by Clare Drake
As business owners we’ve become accustomed to creating valuable content in the form of blog posts to increase our SEO as well as attracting our target market. Content marketing is a big aspect of my own growth strategy in my business and creating the right type of blog posts is key to showcasing my expertise. Here are the tools I use on a regular basis to streamline my process – and hope they will help you be more productive too. I have listed them out in the order I use them.
1. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
CoSchedule is a content marketing scheduler that has a free headline analyzer tool that analyzes your blog post title. It grades your headline and suggests how you can improve it with the right mix of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. A tool I use to improve the shareability of my content (which is what we all want, right?).
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is a stock photo database where you can use their high-resolution images for any project you’re working on without attribution. They are totally free and you can use them for commercial projects too. I have a few free stock photo databases bookmarked but almost exclusively use Pixabay for its clean user interface and high-quality photos, vector graphics, and illustrations.
3. Canva / Adobe’s Creative Cloud
Canva is a graphic design browser application that lets you create graphics and documents easily through the use of a drag-and-drop editor. Perfect for business owners and bloggers who aren’t designers. There are great templates that you can get started with – and it’s totally free. There is also a paid version for extra (and amazing) features. Whilst Canva is on this list I tend to use Adobe’s Creative Suite myself as I’m a designer and use Illustrator and InDesign for my blog graphics creation. I also use InDesign to create workbooks, checklists, and other printables that I add as content upgrades (an extra freebie in exchange for an email address) for my blog posts.
4. Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool that I use daily. It allows you to install a plugin on your browser so you can share content easily. I spend every evening scheduling content for my Twitter feed for the following day, and I aim to share 70% of other people’s content with 30% of my own. This builds relationships with influencers in my niche – and shows my audience I know them and what they’re interested in, which builds trust.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is THE most important tool I use in my business. It not only shows you your pageviews but also gives you immense insight into who your audience is, where they live, how they got to your site, and which pages or posts are most popular. I use it to track where my audience comes from (currently 80% from Pinterest) and what posts resonate with them the most. This allows me to create more content like that in the future. Data analysis is so important in growing your business and blog – to see what you’re doing right and what you can improve on. Plus it’s totally free.
I’d love to know which tools are you excited about trying out. Let me know below.
