Creating new, relevant content for your audience on a frequent basis is the backbone of a good online marketing strategy. However, this can be time consuming. These great tools that make that job easier and more efficient including tools that assist with generating content ideas, writing and editing content, creating visual content and helping with SEO and technical aspects relating to written content. Let’s dive in:
Tools for generating content ideas
Soovle – Knowing what types of content will be popular is important so that you don’t invest time and energy into creating content that doesn’t generate traffic or engagement. Soovle lets you type in any keyword related to your industry and it automatically searches for the most popular terms, phrases and queries related to that keyword. Soovle provides recommendations based on its analysis of searches across Google, Yahoo!, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and Answers.com.
Portent Content Idea Generator – After producing regular content for a while, sometimes it can be hard to think up a fresh or exciting angle or topic. There are many content idea generator tools on the internet but what makes Portent’s one unique is its truly out-of-the-box suggestions. Its algorithm isn’t perfect and you may need to refresh a few times before getting an idea that may work for you, but the content ideas that Portent provides are definitely fresh and interesting and have the potential to go viral if done right. My favourite suggestion that Portent provided me with was “Shocking ways digital marketing can make you better in bed.” I’m not sure I have any verifiable evidence on that topic as yet but I’ll keep you posted…
Tools for writing and editing content
Unsuck-it – This is one of my favourite tools on this list. If you’re writing about business topics sometimes it can be hard to avoid technical business jargon from creeping into your work. Unsuck-it helps provide you with alternatives or plain-English explanations to overused business-speak clichés like “blue sky thinking”, “ecosystems” or “above the fold”.
Grammarly – It’s so frustrating to work hard on a piece of content, upload and hit “publish” or “send” and then – when it is too late – notice a huge spelling mistake or grammatical error. This is where Grammarly comes in. It is a free tool that you can download as a browser extension for Chrome that will triple-check for spelling, grammar and style errors and even plagiarism.
Hemingway App – Ernest Hemingway, the classic American novelist, was well-known for his succinct, easy-to-read writing style. This is exactly what the Hemingway app does. Simply paste your content into the app and it will review your writing and provide suggestions to make the text more user-friendly. It highlights things like passive voice, adverbs, changes in tense and overly long sentences. It also gives your content a reading level. Ideally, your content should aim for lower than a 10th grade reading level, unless you are specifically targeting an academic audience.
Headline Analyzer – Wouldn’t it be great if you could predict in advance the level of social shares, traffic and SEO value of your headlines? With Headline Analyzer you can. Only 62 per cent of people who click on an article end up reading beyond the headline so choosing the right headline that encourages people to keep reading is of critical importance. Headline Analyzer will show you how even substituting one word in your title for a different one can improve users’ sentiment of your entire article.
Tools for creating visual content
Canva – It’s well-known that visual content outperforms text-only content on social media. However, for the small business owner, who can’t afford to employ a graphic designer, visual content is often neglected. With Canva, this doesn’t need to be the case. You can create beautiful visual content in just a few minutes with Canva’s pre-made templates. There’s plenty of value to be found in their free version, however premium assets and graphics are also available for an additional fee of $1 per image.
Infogram – Infogram is similar to Canva, but it specialises in creating beautiful, visual charts and infographics to help bring statistics to life. Their infographics are fully responsive with mobile devices and it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Excel.
HubSpot’s free stock photos – Sourcing appropriate photography for an advertising campaign or ebook cover can be a challenge. Although there are many providers of stock photos on the internet, many charge for their services or have complicated legal conditions around how you can and cannot use the images. HubSpot have a free library of over 550 images that anyone can access and that are 100% royalty-free with no limitations regarding usage.
Tools for SEO help & technical assistance
SpyFu – This popular SEO tool has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. It lets you download your competitors’ most profitable keywords for both paid and organic search and helps you see how you stack up against it. Learn the estimated monthly SEO click value of keywords, their popularity and competitiveness then use this information to embed the right keywords within your content.
Word2CleanHTML – Most content writers produce blog posts and written content in Microsoft Word, Evernote or Google Drive. The trouble with this is that when you go to copy and paste your content into your CMS, lots of formatting issues can emerge that mess up your HTML. Word2CleanHTML takes care of this issue for you, saving you hours of angst and frustration. Paste your drafts into Word2CleanHTML, then copy the text from Word2CleanHTML into your CMS and you will have nice, clean, perfect HTML formatting every time.
Let us know what your favourite content creation tools are. What have we missed off this list that you love and recommend to others? Comment below!
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