Who said content marketing is easy? It is not. It is not only about writing epic posts and valuable content. It is also about marketing and promotion. Hence, content marketing.
Furthermore, most businesses nowadays are going for inbound content marketing and competition is tight. Add the fact that you are competing with millions of people who are doing the same things as you are and after the same market. That makes content marketing much harder.
How can you make content creation easier if you just have a small team or if you are all alone in managing your content marketing campaigns? Aside from that, how can you jumpstart business promotion if you have a limited budget or no budget at all?
One remedy to that age old problem is to look for tools that will help you improve content creation and will somehow automate some processes in your content marketing campaigns. So without further ado here’s a list of free and useful tools for your content marketing campaigns:
Content Marketing Tools for Idea Generation
1. Feedly – After Google Reader’s shutdown, Feedly became the best RSS-feed alternative. You can look for websites that you want to follow via its built-in search. You can also organise the websites accordingly. Like any RSS feed readers, you don’t have to go to each site and look into all the articles. You can see what topics and articles are getting the most shares. There are social media buttons as well if you find a topic particularly interesting and want to share it.
2. Quora – A social media platform for question and answer discussions. There are consistently asked questions that you can look into to identify the hottest topics that a certain community is interested in.
3. Inbound – It’s an online tool for sharing worthy and awesome articles. You receive good karma and “upvotes” for articles that you share and from the response of the community. You just have to be careful with the quality of your content because you can be banned from the site.
4. Twitter – You can gain insight by searching for trending topics worldwide or in a particular region. You can also search using hashtags for a particular niche or interest or those that are relevant to your industry.
5. Reddit – A news aggregator with real-time updates of what’s happening around the world. Redditors can push a story up. It shows the hottest and trending news worldwide. The hottest topics are always on top so they are easier to find.
6. Alltop – This site collects headlines of the latest and hottest topics from top websites. It’s also a news aggregator site that filters news relevant to different categories like work, heath, culture, interests, tech, people, news, geo and sport.
Tools for Content Planning, Management and Organisation
Trello – An online organiser where you can keep ideas, keep track of things with its to do lists, and organise content, projects, and your own team.
Evernote – You can jot down ideas and take down notes, you can share them you’re your team, you can use it to collaborate on ideas, content planning, blog posts, and many more. You can also use it together with clipper to curate content.
Toodledo – Not only a task organiser, you can also use this to create notes, collaborate with teams, and track projects. Aside from that, you can organise tasks according to the degree of importance. It has a hotlist where you can have an overview of all the things on your lists.
WordPress Calendar – One of the most popular plugins from WordPress is the Editorial Calendar. It is easy to install with just one click. You can properly plan your content posting and make things more diversified. Further, you can streamline your content planning and promotion using this calendar.
Remember that Milk – It’s an organiser and a to-do lists. However, the best part is that it integrates with your Gmail, Evernote, syncs with Google tasks, uses Siri to add to-dos and more. It has been around for a long time and is still great especially when adding notes and ideas from your Evernote.
Google Drive – Okay, this isn’t the most thrilling tool you can use for content marketing campaigns but for safekeeping of files, it’s one of the best tools around. I love the fact that you can open files and view them online without the need to download. It’s also good for collaboration. Changes to documents can be seen real-time.
Mind Node – is a mind mapping tool for visualising your ideas. You can organise ideas in a creative and intuitive way.
Tools for Content Creation
Issuu – An enticing tool for creating online publications, lookbooks, and magazines. It is also a publishing network with millions of avid readers and fans. By creating striking publications from this site, your content can easily reach millions of eyeballs.
Animoto – This tool allows you to make videos and share them online. It is complete with designs and soundtracks that you can use for creating quality videos that you can add to your blog or share in social media sites.
Visual.ly – A site with more than 30,000+ infographics created by infographic designers. You can create your own infographic or buy from their list.
Piktochart – An excellent tool for creating infographics. It has a drag-and-drop feature which makes creating a content easier. You can also upload images specific to your needs.
Gimp – An image enhancing and a simplified photoshop-like tool. This is powerful for photo retouching and one of the best tools to have around.
Meme Generator – Do you want to put a funny twist on images for your content? Meme Generator is your thing. You can also check out which memes are getting the most attention through their most popular page.
Tools for Automating Content Promotion and Sharing
Twitterfeed – A popular tool to automate and share posts in different social media sites Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. You can configure to show only a snippet of text to appear before the automated posts. It also includes analytics to know what posts or tweets are getting more clicks.
Buffer – An amazing tool to schedule your posts. It streamlines posting to different social media channels efficiently. Posting is quick and manageable when using Buffer. It’s an antidote for over sharing.
Mailchimp – A great tool for reaching out to your list and leads using your content. You can segment your list and send targeted content with this tool.
Viral Content Buzz – A tool to revive a dead content . By sharing other people’s content you get to earn credits. You can also add your own project and use the credits. Currently, sharing is through Twitter and Facebook only. However, it’s a great site to keep your content buzzing for a long period of time.
Hootsuite – You can manage a whole lot of social network streams using this tool. It also supports brand and company pages in social media networks like Google+, Linkedin and Facebook. You can also edit posts, attach photos, shorten links and more. This amazing tool is a must have especially when you are managing multiple social media accounts.
Do you know any other tool that can help improve content marketing campaigns? We love to hear from you.
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