FAQ pages
• The drag-and-drop editor is extremely easy to use with dozens of options to help get the ‘look’ you’re after
• The robust features specific to ecommerce give merchants more flexibility in how Shogun is used against on site

Price:

Shogun’s app starts at $49/month

Free trial access:

Shogun offers a 10 day free trial

Blog Studio

What it is:

Blog Studio is one of many apps developed by ShopPad for the Shopify ecosystem. The core functionality of Blog Studio is their drag-and-drop builder experience (think Shogun, but simpler) that allows the user to edit old articles and/or build new articles by selecting pre-built elements (images, headings, formatting, etc.)

This is an app for someone who needs an improvement over the basic Shopify blog, wants a solution that will work with any Shopify template and needs the product to focus squarely on the creation of blogs.

What it isn’t: 

Blog Studio is 100% motivated to improve the ease of blog creation, but the product will not be a stand-alone tool to help you manage your larger blog strategy. You’ll still be using your Google Analytics or Shopify queries in order to evaluate blog performance as well as any tools you use for content promotion to email, social, etc.

Where it shines: 

• Blog Studio is a great way to get a drag-and-drop blog builder that won’t break your budget
• There are dozens of drag-and-drop elements to pick from to help build the exact formatting you’d like
• For those who are looking for more control, advanced editor settings allow you to manipulate raw code for fine-tuning.

Price:

Blog Studio has one subscription at $14.95/month

Free trial access:

A 14-day free trial is available.

Recipe Kit

What it is: 

Recipe Kit is a fantastic option for any brand that finds themselves working recipes into their marketing efforts. Whether you sell ingredients or simply are wishing to share recipes with your audience, Recipe Kit is totally designed around this type of blogging.

Creating recipes is incredibly time intensive, so Recipe Kit takes over formatting, Google indexing (as a recipe card) and allows you to insert relevant products (if you sell ingredients or relevant products) into the recipe.

What it isn’t: 

This is truly designed for recipes, so if you’re only partly using recipes in your blogging effort you’ll still use something else to create the rest of your articles.

Where it shines: 

• This is a great way to cleanly format recipe blogs
• The Google indexing of your recipes into actual recipe cards allows your blog a much better opportunity to be discovered through search

Price: 

Recipe Kit is $7.99/month

Free trial access:

There is a 7 day free trial available.

Shopify Blog 

What it is:

If you have a Shopify site, you have access to Shopify’s included blogging tool. We love Shopify (no question about that) but we don’t love the Shopify blog. We’ve actually done quite a bit of critiquing of this tool in the past. 

Out of all of the tools listed in this comparison, the included Shopify blog is likely the weakest.

Here are a couple of things the Shopify blog will not do for you:

• Provide templates for producing better content faster
• Identify what content is winning with various audiences and why 
• Recommend content to create based on audience interests 
• Easily embed products and forms into content to convert readers
• Quickly/easily allow marketers to optimize content for SEO
• Integrate seamlessly with Social platforms and ESPs to fuel content campaigns and segmented email journeys

Where it shines:

One big perk for the Shopify Blog would be that it takes about 3 clicks to turn on a new blog. For most of the products reviewed here, this will be a necessary step regardless whether you’re going to use the Shopify Blog builder or not.

Price:

Included in Shopify subscription.

Free trial access:

Shopify’s platform offers a 14 day free trial