There are so many factors that contribute to your blog’s success. SEO? Sure.
Having a good headline that will hook the readers into clicking on it? Check.
Having a website that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but not to overbearing? Got that, too.
Social media presence? Ditto.
All of these are pretty much necessary, yet rendered completely useless if your blog is missing its most important ingredient: great content. After all, you’ve started your blog because you had something to say, and wanted to share it with other people who might find it helpful, or interesting, or perhaps funny.
Of course, you may be in it for the money, and that’s ok, but you still have to offer something of value to your readers, otherwise they will just leave and go somewhere else once they realize your blog’s content is subpar. Even if you’ve neglected that aspect, don’t worry, because help is at hand with these 11 power tools which will assist you to create brilliant content for your blog.
When it comes to trending topics, you should also check out Buzzsumo. Not only will you be able to keep track of the most popular trends, but you will also be aware of the most influential people on the web. It uses a specific keyword, a URL, or a topic which you enter to detect trends. What makes is so brilliant is that it selects trends based on an aggregated number of shares across all major social media platforms. Buzzsumo can also be used to set up content alerts for your blog and your competitors.
If you are still struggling to obtain readership, perhaps you need to start following what’s trending right now. Bring the content to the people, and not the other way around, which is why we recommend Zite.
However, you won’t have to give up writing about stuff you like, because Zite uses your personal preferences to deliver you the hottest trending topics out there. If you don’t believe us, believe CNN, they are using it, too.
Constantly coming up with great topics for your next post can be really frustrating, but you can take a break every once in a while and check out HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. It requires you to enter up to three keywords which sum up what you want to write about, and it will generate a week’s worth of topics that contain any of those keywords. Here's a quick tutorial from John Haydon on how to use it:
EduGeeksClub
If you need some assistance in creating great content for your blog, EduGeeksClub has all the goods you need, because it features professional writers which can cover pretty much any topic. In addition to that, EduGeeksClub can also help you edit and proofread your content, making it one of the most complete online writing platforms on the web.
Helpmewrite
Keeping in touch with your readers is important, and Help Me Write takes that approach and takes it to a whole new level. It enables you to share your ideas with your readers on social networks, and let them decide what they want you to write next.
Not only will you get enough ideas for your blog, but you will also be able to figure what it is that people like about it most – based on direct feedback.
Having some eye-catching images to go along with your words is an absolute must nowadays, and if you find Photoshop too difficult to master, or expensive, you should check out Pixlr. This online image editor will help you edit images thanks to wide selection of pre-sets, templates, filters and editing tools. Also it has the ability to grab and save any image that is present on the page you are visiting.
Infographics are huge right now, which means you need to work some into your blog posts. If you think you have to be a designer to do that, perhaps Piktochart will change your mind. This tool will help you create some Infographic eye-candy thanks to a selection of 400 different templates. Once you get a hang of it, you’ll be able to create Infographics in under an hour.
Having images in your posts is great, but sometimes you need an additional way of driving the point home. Skitch is a simple and effective tool which is designed to highlight your existing images with shapes, arrows or sketches in just minutes.
It's from the folks at Evernote so you know it's got to be great!
Quabel
In order to produce great content, you need to write, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do considering the number of different distractions on the web. Quabel is a distraction-free text editor that will make you direct your focus on just writing, and nothing else, and that includes not editing your work until you are really finished writing.
ThingLink is one of the leading apps for creating interactive images, video, audio, infographics and just about any kind of media-rich content. You can even annotate images with videos, videos with videos, audio with video, video with images, and so on. Any combination of the aforementioned media is possible with ThingLink.
PlagTracker
The best content out there is original and fresh, and if you want your posts to be like that, you need to keep them free of plagiarism, accidental or otherwise.
We recommend PlagTracker, which will not only check for plagiarism inside your posts, but it will also help you proofread your work, so that is completely error-free as well, before you publish it for your readers.
These 11 helpful tools will enable you to become a master of creating unique, fresh, intriguing, media-rich content which your audience simply won’t be able to resist. Once you’ve gotten content out of the way, you can focus on all that other stuff, like SEO, social media promotion and interaction with your readers.
Hi Ileane and Antonio,
Thank you so very much for linking to my Piktochart article. I am honored!
Antonio, I, too, have guest posted for Ileane. Getting another link from her site is so flattering! Thank you for giving me a link from her highly respected site and exposure for my article.
Janice
Awesome ideas! It really is important to not just focus on design or driving traffic but also your content. One tool that I use a lot for images is Canva. It is awesome for making images on the fly.
I did not know about help me write, will be looking into it. It sounds awesome for anyone trying to improve their content marketing strategy!
Thanks for sharing the tips,
Chris
Great content.
I think I have me something to start working on to improve my blogging experience.
Also searching for keywords on google before writing an article on them to know how old the already written articles are, will increase ones chance of ranking high on such articles.
Browsing through the net on a particular niche one is interested to write about to fine poorly written content and modify them increases chances to gain high ranking.
Antonio,
I applaud you for not going with the “default 10” tools that everyone links to and basically repurposing their descriptions of them. Unique articles like this help me do my job and find new and interesting tools I’ve never tried. I’m about to dive into ThingLink and Plagtracker. Thanks!
Hey, guys!
Really happy that you found the post useful!
Good luck on your journey to perfect content! 🙂
Great post, very useful tools. it will help me in blogging thanks for sharing. i am using plag track for checking my content.
Hi Antonio and Ileane, wow, this list has all terms I really haven’t heard of and I don’t believe I’ve been living under a rock. Where did you find them all? I will certainly be checking them out. Zite looks really interesting. Thank you for sharing all of these with us. I’ll be back to check them out.
Hi. nice information.
In addition to above mentioned platforms to create some brilliant content, i would like to say, that WordPress itself is great to create some great content, as plugins like TinyMCE are there to assist you.
Hi Antonio,
This is agreat list of tools you’ve provided for us. There are some that I’ve heard of and use and there are quite a few that are new to me. Definitely going to check them out, Skitch especially.
It’s nice to meet you. Hope you’re having a great week so far!
Cori
Hey, Cori!
Happy you liked the list!
Yes, you should definitely give Skitch a try, it’s pretty powerful!
Have a great week too!
I often use Buzzsumo to check out what’s hot in my industry or what titles have worked the best for similar topics. However, I find the best tool for content inspiration is my audience! I listen to my readers’ questions, their worries, and their success stories, and use those as a spring board for content ideas.
I have never been used Buzzsumo, I’m not sure if it good. But i’m family with Alltop. I believed Alltop gives you what you want. They verify all blogs, and it’s in a category already, no need to search for it 😀
This is great content! Thanks for the tools, these will for sure make my life easier while trying to create better content!
Regards, Jordan.
Super list of tools Antonio. BuzzSumo seems to be all over these days. Every other blog post seems to mention it and hey, how important is it to connect with influential bloggers? Any tool that saves you time and energy works for me. Snag a few, use responsibly and leverage your presence. I leverage like mad as I circle the globe. I have no other choice. Thanks so much for sharing these content creating tools. They rock. Signing off from Nicaragua.
Ryan
Super list Antonio. Doesn’t Buzzsumo rock? I also use Pixlr, which is a great tool for someone like me – as I don’t really have a lot of time to learn Photoshop. There are a few in here though that I hadn’t heard of until reading this post, so will definitely check them out.
Hi Antonio,
What a useful list of tools that makes online marketing stress free, I use Buzzsumo a lot of the time and have found it very useful for the purpose it was created.
I use Grammarly for proofreading while writing, it makes writing a lot error free. The best of it is that it works perfectly with WordPress text editor and anywhere you writie online.
While for images, I use Canva; is such a useful website to create custom images at a snap.
Thanks for sharing Antonio, nice read.
I did not know about help me write, will be looking into it. It sounds awesome for anyone trying to improve their content marketing strategy!
These are great tips for online businesses. I really enjoyed reading your blog, you have lots of great content. I look forward to reading more posts from you. Thanks for sharing important point.
A very awesome collection of tools here Antonio,
In blogging, once you’ve gotten the right tools in your arsenal, the whole thing will indeed become very very easy and less time consuming.
There are so many tools out there to help create amazing contents and the ones you mentioned here are indeed very helpful as I’m also using some of them.
A few of them are also somehow strange to me and i will have to look them up.
Thanks for sharing.
hello, I use many of the tools you mentioned. Although I was not aware of Quabel and ThingLink. The tools you mentioned are very useful and are great. The one which I was not knowing about, I will check them indeed.
Hi Antonio,
Thanks for sharing this great list of blogger tools. I used to edit pics on paint or photoshop. Will give a try to Skitch
Amazing list of tools to create content. The content of any blog is very important. I have tried zite it is good now I can try all these tools listed. Thank You Antonio for sharing this article.
WHat about spinning the content ? I have seen many people doing that….
I don’t think that spinning content would be a great idea nowadays.
Spinning worked long ago and it helped you rank higher in Google, when you created tons of articles with your target keywords. It used to be an effective SEO tactic, but now you can get penalized for it.
Nowadays, to rank high in Google, you have to create content of premium quality and spinning won’t let you do that.
Quality is a million times more important than quantity. It’s better to have 10 great posts which people will link to than 200 posts with crappy content.
If you find it difficult to produce content constantly, you can invite guest bloggers to do the job for you. All you need to do is link back to their site and get a nice post in exchange.