Webmasters Gallery

Content marketing is the planning, creating, sharing and publishing of content to reach your target audience. It helps you increase brand awareness, engage with prospects, and convince them to convert.

Content marketing offers businesses a much more efficient alternative to paid advertising. In fact, content marketing gets 3 times as many leads as paid search. Content marketing also boasts conversion rates 6 times higher than other advertising tools. And when it comes to blogging, those businesses who publish more than 16 posts monthly get more than 3.5 times the traffic than those who post 3-5 times.

It’s clear that content marketing is essential to growing your business. However, it has never been easy. Before any piece of content is laid out, it intentionally goes through different stages of production.

There are countless tools that can help you get the most out of your content marketing strategy. And in this article, we want to draw your attention to 7 of those essential tools. They are some of the most effective ways to boost your content creation.

1. Buzzsumo Hunts for Your Content Relevancy

Do you find it hard to find topics that are trending in your industry?

Do you find it hard to know what your competitor is writing about?

Buzzsumo is a great content research tool. It is one of the major tools to help analyze and understand what topics in your niche perform best for you and your competitors. You’ll find metrics like shares, and the influencers that are most relevant for your niche.

Once you’re registered, you’ll constantly receive alerts about content that mentions your keywords. These reveal topics you should write about to reach your audience’s needs, and make it more fun to brainstorm content ideas.

My favourite feature is Content Research. Before 2014 it was their only feature. And even after they added a bunch of other features like Facebook Analyzer, Monitoring, and Question Analyzer, it is still the one I frequently use for relevant content creation.

First, begin by researching your keywords with Google’s keyword planner. Once you’ve found one that has potential, you can enter them into Buzzsumo, and remain aware of trending topics people are following on different social engines.

Buzzsumo also enables you to get in touch with bloggers who continuously spread the word about what you need your industry to be heard for.

Buzzsumo is mainly geared towards professionals in marketing. So if you are serious about marketing and SEO, I highly recommend you to give this tool a shot.

Once you are well-aware of what you are going to jot down, time to pass on to the next tool.

2. Google Docs is as Important for Marketers as a Kitchen is to Chefs

Personally, I don’t know any content marketers who don’t use Google Docs to craft articles. It is also super easy and convenient to organise productive teamwork.

I especially love headings in this tool. By adding headings to the document, text gets logically divided into semantic groups. It becomes more suitable to find the necessary paragraph instead of scrolling on up and down for the right passage to edit.

Recently, Google added a new feature to ease the burden of excessive writing.

Can you guess what it is?

It is voice typing.

Yes, you read it right. VOICE TYPING. You speak what’s on your mind, and the text writes itself. Isn’t that cool?

Also, Google Docs gives you the option to download your content in different formats, including PDF, .docx, .odt, .rtf, .txt, .html zipped, .epub. All in one place.

Google Docs also helps you access your content from anywhere you want.

As your writing must look professional in all aspects to make your readers trust you, I feel obliged to bring you to our next tool which is Grammarly.

3. Grammarly Provides FREE Writing Assistance

Grammarly has changed the game once and for all.

With Grammarly, you definitely won’t slip through any grammar mistakes that to some extent litter articles. Even the most detail-oriented editor might not notice the errors Grammarly brings to the surface.

It has reduced my error rate by around 50-80% by analyzing any types of texts, highlighting errors, and making suggestions on what I can replace them with.

The free version covers basic grammar errors, punctuation, spellings, tone detection and conciseness. However, if you want more succinct content, Grammarly offers a premium package. It includes style suggestions and clarity improvements in terms of fluency, readability, word choice, plagiarism, inclusive language, formality.

Grammarly greatly helps to make content sound more native. It contributes to the smooth flow of language in texts. This is pretty vital for people like me who weren’t born with English as a first language. Quite often, I use it to make sure the text sounds truly “English English”.

The overuse of definite articles is the most common problem at present that I have to deal with. That’s why I immensely appreciate Grammarly in this effort.

This is an ultimate tool for you to use if you want your writing pieces to look ubiquitous.

Tip: After you finish up your body parts, then craft a headline. Only then you know what your content contains as a whole.

Headline writing is another artwork that my next favourite tool will make easy for you.

4. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

How many times have you drafted headlines and deleted them in a second because they weren’t attractive enough?

It’s no secret that headlines are a top-notch hook to attract readers on their first glance. Thus, it is super important to bring your attention to this point. I understand it is tough to come up with exclusive headlines to rank higher than your competitors.

Here Portent’s Content Idea Generator walks in to assist. It analyzes headlines based on a variety of factors, like sentiment and length. Just type any keyword you want, it will show you a ready headline with in-depth explanations on each component of the tail.

Not pleased with what you have been offered?

Just rinse it with the arrow and repeat the search until you find the most perfect variant for you.

As you are now reading this article, it is a genuine proof of how well the headline generator worked for us.

Next, we are going to talk about the most popular CMS to upload and manage your content and make it available for readers.

5. WordPress is Home to Your Content

WordPress is the most widely used content management system. According to Venturebeat, it powers 30% of the Internet in general.

Social proof might lead us astray, but WordPress truly is the best in comparison with its rivals both at the beginning stages and as you continue to grow your content marketing strategy. For instance, even sites like the New Yorker are hosted on WordPress.

At its core, WordPress helps to build websites. You can host your website via WordPress.com. It contains plugin architecture and templates to easily customize and fit your business peculiarities.

This is used as a great tool to build websites as personal bloggers or for clients. It contains all the necessary plugins to build on. So don’t ever be afraid to get your feet wet and dive into WordPress. It’s pretty simple. You don’t have to be super tech-savvy to wrap your head around this system.

Once the content is uploaded, time to sprinkle some magic power to rank it higher on search engines.

6. Yoast is a Real Magic Power for Content Optimization

Yoast is one of the best-known tools for producing SEO-based content.

It’s a WordPress plugin for SEO that literally does everything, ranging from optimising for a keyword to editing and previewing meta-descriptions, URL slugs, abstracting away some minor SEO tasks, and finding relevant internal links.

When you’re working with a self-hosted WordPress site, Yoast is the best on-page SEO tool you can ever come across. It is easy to understand whether you’re running a personal blog or managing a website for a client.

Yoast will make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible. The main functionality of the tool is free, and it still builds the best-performing sites.

If you can afford the premium version you’ll also benefit from Yoast preventing and fixing dead links with the redirect manager. 58% per cent Yoast users praise the feature of redirect manager as one of the best. Premium also lets you optimize your text for synonyms and related words so Google and other search engines can determine what a text is about by detecting any other word forms in your content. It helps you get your internal linking right.

It works really hard to rank your content higher than your competitors.

They have 9,000,000 downloads—4 out of 5 stars.

Everyone I know who uses WordPress, uses Yoast. It’s just an amazing plugin.

Nevertheless, producing and optimizing quality content requires more effort to appeal to the audience’s interests which takes us to the next tool.

7. Kred Indicates Your Authority

When it comes to content marketing, just producing and uploading content won’t build credibility and trust for your brand.

You need to collaborate with influencers in your industry to amplify your messages. They will help you not to get lost, as the content is rapidly produced every second.

Unlike other tools, Kred allows you to build up your own influencer status and become an authority in your niche so your online presence is enhanced.

Kred lets users know how influential they are based on social media accounts. With the help of a comprehensive algorithm, Kred scores users based on two factors: outreach and influence. It keeps you alerted on where your content stands now so you can continue improving further.

The platform measures your influencer status analyzing Facebook and Twitter activities so you can reach out to other relevant influencers who will impact your business the most.

Once you build up your authority, your content will have more credibility. When people know who you are, they are more likely to click on your content and engage with it.

Sounds interesting? Go ahead and try them all.

Which Tool Will You Use First?

Content marketing tools will not save a bad strategy or bad product but they will certainly help you get your job done faster and more efficiently.

All these 7 tools guide you on your content marketing journey, step by step. They help you start from the first phases of writing, and on to editing, uploading and optimizing. These tools help to ramp up your productive work and get the best results.

Buzzsumo will help you delve into your audience’s interests and understand the relevancy of your content. Google Docs will contribute to gathering all your thoughts in one compact place, Grammarly will help you sound more natural, and Portent’s Idea Generator will get you a powerful headline for a hook.

WordPress gives you a space to show your content in a well-designed layout, and don’t forget to use Yoast to optimize your SEO so Google finds you upon the very first search. Then check back with Kred to see if your efforts are building your trust and credibility among your audience.

As you now know what tools are most effective to develop your content and get it noticed by the largest number of people, you are totally armed to create phenomenal pieces of writing with ease.

There are obviously more content tools than mentioned above but these are the main ones to consider while creating content at the initial stage.

If you’re looking for even more, please, head to our website for more marketing tools and hacks.