In a world with increasingly sophisticated search engines and increasingly demanding audiences, simply offering mass quantities of content will not get you far. Today, businesses need a wealth of high-quality content to offer their followers, fans, clients, and consumers true benefits and land new sales and customers.
They also need a comprehensive plan in place for the dissemination of that content as well as a means of organizing it both prior to and after publishing. Here are 10 tools that can help businesses of any size streamline their content creation process.
1. Content discovery
To be competitive, you need to establish yourself as the go-to source for all things related to your field. This means that while you certainly need to be creating original and engaging content, you can also offer a carefully curated selection of the best content available from partner organizations. Here are some programs that can help you find and offer the very best content on your site.
ShareIt
ShareIt is a free content curation and discovery tool that curates content based on keyword searches. If you wish to find influencers and popular sites related to your niche, ShareIt provides you with suggestions as you enter the keyword. Adding a filter to your content list will get you the most relevant and updated content available online. If you are curating content for the purpose of sharing it on social, this is a bonus – this tool helps you share the content directly from your social accounts. For bloggers, this tool helps them brainstorm content ideas for their blog(s).
AllTop
AllTop is a carefully curated collection of news stories from the most credible sources on almost any topic. Being the first to post news and information right when it happens can certainly help you establish yourself as an expert in your field, but not if that information later turns out to be fake, false or inaccurate. With AllTop, you can embed a news feed directly into your site that will post the latest news you can trust to always come from a reliable source.
Pointerpro
Surveys are a great way to learn almost everything you want to know about your clients and consumers. While you can, of course, buy data about them, perhaps the best way to really find out what they want is to just ask them. Consumers are becoming more and more inundated with surveys, however, so if you really want to get their feedback, you need to create surveys they actually want to take. Pointerpro can help you create creative and unique surveys that your customers won’t simply click “no thanks” to every time.
Ubersuggest
Creating great content is critical of course, but even more critical is ensuring users can actually find it. Not only can Ubersuggest help you determine just the right keywords to help users find your content but by understanding what keywords your target demographic is using to search for content, you can also create content around those keywords. Then, when your target demographic goes looking for content, your content is what they will find.
SE Ranking
There is no doubt that a well-conducted content audit on a regular basis will help you avoid the most common content mistakes and improve your overall content marketing strategy. SE Ranking Website Audit carefully analyzes and assesses your existing content, its uniqueness, its performance in search and shows your prons and cons that you can use to adapt your current content marketing campaign and create new quality content based on your experience. You can kill two birds with one stone. You will receive a detailed audit of your page based on 70 parameters, and find out whether your content is keyword optimized and SEO friendly.
2. Content creation
Creating great content involves several different factors. If you create blogs or articles, they need to be free of grammatical errors and other types, as well as having a good flow and being easy to read. If you create videos, they should have good production values and be easy to watch. If you create infographics or other graphic material, they should also be free of typos and be easy to read and view. Here are some tools to help you create great content.
Grammarly
Many businesses know the agony of printing a large batch of materials only to discover it has an error. And for good reason, a study found that 59% of the respondents would not use a company that had spelling or grammar errors on their marketing materials or website content. A simple spell check can go a long way towards helping you create professional content, but Grammarly can do so much more. Spell check will often miss words that are spelled properly but used incorrectly, Grammarly will not. From marketing materials to blogs and articles, you can avoid a number of embarrassing mishaps by having them checked by Grammarly.
Pro Writing Aid
Professionals in almost any field generally possess a vast wealth of knowledge that can help their clients and consumers. Communicating the information in a clear, compelling fashion, however, is a different story. While Grammarly can help you after your content is already written, ProWritingAid can help you write it. From suggesting better word choices to helping you communicate in a more streamlined fashion, ProWritingAid can help even the most novice writer translate their knowledge into great content.
Snappa
Offering great content once a week or every few weeks is no longer enough. With social media, you need to be offering some type of content every single day and if possible, several times a day. Hiring a professional to produce that much content can be prohibitively expensive. With Snappa, you can create your own great visual content for social media, newsletters, articles, blogs, and more. Check this article to discover Snappa alternatives.
Design Wizard
Design Wizard is your go-to tool for high-quality visual content creation. There are over 1 million images and tens of thousands of high-quality videos available in the library. Standout features of the tool include a custom color palette, free font library, and resize feature. There are also excellent integrations with Hubspot, Marketo, Buffer, and Intercom.
Venngage
Venngage is the leading infographic maker perfect for creating eye-catching, informative infographics. There are over thousands of professionally-designed infographic templates to choose from, and an online editor that makes customizing them simple. Features include drag-and-drop functionality, a library of icons and photos, branding elements, and team share.
3. Content organization
While great content needs to have certain individual components to be considered great, it also needs to have a strategic plan for cohesiveness. For instance, you need to ensure you aren’t publishing multiple articles on the same topic while failing to address another. In addition, you also need to post or disseminate content frequently and regularly, preferably on a fixed schedule. Here are some tools to help you organize and manage your content.
OneDrive
With OneDrive, you can not only store ideas and works in progress, but you can also use it to collaborate with others. With OneDrive you can also access your information from anywhere. If a situation arises that you already have a piece ready to go that addresses, you can post it immediately no matter where you are and from any device.
No matter what business you are in, you probably read a lot of material related to your field. Sometimes, you may come across a news article, video or blog that you want to save for inspiration when creating content of your own. Pocket is a great app for managing all the content you use for inspiration. Unlike simple bookmarks, Pocket can help you organize your material however you choose to help you find just what you are looking for right when you really need it.
Trello
Sometimes content creation is a team effort. You may have a freelancer working on content creation for your website while you assign members of your team to write blog posts or articles and have others creating social media posts. Trello can help you keep track of who is assigned to do what and where they are in the process. This, in turn, can help you manage your posting to be sure you always have something going out, something waiting in the wings and a backup on the side, just in case.
These days, it’s not enough to just create great content, you also have to manage it. Thankfully, there are a greater number of tools than ever before to both create and manage content. You just need a comprehensive strategy and some tools to help you do it.
Monday
Writing good content is more than banging out words on a keyboard. We’re talking research from multiple sources, checking for plagiarism, collecting insights from different contributors, copy-editing, design, etc. etc.
Bottom line? There’s a lot of overlapping tasks–and this can easily make the entire process overwhelming.
This is where Monday’s task management software comes in and helps keep tasks organized. From prioritizing specific tasks, setting due dates and even tracking progress. With Monday, you’ll have all the tools to keep things nice and tidy.
