40 Content Marketing Tools — The Ultimate Cheatsheet
Our job is not to create content. Our job is to change the world of the people who consume it. — Andrea Fryrear
This quote, in fact, inspired me to post this blog today. Just for a moment pause what you’re doing and think about this — as marketers all of us play such a crucial role in the molding of the sculpture, adding accessories to the brand, giving it a face through various techniques. The root of every digital marketing effort ties back to a base document full of texts. Our efforts begin with content.
Content is the foundation that determines a successful marketing effort. While the content is such an indispensable portion of your marketing journey, you must always give it the importance it deserves. This is what we’re going to see in this post today.
We must create content, not for the sake of it, but to make a difference. This need not necessarily be to have an ROI. The purpose of content need not always necessarily be to generate leads, it can sometimes drill down to attaining brand values, credibility, and expertise.
So, today we’re going to learn how some of the awesome tools that are available can be leveraged for excellent content marketing — covering creation, curation, and distribution.
Note: Some of these tools require a subscription, but even if you have to allocate a portion of your budget to these tools, they’re totally worth it.
Content creation
Answer the public is one of the incredible content idea generation tool I have come across. It curates topics from around the web that people are actually talking about in your geography. It gives you tons of ideas to quickly kick-start your post.
Go ahead and try it for yourself by typing out a keyword in the search box.
2. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is great to curate ideas pertaining to topics that have performed well on the social sharing and influence reach front. You have to type in your keyword and get analytics based on time (up to 5 years in the past). However, the free version is very limited to certain features. To unlock some powerful insights you may want to go for a paid plan, which would be worth giving a shot.
3. Tweak your biz
Tweak your biz is an amazing tool that holds good for creative title generation. Now, most of the title generators out there give you a monotonous title that fits in your keyword to a programmed list. Now tweak your biz does the same but only in a more compelling manner. They do not only give you catchy titles but also blog post ideas covering — lists, bests, how to’s, lists, questions, love, celebrities, secrets and a lot more!
4. Quora
The best community by far for effective networking. Quora is the place where a large chunk of your audience that you can consider as a potential sample go around asking questions to which you possibly have the best answers. All you need to do is follow your areas of interest and get fueled with a ton of questions that can be answered not just as an effective marketing technique but also be converted to a brilliant blog post that resonates with the audience.
5. Google alerts
When you sign up for google alerts the best thing about it is that you’ll be updated with the latest posts around a keyword you have signed up for. You can draw inspiration from what’s already published on the web.
6. Twitter feeds
By following potential followers or identifying the discussions through trending hashtags in your geography, you can curate content ideas that are highly significant. You can also search for specific hashtags on the search bar and curate posts that are specific to your search origin.
7. Flipboard
Flipboard curates news around the topics you are interested in to your news feed and you can read them to stay updated in the niche that interests you and probably get a spark from what you read for a brilliant blog post. Just head over to flipboard, follow topics you like and that’s that! Get tons of news updates to fuel your content ideas.
8. Evernote
A lot of quick and successful content creation goes into jotting down and staying organized with the ideas — planning on when is the right time to post and how your schedule can fit in your to-do’s. Since discipline is essentially a crucial piece to content creation, Evernote is a brilliant content marketing organization tool. Check it out to collaborate with your teams.
9. Alltop
Similar to some news aggregation tools that we just discussed, Alltop is also one such tool that can help you curate content ideas by keeping yourself aware about the industry happenings and draw inspiration from the writing styles.
10. Content gap tool
The content gap tool from Ahrefs helps you target the right topics by filtering out the keywords you should be targeting but you are not (while your competitors are already doing it).
Recommended read: If you are looking for tools specifically to amp up your blogging efforts, check out my post on best blogging tools.
The aesthetic appeal
11. Unsplash
If you are looking to create beautiful stock images for your website banners or even your blog posts and ebooks for that matter, you have to check out unsplash. It is a brilliant tool for free stock images that has a very good collection of awesome photographs. Just sign up for it and use the search bar to get the photo choices you like.
12. Pexels
Pexels is also a free tool for stock images. You can head over to either unsplash or pexels for amazing stock photographs.
13. Pixlr
Want to fill, crop, blur, smudge? And even more, can be done through pixlr. You don’t have to invest in expensive photoshop software. For content marketers who do not want to depend on designers for their editing tasks must check out pixlr. It allows creating a new image, uploading from the desktop or even importing from the URLs.
14. Canva
A must try is this one. These have been the best tool by far that allows tons of features in the free version. Canva is the go-to tool for many content marketers to create blog banners, pdf documents, banners, social media posts, and infographics. With loads of free templates, canva is user-friendly and enables professional standards in designing even for the ones who aren’t good at designing, even a bit.
15. Freepik
This tool has a plethora of stock, vector, and other image styles. Most of these images on freepik are available for free. Shutterstock is similar to this, you may want to check that out too. Freepik and Shutterstock have icons as well, but I would recommend sites like flaticon and iconfinder that are icons-exclusives.
16. Colorzilla
When you edit these images, you may want to match the colors through a layer of background (some minute editing work) for which page color picker might be useful. Use this colorzilla, google chrome extension to help you edit freepik images.
17. Venngage
Venngage is a paid tool that offers fantastic templates for infographics, reports, resumes etc. But, its best feature is infographics that have templates in an easily editable format. The design and the variety is why you need to try out venngage.
18.Animaker
Animaker is a great tool for video content creation — be it explainer videos or product videos. To be honest, I have not purchased this tool and do not own my personal account on this. At my workplace, our team owns a subscription to this product and we have created some quite impressive work with this. I am planning to invest on this soon for my personal work.
19. Meme generator
Memes are the best way to reach and easily connect with a millennial set of audience. It is a very creative part of content creation that is ridiculously relatable. You must check out memegenerator to quickly create memes for free through witty templatized images.
20. Giphy
Like memes, gifs are also catchy and highly relatable. Apart from some free gifs available on Twitter, you can get a plethora of gifs parallel to your search preferences for free on giphy. I highly recommend you to check this out!
Content optimization
21. Google search console
By signing up for the google search console, you will be able to submit your website and monitor URL submissions and indexing of the pages. Not just that, you will get insights into the search analytics. You can review your performance on google search and track clicks, impressions, and CTR.
22. Bitly
You distribute your content URLs through multiple mediums. Long URLs are converted to trackable once with the help of some tools. The one I would recommend is bitly that will help you track the source/medium of the traffic to your site. Not just that you can perform some in-depth analytics through this.
23. SEMrush
Understanding every visit, source, and click in the most minute sense will help in better understanding about your website, audience, and the content. These insights can help you get better and rank higher. One such tool that can give you insights at granular levels is the SEMrush tool. For beginner’s the data can be intimidating, but spend some time on it. Go explore every bit of it, the insights you gather would be mind-boggling.
24. Marketmuse
Once your final copy is ready, post the URL on marketmuse to uncover brilliant optimization insights to help you refine the copy and make it SEO-ready.
25. Backlink Checker
Ahrefs’ backlink checker helps you identify all the backlinks from the top performing content in the search results with the domain rating data which can help you potentially link back to the same sites.
26. Google analytics
Once you sign up for google analytics and it has collected data, you can review analytics every day to understand the traffic and the audience in-depth.
27. SEO site check up
Go to seositecheckup and enter your website URL. It will give you a score and will run anatomy of the site from every possible angle and tell you what’s right or wrong and will also assist you with the fixes.
28. Varvy
This tool specifically lets you know your website compliance to google rules. Just enter your URL in varvy and identify your fixes on various aspects.
29.Ubersuggest
Including keywords in your content to optimize it can be an easier and effective task with ubersuggest as it gives a lot of insights into every keyword, you must include in your piece for better search performance.
30.Keys4up
This tool is pretty cool because with keys4up you can identify semantic keywords which essentially uncovers the possible search patterns.
Content distribution
31. MailChimp
One of the best tools to run an email marketing campaign out there is the mailchimp that makes the whole process hassle-free. Apart from emails, you can do a ton of analytics and MailChimp will assist you with pretty awesome work to send out to the world.
32. Buffer
Content distribution on multiple social media channels and updating them on favorable demographic time is quite a task. Social media management tools like buffer will help you schedule your posts at a go on all your channels in the most effective time that can boost post engagement.
33. Authority spy
Instead of looking for influencers to connect with on multiple sources and wasting your time, you can simply head over to authority spy and get data from a variety of these sources including Twitter, Facebook, Klout etc.
34. Tweroid
Tweroid will help you manage the time in which your post needs to get live on Twitter by posting it in the times that gives highest engagements. It will analyze your tweets, your followers' tweets and you can tweet when it makes the most sense.
35. Medium
You try a lot of avenues to distribute your content. But if you are missing out on medium, I highly recommend you to create a profile and import your stories (created by you) to medium. It has a high viewership and is a brilliant platform for content distribution. You can also follow your interest and own a news feed full of awesome content to read.
36. Outbrain
Outbrain is a content discovery platform that allows users to submit links to their content. Outbrain will make this contnet appear as recommendations on some of the premium publishers sites.
37. Linkedin Pulse
By publishing your content on the linkedin pulse you reach a potential set of professional audience who get notified about your post instantly. This is a great platform to expand your horizons for publishing an promoting your content. Linkedin pulse will help ypu nurture relationships with your potential audiences.
Check out this 3-minute video by Neil Patel to quickly grasp the power of linkedin marketing.
38. List.ly
Listly is a fun tool to make lists about anything — blogs, twitter accounts of influencers and so on. Listly will allow other users to add to your list and so can you.
39. Inbound.org
If you are a marketer, inbound.org is a great community tool to find high-quality marketing content on the web.
40. Taboola
Taboola helps your content reach one of the hundreds of premium publisher sites. It helps you get more traffic and generate leads by getting some top-publishers recommending your content.
YOUR ULTIMATE CHEATSHEET
You can download this crib sheet of all the content marketing tools that will help you effectively refer and create awesome content by scoring off the essential checklist!
Have them pinned to your boards, stuck on your wall or laminated and lying on your desk.
This is going to be incredible for your content marketing efforts making your work 10X better. Thank me later, now download!!
I hope you found this post useful and there are tons of other tools that are out there and if you have a personal favorite that’s worth recommending and if I have missed it out, leave a comment below.
Let’s all grow together:)
Originally published at digitaldyno.wordpress.com on December 24, 2018.
