Content marketing’s rapid growth over the past few years has led to a demand for better tools to facilitate it. This demand has fueled an explosion of applications that handle everything from creation to final distribution and promotion. To attempt to list every single content tool on the market would take an eternity. As such, we’ve taken the list and condensed it down to some of our favorites. Hopefully, this information will help you to get started with your content marketing efforts!
Content Creation Tools
These tools are used for content creation. While we pride ourselves on never outsourcing, we have a team of writers ready to write content on a regular basis. Furthermore, we had to lean on these tools when we were starting out to locate talent in the first place. For those lacking the resources to write their content, these are fantastic tools for getting the content from elsewhere.
UpWork (formerly oDesk)
Upwork is a network of freelancers connected through a unified platform. Previously known as oDesk, UpWork retains all of the features that made its predecessor useful. Talent ranges from SEO experts to writers and graphic artists. In short, everything you need for content creation can be found on this one platform.
Jobs can be created and posted publicly or handed to a select team of freelancers. This allows you to work with the individuals that you want to work with while creating a reliable team you can turn to on a regular basis. Furthermore, each job can be paid hourly or on a fixed price. The milestones system is fantastic for larger projects and allows you to approve the results each step of the way.
For hourly work, UpWork includes a built-in “work diary” application that takes regular screenshots, allowing you to see what your freelance employee has been up to. This guarantees that every minute billed is a minute worked.
TextBroker
This platform is focused on written content and delivers fast results. When you post up a job, you can be sure that the content will be written and submitted before the day is out. These rapid results do come with a downside – quality control. You will need to pay top-dollar for a high-quality, well-written article. Anything below five stars will suffer from grammar and spelling errors. If you use TextBroker, be prepared to edit unless you are willing to pay for quality.
Content Distribution Tools
Creating high-quality content is only half the battle. You also have to get the content in front of your customers. Publishing content on your website is a good way to place your work somewhere on the internet, but you need to promote it if you hope for success. These tools are incredibly useful for getting your content distributed, and we highly recommend them.
Outbrain
Outbrain is a promotional tool used to get your content and links to your content onto trusted websites across the web. You have likely seen a tab when browsing a news website that proclaimed “featured articles” or “recommended for you.” Sometimes these articles link off-site, but the content is still engaging. These links are provided by services like Outbrain.
In fact, as a fun exercise, go to CNN.com. Click on a random story and scroll down to the bottom, you will most likely see a bunch of stories “recommended by Outbrain”. In fact, when you click these links you may notice your browser includes a “traffic.outbrain.com” URL before you are redirected.
Outbrain is thus a fantastic tool for getting exposure for all of your content!
NeoReach
Influencer marketing has been growing steadily over the past few years, and its compatibility with content marketing is apparent. Social media is inextricably linked with content marketing, but being the only one pushing your content is a poor tactic. Influencer marketing platforms like NeoReach pay social media celebrities (influencers) to promote your content for you.
NeoReach has already gathered a large number of influencers in spite of being relatively new to the space and thus far has proven highly effective in content promotion.
Analytics Tools
All the tools in the world do not change the fact that if you cannot measure it, it may as well not exist. Gathering hard data about traffic, conversions, and revenue are essential for knowing if your marketing efforts work. Here are a couple of the tools we use for measuring data to demonstrate that what we are doing makes a difference.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular tool for analyzing a website, and for good reason. It gives you all the information about where your traffic is coming from, where they land, where they go, and where they are when they leave or convert. Using this tool you know if the bulk of yours sales come from organic search, and can even determine what websites are driving customers away.
The one major flaw comes from the one part you’d think Google Analytics would be strongest: keyword traffic. As an internet marketer, you’d want to know what your strongest keywords are. Way back in 2011, Google updated its privacy policy so that now many of the keywords used to find your site come back as “(not provided)”.
In spite of this flaw, Google Analytics is still a very useful tool for providing traffic data and knowing where it all comes from. This way you know where your marketing efforts are succeeding, and where they are falling apart.
SEMrush
For SEO analytics, SEMrush is one of the most popular and useful tools on the market. SEMrush provides traffic estimates on your site and your competitor’s websites based on keyword rankings. It lists out whom your competition is based on keywords, what those keywords are, and where you are ranked. You can even get an overview of where your backlinks are coming from.
SEMrush is an incredibly useful tool that professional internet marketers use on a regular basis and are expected to be familiar with it. Some of the information overlaps with Google Analytics and often comes into conflict. When Google Analytics says one thing and SEMrush says another, we would default to Google Analytics.
No list is going to be exhaustive, but this is a good start and a representative sample of the tools we use on a regular basis. Every tool does have a learning curve attached to it and takes time to learn the intricacies of, but all are well worth the effort.
