I know that blogging isn’t easy. Either you’re blogging for a company or your personal brand awareness, writing keeps you busy most of the time.
As I recall, successful marketers implement like hell when it comes to finding the right strategies, tactics and tools to achieve their goals. The online tools are probably the marketer’s best friends when it comes to searching for the key to unlocking successful marketing campaigns.
So, are you ready to make your job easier and to become better at blogging?
I’ll share with you in this post my favorite content tools for blogging.
19 Content Tools to Make Blogging Easier
Tools and sites to get inspired
If you don’t know what to write about it’s probably because you haven’t done your keyword research by now. Don’t forget that you need to consider SEO when blogging. On the other hand, if you’ve already made a list of keywords, you have to come up with content ideas. Here are my suggestions of content tools:
Quora – you ask questions regarding any struggle that you’re facing, and experts, usually, come up with really creative solutions. I love Quora because it is a great source to generate leads for B2B companies.
Brain Pickings – it contains valuable content regarding creativity, design, art, science, and psychology. Even if you think those topics don’t have to do much with your work, you might be surprised how inspired you feel after reading a few lines from an article.
Buzzsumo – typing a word or a phrase is enough to get the most popular topics on the web. The posts are automatically generated by Buzzsumo.
Twitter – it’s not only a good tool to share and distribute content but to observe what is trending.
Pulse – LinkedIn publishing feature allows anyone to see which are the latest topics discussed within an industry.
Feedly – add your favorite, most popular, authoritative websites and blogs within your industry and check out every day what are your competitors, partners, trendsetters sharing with their audience.
TED Talks – besides watching TED Talks for pleasure, you could use the information provided by experts to help you with discovering interesting topics for blogging. I recommend you the talks on psychology and behavioral economics. Obviously, you should watch anything that may link to your online business products, services or brand values.
Tools for planning
Once you’ve bookmarked the sources to get inspired and came up with a list of topics, make sure to organize them. I’ve used by now the following content tools to plan my blogging activities:
Trello – it allows you to track how you do against your objectives. You can organise ideas or projects using to do’s, in progress and done Tags.
WordPress Editorial Calendar – schedule your future posts in an easy to use and accessible calendar for content.
Google Calendar – I use this tool to schedule all of my activities. No matter what, every Monday morning I take time to prioritize my activities and schedule them for a week.
Tools for writing content
Google Docs – the handiest content tool for any writer. What I don’t like about it is the fact that once you insert an image, you cannot paste it in the WordPress Dashboard…but that’s just a triffle. 🙂
Grammar.ly – one of the most useful content tools if you’re not a native english speaking person. It detects spelling and grammar errors and it checks for plagiarism, too.
Wunderlist – it’s great for the list posts. I’ve noticed by now that people still love lists. I must recognize that I prefer writing “opinion posts” rather than lists, but the lists posts get the most shares.
For infographics, I recommend you to work with a designer or to use paid online tools. I’ve tried Infogr.am and a free trial at Piktochart, but I must recognize that design isn’t for me.
Tools to distribute and promote content
Twitter – always a good idea when it comes to social sharing.
Click-to-tweet – a nice plugin that allows you to insert tweetable phrases in your post.
Buffer – it allows you to distribute content on all the social networks within seconds.
Klout – it is a great tool to schedule posts once a week and then forget about it and concentrate on other activities.
Finally, I recommend you to share your stories on your own social accounts. If you do not share your content, don’t expect others to do it for you. Also, if you have ever interviewed someone, don’t hesitate to write a brief email in which you asked them to help you qith sharing the great content you’ve created with as many people as possible. Think about barters, partnerships, in order to distribute valuable content to people and to help each others businesses.
Image source
See also: 30 Best Social Media Management Tools
