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A list of free tools to improve your content marketing strategy

September 24, 2015 - 6  min reading time - by Emma Labrador
Home > SEO Thoughts > A list of free tools to improve your content marketing strategy

An effective content marketing strategy is part and parcel of your global SEO strategy. Content is essential to rank higher in the SERPs, that is why content and SEO work hand in hand to develop your marketing results and your conversions. Thus, any content strategy must be thought in terms of performance and conversion and should not be done without any guidelines. But to help you out in this task, there are some free tools that can help save you time and energy once you have settled your content marketing goals. From content discovery to content organization or distribution, this nice list of free and essential content marketing tools will help you improve your performances.

Ideas and content tools

Quora: this platform of Q&A is great to help you find new ideas for articles for your blog for instance. This community is sorted by categories of subjects where people can ask questions and get answers.
What is better than delivering articles based on potential clients insights and queries? It will help you gain authority because you will write content based on real expectations.

Feedly: This RSS aggregator is the best remplacement solution to Google Reader. With over 15 millions users, Feedly is definitely one of the best tools for content curation. You can add all of your favorite resources, blogs and websites and get the latest news in real time. This feed of fresh content is perfect to find ideas and feed your blog with targeted topics.

Docido: this content discovery tool and ranking engine displays all the pieces of your digital world in one customized and integrated view. You can access the information you need in a single search. The content is ranked according to what is most important to you – Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Evernote, GMail, Dropbox and any other cloud services you might be daily using. It is pretty helpful to pinpoint and find trends, topics, companies or people and retrieve stuff easily. Try it, for the moment it’s still free.

Reddit: Even if the interface is quite messy, Reddit is a must to know what is trendy for the moment. For example, you can observe which headline is the most effective and which type of content drives the most engaged audience.

Spike: this tool displays topics, timeframes, places and open search filtered by country and interest and offers a watch list. But what’s great is that you can see how it is performing on social media. Thing interesting, there is also a “pre-viral” section. So if you need to know what is getting popular on the net, this is your tool.

Distribution and marketing tools

Once you’ve selected your curated content or your own one, it can be time-saving to use a distribution tool that can manage your sharings and measure them.

Buffer: This tool is your best friend if you want to save time by scheduling your posts through your different social media channels and measuring your content performances. But tips from a community manager: do not automatise all your contents, your social accounts will just look like bots.

SlideShare: this allows you to create an interface when you can share your presentation to drive attention to a service or a product. SlideShare owns a well engaged community. This is why this tool is great to effectively share your content.

Yoast: if you own a WordPress website, Yoast is the best solution to optimize your articles for search engines because it provides a full interface to customize your title and description. You can thus personalize your headlines and description to make them more appealing and improve your on-site SEO.

Open Graph: this plugin allows you to customize your images for social shares. This is a valuable option because otherwise, one image will be randomly chosen within your article. Pick the right image for your social shares to maximize their efficiency and impact.

MailChimp: as an email marketing platform, MailChimp is great to deliver your content to your database. Create exclusive content on this channel to attract new subscribers to your email list.

Followerwonk: this app developed by Moz offers insights about your Twitter audience like when your followers are the most active, their main hashtag used, demographic data, etc. This is pretty useful to know when and how you should share your content.

Promoted posts on Facebook/Twitter: advertising can increase your content visibility so far if it is well targeted and if it relies on the right goals.

StumbleUpon: bookmark your content to a wider audience thanks to StumbleUpon. Easy and fast to use!

Inbound Writer: this content optimization application lets your business monitor topics of interest, understand your readers and reach your readers by providing insights on what type of content to create that match the passions of your audience.

Organization tools

Doing content marketing involves organisation. Because you cannot just write stuff without any scheduling, editorial calendar. There are some great tools to help you organize your work.

Trello: this is the tool you should use to organize all your editorial tasks into different boards. You can thus edit boards by themes from ‘ideas’ to ‘to approved’ to ‘online’ for example. If you’re part of a team with different writers, this is great to know what everyone has to do and save time. You can also leave feedbacks, add due date or label your cards.

Evernote: this platform can organize everything from work to personal life. You can track your editorial calendar here and drop content ideas from any devices you use.

Milanote: Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. You can easily collect everything in one place, arrange things in whatever way makes sense for your project and create a shared workspace for your team.

IFTTT: why don’t you use recipes for things that work well and don’t need to be done manually? IFTTT can increase your productivity through all of your web app and platforms by making them efficiently work together

Pocket: you can save and organize videos, articles and other useful content from more than 300+ apps for later if you don’t have time to treat them all instantaneously.

Google Calendar: Google has developed this tool to effectively organize your calendar and collaborate with your team on editorial and production content calendar easily.

Content creation tools

Canva: this easy-to-use tool allows to create visuals for all your supports whatever it’s on social media, a website, a banner or an email campaign. You can dig into a wide range of free template and customize them. The results is pretty graphic and qualitative and will highlight your content.

Google Keyword Planner: if you need inspiration to find keywords for your article or headline, Google Keyword Tool can help you out. In fact, you can dig through combination of keywords that perform the best on search engines. This not the only thing you should look after when writing a headline for instance, but it can give you ideas on what’s working and what’s not.

GIMP: if you don’t have the money to afford Photoshop, you can use its free version Gimp. This is pretty useful to manage your compression files for instance to reduce load time on your site. Visuals are essential in any content marketing strategy so don’t neglect them.

Embedded Tweets : add embedded tweets to your content to add credibility and dynamism to your articles. Your visitors will be able to follow directly the author of the tweet.

Headline analyzer: this tool provides feedbacks about your headline effectiveness and value in clear graphics and bulet points

Hemingwayapp : this site helps you with your content by telling you how to improve it. It highlights complicated sentences, confusing words, passive phrasing, and more with color-coded marks for quick and easy edits.

Oncrawl: to avoid duplicate content issues, use this free tool to quickly know if you haven’t already written something similar on your blog.

Emma Labrador See all their articles
Emma was the Head of Communication & Marketing at Oncrawl for over seven years. She contributed articles about SEO and search engine updates.
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