Your 50 Favorite Blogs: The Most-Loved Marketing, Social Media, and Productivity Blogs of Buffer Readers

Mar 9, 2015 6 min readContent Marketing

Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer

Having a list of go-to blogs can be a great source of information and inspiration.

In our case, the blogs and websites we visit most often provide some amazing articles with in-depth insights, tips, and strategies that help inform our social media sharing. Likewise, the amazing content gives us something to aim for and ideas for what to cover next.

We’ve shared a bit about favorite blogs for content marketing and blogs for advanced marketing.

Now it’s time to ask you: What are your favorite blogs and websites?

We posed this question in our end-of-year survey to Buffer blog readers, and I was amazed at the breadth of responses. You all read some really wonderful blogs! And I’m really happy to share the list here in hopes that maybe some new go-to blogs might surface for you.

If you missed a chance to share your favorite blogs, I’d love to open things up to you here. Please do add your favorites into the comments.

Here’s the question we asked in the original survey:

We’d love to hear any other blogs, sites or publications that you enjoy reading.

Which ones stand out for you?

Adding up the full list of responses, there were over 250 blogs that were mentioned, covering everything from digital marketing to lifehacking to inspiration. You all read some really awesome stuff!

I did my best to narrow down the list to those blogs that were mentioned most often and the ones that might be most relevant to the Buffer blog audience as a whole. If you’re interested in all 250 specific responses, feel free to grab them from this spreadsheet.

(HT: Jon Collins and Inside Intercom for the inspiration for this article.)

We loved seeing so many great social media blogs mentioned in the survey. These blogs cover a wide range of content types, aimed at a wide audience—beginners to experts and everyone in between. Here were the social media blogs that were mentioned most often.

1. Social Media Examiner

2. Jon Loomer Digital

3. Social Media Today

4. Post Planner

5. Socially Stacked

6. Sprout Social Insights (pictured above)

7. Convince & Convert

8. Razor Social

9. Mari Smith (if interested, you can learn more of Mari’s story from our interview with her!)

10. Rebekah Radice

Plus a couple under-the-radar choices:

r/socialmedia – This subreddit has tons of interesting questions and answers about all things social media. Not only can you ask your own question here, you can also see which topics are being mentioned most often by the Reddit community—great validation for future articles or just to learn what people are talking about!

Boom Social – Kim Garst’s blog focuses on social media tips for small business owners and covers some really actionable topics that you might not see elsewhere—her post on how to use Twitter lists is a great resource.

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Writing & Content Marketing

You chose a great number of awesome writing blogs, some that cover the words themselves and some that cover the strategies and tips for successful online content. Here are your top choices.

11. Copyblogger

12. The Writer’s Room (a Medium publication)

13. Content Marketing Institute

14. CoSchedule

15. Fizzle’s Sparkline blog (pictured above)

16. Contently’s Content Strategist blog

17. Boost Blog Traffic

18. Blogging Your Passion

19. Kopywriting Kourse

20. Copy Hackers

Plus a couple under-the-radar choices:

Grammar Girl – Mignon Fogarty shares tips on some of the most common grammar questions that writers face, things like “affect vs. effect” and “i.e. versus e.g.” She also hosts a grammar podcast.

Blog Tyrant – Ramsay’s tips on blogging are designed to help you turn blogging into a source of income and eventually even a career.

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Inbound Marketing

This category covers all sorts of digital marketing sites whose content can include social, blogging, SEO, design, and any other tool in a marketer’s toolbox.

21. HubSpot

22. Moz

23. Quick Sprout

24. Marketo

25. Marketing Profs

26. OK Dork (pictured above)

27. Unbounce

28. {Grow}

29. Marketing Land

30. Social Triggers

Plus a few under-the-radar choices:

LKR Social Media – Laura Roeder’s social media and business blog contains the tips and strategies that she’s personally used to grow her consulting business and launch new products. The posts are super actionable and interesting, and her email newsletter and resources are a great introduction.

Video Fruit – Bryan Harris’s blog is full of ways to grow your business with video. His articles cover video along with other growth skills like writing, content, email, and more.

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Company blogs

There’s likely to be a lot of crossover in the topics from these company blogs and the topics in the above lists. Company blogs exist in support of a product (kind of like the Buffer blog supports Buffer). Here were some of your favorites.

31. KISSmetrics

32. Groove

33. Help Scout

34. Wistia

35. SumAll

36. Inside Intercom (pictured above)

37. Shopify blog

Plus a few under-the-radar choices:

Refinery29 Intelligence – The Refinery29 website covers emerging fashion trends. Their Intelligence blog shares the details of how their marketing works. Past articles have included deep dives into analytics and strategies, with highly transparent sharing.

Swiss Miss – The blog for the Swiss Miss design studio, run by Tina Roth Eisenberg who founded TeuxDeux, Tattly, and others, covers all sorts of interesting topics and categories on productivity, inspiration, marketing, content, writing, and more.

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Productivity, Lifehacking, and Inspiration

So many people named blogs in the productivity/lifehacking or inspiration topics, which are some of our favorites, too. While these are a bit off from the social media focus of the Buffer blog, we think there’s a lot of value and interesting stuff to be found at these cool places.

38. Lifehacker

39. Four Hour Work Week

40. Farnam Street

41. Brain Pickings (pictured above)

42. James Clear

43. Zen Habits

44. 99U

45. Michael Hyatt

Plus a few under-the-radar choices:

Smart Passive Income – Pat Flynn shares his best tips on how to build an online business (and earn passive income). Lots of great marketing/productivity articles, how-to tutorials, and more.

Stanford Behavior Lab – Yes, this is a link for the actual laboratory at Stanford that studies human behavior. The publications stemming from Stanford’s research are all available here.

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Thought leaders

Some of the big names in digital marketing arrived there with great blogs to back them up. You may recognize most (if not all) of the names in the list here. They’re all great ones to get to know.

46. Seth Godin

47. Jeff Bullas

48. Chris Brogan

49. Gary Vaynerchuk

50. Marie Forleo (pictured above)

View these great blogs in Feedly, and subscribe in one click.

Miscellaneous

Major news sites –

General Marketing –

Email –

Design –

WordPress –

What can you do with these blogs?

It was an absolute pleasure to see all the great blogs that the Buffer blog audience knows and loves. I got a handful of new ones to follow from browsing the list. I hope you found some intriguing ones also!

What to do with this wealth of new blog options?

Subscribe to updates via Feedly. You can follow along with every new post by adding the RSS feed to Feedly. There are some neat Feedly integrations that can help with moving articles from Feedly directly into Pocket, Buffer, or your favorite business tool.
Add a site to Buffer Feeds. Those on the Awesome or Business plan have 15 slots for Feeds per profile. You can add one of these sites to your Feeds and quickly add new or favorite articles from the feed straight to your Buffer queue, without ever leaving the dashboard.

Thanks so much for sharing your inspiration here with us! I’d love to hear if any other blogs we might not have mentioned. I’ll look forward to your thoughts in the comments!

Image sources: Pablo, The Noun Project, Blurgrounds