What do you really need for successful content marketing ? You need content, of course. What follow next, naturally, are research, and a way to keep yourself organized. And, even if you are good, you would still do well to have a basic proofreading and language editing tool handy. It is easy to make mistakes especially when you are constantly engaged in the same activity – writing for the Web, in this case.
Here are 7 free tools that can help you with content marketing, and there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be using all of them.
1. Evernote
This free resource ought to take care of your research. Save web pages, create notes, share with friends and colleagues, record audio, capture an image, keep everything organized and searchable. The premium service offers more, but the free version is usually enough for most people. There are also other useful software and apps from Evernote. Evernote Hello lets you remember details about people you meet. If you are a food blogger, Evernote Food is the one for you. Need to concentrate more on what you are reading? Get Evernote Clearly to read web content better. If you are not using Evernote, you might as well be working with a 56.7k modem or on a Pentium I computer!
2. Ubersuggest
Even though the Google Keyword Tool is still the most popular choice, it does keep you limited to Google. For a successful content marketing campaign, you need to move beyond the Big G. Ubersuggest will aggregate suggestions from all major search engines, allow you to search by category (music, video or news, for instance), and save your results in a virtual basket that you can access later. You get a more comprehensive view of what is going on around the Net with Ubersuggest.
3. Soovle
Use Soovle with Ubersuggest to complete your keyword and trend suggestions requirements. Soovle is also fun to use, which is always a plus when doing something as tiring as keyword research. It incorporates all major search engines as well as Amazon and Wikipedia to show you real time queries on one screen. The entire experience after you type in your seed query is like watching a clickable flash presentation. And, of course, you can save your research for reference.
4. Hubspot
This is not to be confused with the popular HubPages which is a good place to look for new content ideas. Hubspot is a marketing specialist, and since content marketing is geared towards, well, “marketing”, you might want to check out the professionally written resources on Hubspot. Their software is a premium service, but scouring the website should get you in touch with a lot of useful and no-nonsense information.
5. LSIKeywords
All search engines look for latent semantic indexing in your content. What this simply means is your content must have words and phrases that are naturally related to the keywords or phrases that you are targeting. Even if you are a naturally gifted writer, you would want to get a list of related words just to see if you are on the same page with the search engines.
6. PaperRater
There are several paid and free online language editing tools, but PaperRater is clearly one of the best. It will check your content according to the category you have put it in (whether it is an essay, a research paper or an email, and so on) and take your educational qualification into account as well while grading you. You will find detailed review on grammar, vocabulary, word choice, writing style and spelling. There is also a plagiarism checker (temporarily disabled at the time of writing the present article) to make sure you have not inadvertently copied something too closely while creating your content.
7. Bottlenose Lite
Finally, what we most need: content. Bottlenose does not exactly give you content though; you have simpler methods for that. This site will be your control panel for whatever is going on in the social media world: the trends, the conversations, relevant conversations to the conversations, who is doing what – it is a bit like eavesdropping on everyone, but legally. The Sonar feature has a nice graphical interface that, like Soovle, is fun to use, and the sheer volume of information is mind boggling. If you want to create content on any topic, just use your Bottlenose account to know all about it in real time to ride whatever wave is current.
That would be the 7 free tools that can help you with content marketing, and if you create a strategy that makes the best use of all 7 of them, you’d be hard pressed to not succeed.
About
Iliana Lola is a full time internet marketer and writer and the owner of Ilianalola.com.
