200+ Content creation tools to research, write, and share amazing blogs

If you write content and need a directory to help you navigate all the amazing tools and services on the web, look no further.

After writing 538 professional blog posts* (and that’s the last time I’m going to hunt down all the articles I wrote for various clients), I decided to share the many tools I’ve found helpful to research, write, edit, and share amazing blogs.

*counted December 7, 2015. I didn’t recount for the update, but you can check out my portfolio to see what I’ve done!

This article is broken into five major sections with subsections linked below for ease of navigation:

1) Inspiration and collecting ideas

Industry trends
Audience research
Customer research
Team brainstorms
Competitor analysis
Keyword and topic research
Compiling your ideas

2) Writing and editing

Title formulation
Outline crafting
Content creation
Content platforms
Website design
Editing and proofing
Plagiarism check

3) Graphics

Image creators
Royalty-free images
Screen capturing
Video hosting and creation
Webinar recording repurposing

4) SEO and sharing

Search engine optimization
Amplification and sharing

5) Monitoring, analysis, and development

Measuring results
Conversion optimization

6) Miscellaneous

1) Inspiration and collecting ideas

When collecting content ideas, start by looking at what’s happening in your industry, what your customers are saying, and what your team members have observed.

Industry trends

Industries change more often than you think. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the ecommerce industry by at least five years. And the Google search algorithm changes 500 to 600 times every year. Stay on top of industry trends with the following tools to keep your blog relevant and credible.

1. Google Alerts: Monitor what people are saying all over the web

Beyond speaking directly with customers, Google Alerts is your eyes and ears on the web.

You choose which keywords you want to “watch” and the tool will deliver news with those terms to your email inbox at the frequency you want to receive them. For example, if you’re interested in online marketing, set up alerts for “inbound marketing” to receive emails when someone mentions that phrase online.

Pricing: Free, but you need a Google account

2. Talkwalker Alerts: “Better than Google Alerts”

Talkwalker Alerts is a free tool by Talkwalker that touts itself as better than Google Alerts.

To use the the tool, you need to choose something to create an alert about—your brand name, a competitor, or even keyword. After which, you need to give them your email address, which sites you want to monitor (e.g. Twitter, Google News, etc.), how often you want to receive updates, and how many results you want to get per alert.

Pricing: Free, but you need to give them your email address

3. Pocket: Put interesting content into your virtual “pocket”

Pocket is a content aggregator that gives you useful content online.

Even better, if you find something interesting on the web, you can add it to your Pocket account to revisit later.

Pricing: Free, but with premium options

4. Flipboard: Make interesting content into a personal magazine

Flipboard, similar to Pocket, is a service that aggregates articles that you like into your own online magazine.

You can browse articles that other users store in Pocket or Flipboard based on topics that interest you. You can also follow hashtags to see what’s new in your space and add your own content into the database.

Pricing: Free (you can also open a publisher account)

5. Exploding Topics: Discover trends before they happen

Exploding topics monitors industries through Google and their own database to figure out what people are looking for. Their graphs show you very clearly when a topic “explodes” or is about to “explode.”

In their free version, you can filter by pre-set categories and see which topics are “exploding” now based on search volume and history. This is a great way to see what your audience is searching for, what’s relevant to your business, and how to capture some of that traffic with your content.

Pricing: Free, but with pro options

6. Muck Rack: Stay on top of industry news

Muck Rack, much like Exploding Topics lets you discover upcoming trends and keywords based on search performance.

Muck Rack is similar to Exploding Topics, but they categorize data by industry instead of random topics. On their homepage, for example, you’ll see that all the late night show hosts are categorized (and compared with each other) under the industry “Late-night TV hosts.”

Pricing: Free for searches. You need to request a demo for pricing.

Audience research

Even more important than industry trends is audience insights—what your target market’s pain points are and how you can position yourself as the solution. Here are a few market research tools and services to get to know your audience better.

1. Audiense: Visualize your audience segments

The free version of Audiense looks at your social media followers—their location, biography, gender, etc—and tells you more about them through a visually-appealing interactive web.

Its web-style mapping and color-coding make it easy to visualize your customer base. And it tells you how your audience identifies themselves.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. SparkToro: Resonate with your audience by knowing how they see themselves

SparkToro is an audience analysis tool that provides insight into what your target audience is talking about, the blogs and podcasts they follow, and how they use their social profiles.

Input key terms your audience talks about, hashtags they use, social accounts they follow, or websites they visit to compile a profile of their other interests and channels.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Attest: Reach 110 million people for consumer research

Attest has one solution for audience research: Consumer Profiling.

They have a pool of 110 million people in 49 different marketers that you can reach within minutes. Set up your questions, set audience parameters, and Attest will deliver the results from their consumer database. They can also help craft personas from the results.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Pollfish: Get audience data from over 160 countries

Pollfish is a market research service that gathers clean, quality data from your target audience using their audience network of real consumers across 160+ countries.

Create your own survey on their self-service platform. Then, link to third-party surveys, and use their API access point to power your research. They have a variety of predefined questions, organized into type, to get you started, and offer the ability to embed media and add screening questions prior to taking the survey.

Pricing: “Per completes” pricing

5. Dynata: Reach 62+ million business professionals and consumers

Dynata allows you to create your own surveys, either by yourself or with guidance from their team.

They can handle the entire process on your behalf and build the survey for you, then gather insights from their own pool of consumers and deliver them to you.

Pricing: Request a demo for pricing

6. SurveyMonkey Audience: No fuss customer research solution

SurveyMonkey Audience lets you select your audience, build your survey, and have results delivered straight to you without any fuss.

They boast respondents from 100+ countries, up to 5,000 responses with a <3% margin of error, and bot and fraud protection.

Pricing: Get an estimate

7. AYTM (Ask Your Target Market): Demographic targeting for over 100+ million respondents

AYTM gives you access to their proprietary panel of more than 100 million respondents around the world in over 40 countries.

You build the survey and they do the rest. They have demographic and location targeting features that help you reach only relevant members of their panel. They can also perform research for you and deliver their compiled findings.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. Respondent: Reach and reward business professionals

Respondent has a database of business professionals that you can talk to, one-on-one.

After you post a project, you’ll get a list of professionals that match your criteria. You can then message them, invite them to a call, and then reward them for their time—all within the Respondent platform.

is a market research tool that lets you create research projects, set up budgets for respondents, and invite professionals with verified work information to participate. This tool goes beyond a simple survey, as you can conduct video calls, phone calls, or in-person discussions as well.

Pricing: Per interview rate

9. Conjoint.ly: Data in days, not weeks

Conjoint.ly boasts of its user friendly interface and curated respondent pool.

They possess a wealth of tools and support for product and pricing research. This isn’t necessarily market research simply for the sake of content creation (e.g., what topics your market cares about most), but it can be useful for figuring out your market based on what people would pay for your product. You can also learn what features are most important to your market, and create content around those.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

10. Wynter: Get customer reactions on your content

Wynter differentiates itself from the other audience research tools on this list by being a more content-focused tool. They do message testing for your website by showing their verified B2B respondent pool your content and asking them for feedback.

They also do audience testing for ads, email copy, blog posts, and surveys.

Pricing: One free report, then you have to get a paid account

11. Find My Audience: Audience overview in seconds

Select your audience type and category and hit the “start now” button to see how your target audience describes themselves, what YouTube channels they watch, what items they’re planning to buy, and what other segments they belong to.

The best part—it’s free!

Pricing: Free

12. Facebook IQ: Audience Insights: Get to know your audience

While privacy rules have affected the accuracy of Facebook’s audience insights, it’s still worth checking out. They’ve collected a lot of data on what people are looking at and looking for.

You don’t need to run ads to get access to insights—but if you find an audience that’s a perfect fit for your business, you can run targeted ads to reach them.

Pricing: Free with a Meta business account

13. Market Finder by Think with Google: Know where your best audience is

If you don’t know where your target market is, Google can help you in a matter of seconds.

After you enter your company’s webpage URL, Market Finder looks at what services you offer. After which, it tells you what states in the US or countries globally have the most engaged consumers for what you offer.

Pricing: Free

Customer research

When you need to hear directly from your market, surveys are an easy way to test the waters and get quick feedback for your most burning questions. But how do you know what questions to ask and how to ask them so you get the answers you need?

Below are some tools for building surveys and holding customer interviews.

Building your own surveys

1. Bellini Slushie: Survey question database

Bellini Slushi is a free platform that gives you survey questions based on your demographics.

It eliminates your need to crawl the internet searching for sample questions, types of questions, response options, phrasing, and quizzing colleagues to build a survey.

Pricing: Free

2. Typeform: Survey beautifully

Typeform rose to fame because of their user-friendly and visually appealing interface.

It lets you create interactive forms and surveys that your audience will love to complete. It displays one question at a time to keep respondents engaged and features a library of photos and videos to embed. It also has conditional logic features that lets you customize questions based on your respondents’ answers.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Google Forms: Survey + Data

Google forms has been the go-to survey tool for companies, students, teachers, individuals, and everyone else because it’s the complete package.

While it’s a less customizable compared to Typeform, it still allows you to add branding, images, and videos to your questions. It’s easy to set up and use, and you can view responses in real time or export them to a spreadsheet.

Pricing: Free for personal use

4. Airtable: Survey to workflow in seconds

Airtable isn’t just a platform to create forms, but their forms are pretty awesome.

Their forms integrate with your database so your respondents (and their answers) are automatically integrated within your workflow. You can then use add-ons to turn your data entries into charts to observe trends and takeaways.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Hotjar: Survey ALL your website visitors

Again, Hotjar isn’t just a form-building tool, but their forms differentiate themselves by integrating directly with your website so they pop up on the homepage.

Their surveying tool provides an in-app and on-website pop-up questionnaire that your customers and visitors can answer without any hassle. You can use this tool to create and launch surveys all in one place. Plus, their heat mapping features can reveal where respondents drop off most frequently so you can place and adjust your survey for maximum responses.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. PMF Survey: Free and powerful

PMF Survey is a free tool designed to help run the Sean Ellis test and measure your company’s product/market fit.\

The solution measures the percentage of users who would be disappointed if they could no longer use your product.

🔥 Tip: You have product/market fit if more than 40% of your consumers can’t live without your product.

Pricing: Free

📚 Find out how to get the best data and what questions to ask 📚
👉 Is your customer exit survey giving you the insights you need? 👈

Customer interviews

Set aside half an hour every week to talk to one new customer (the good, the bad, and the ugly – don’t play favorites). Take off your marketer hat and dig into how they found you, what their buying triggers were, what annoys them about your product or service, and what content channels they favor.

But instead being an boring note-taking robot while you’re chatting with your customers, leave the note-taking to actual bots.

1. Tactiq: Google Cloud’s official technology partner

Tactiq is a speech-to-text app that seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud and Google Meet so that you get a full transcript of all your meetings and interviews.

Features include speaker identification, timestamps, and transcribing in real time. It integrates with Google Docs, Quip, Slack, Notion, Google Meet, Zoom, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Fireflies: Fred will take care of the notetaking

Fred is the Fireflies AI assistant who you can add to your meetings to take notes. Fred records and transcribes your meeting for you so that you have a searchable record of all your voice conversations.

Fireflies integrates with major programs like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, Teams, Google Calendar, Outlook, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Rev: Accurate AI and human transcripts at your fingertips

Rev has both a speech-to-text AI and an army of human transcribers to give you the most accurate video, audio file, and video transcripts you could ever want.

Upload your documents to Rev’s database and it’ll give you a per-file quote based on which service you want to use—AI transcription, human captions, foreign subtitles, etc. Pricing is per minute for human transcription, machine transcription, adding captions or foreign subtitles, or live captioning for Zoom meetings.

Pricing: Per transcript pricing

4. Otter: Beautiful notes from a reliable “assistant”

Otter is an AI assistant that generates notes for meetings, interviews, and lectures. The software syncs audio, text, and images so that you have a quick and easy searchable database to refer to for all your meetings.

It also records conversations and transcribes audio in real time.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Descript: Edit videos—but through text!

Descript doesn’t just transcribe your videos—it lets you edit your video right from the transcript.

It’s an all-in-one audio and video editing tool to assist with podcasts, videos, screen recording, and transcripts. With a few clicks and backspace button, you can remove fillers from your videos and change inaccurate information.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. Avoma: Your AI assistant before, during, and after meetings

Avoma summarizes a transcript’s key takeaways and automatically pulls together a bulleted list of action items.

This makes it incredibly easy to highlight important quotes and follow-ups for yourself after the interview.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. Epiphany: Organize your qualitative data into a searchable database

Epiphany organizes your audience research data so you can compile all your interview transcripts, survey responses, and even support tickets into one place.

You can tag different insights for quick browsing, arrange key findings, and store your customer-inspired content ideas on a single platform.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

8. Grain: Record Meetings AND add notes to them below

Grain has an AI assistant that you can add to all your meetings so that you get a transcript of your meeting.

It turns your recorded video into a shareable landing page with a video and scrolling transcript right underneath.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Team brainstorms

Call recorders are an excellent option for capturing key information shared during a team content brainstorm; they capture not only what’s said, but what’s shown as well. So, if your data analyst pulls up trending blogs and shares their screen, you’ll have that context as well. Here are a few tools you can use to record your calls.

1. Gong: AI that analyzes your calls

Gong integrates with your CRM software and works with web conferencing platforms to record calls, as well as transcribes sales call recordings.

It then analyzes your sales calls and identifies what your top performers are doing on calls that the rest of your team aren’t doing.

Pricing: Get a quote

2. Vidyard: Record your sales pitch and hit send

Vidyard makes it easy to record and send videos with just a few clicks.

Their free tool allows you to record your screen or webcam, send videos via email or LinkedIn, and track who watches the videos. They also have paid subscriptions with enhanced features.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Dialpad (formerly Uberconference): Easy interface for all conversations

Dialpad is a video conferencing tool that uses AI to take notes and action items from the meeting automatically.

You can lean on this to capture the important details from your brainstorming sessions.

Pricing: Free trial, then you have to get a paid account

4. Zoom: Breakout rooms, screen recordings, and more!

Zoom is known for its meeting functionality. But it’s got other features—they’ve got breakout rooms that help your team come up with a solution in smaller groups then reconvene after a certain amount of time.

Zoom has multiple integrations that you can use—including ones for Slack and Gong.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Competitor analysis

After you look at your customers, your next area of opportunity is your competitors. Look at the keywords they rank for, what communities they’re in, and so on. After all, if they’re doing well, their keywords probably have high business value and purchase intent. For example, “blue Nike tennis shoes” has a higher purchase intent than “common shoe materials” since it implies someone wants to purchase specific shoes, versus doing a general search.

1. Ahrefs: All things SEO

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolkit that includes website optimization, competitor analysis, research on current customer search trends, industry content exploration, and rank tracking.

You can use Ahrefs to look up competitor URLs and see where their backlinks come from and what keywords they rank for.

Pay attention to these keywords and gauge the value of that traffic. I identified some keywords my website ranks for organically and copied the results below. “Blog exchanges” doesn’t indicate high purchase intent, but it does show high educational intent, which is valuable because I teach others how to run blog exchanges (among other things).

Pricing: Paid account options

🔥 Tip: You can also use Ahrefs to analyze your own website and discover opportunities for keywords you may have missed.

2. Semrush: Market research made easy

Similarly, is a one-stop platform for a variety of tools, including SEO checking, keyword research, content optimization and marketing, competitor research, website monetization, social media marketing and management, and more.

The market research function exposes your competitors’ marketing tactics, showing traffic sources and categorizing your competitors, their target audiences, and promotion strategies.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. S imilarWeb: Analyze companies similar to yours

SimilarWeb is another platform that combines research, market analysis, SEO and PPC, and data on your customer’s journey. Track trends and forecasting in real time, and you can accredit your website to boost trust with your audience.

They also have their own browser extension that provides website traffic analysis as you browse the internet in real time so you can keep tabs on your competitors. A free version is available, and you can copy the URL of any website into their site directly and see global, country, and categorical rankings, traffic overview, total number of visits, and traffic sources.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options
🔥 Tip: Their browser extension is also free

4. BONUS TOOL: Google site search

Pro Tip 🔥 Find how many articles a competitor published between two dates to gauge their publishing cadence. If they’re doing well, test their publishing schedule out on your own website.

Use this formula on Google: “site:[URL] before:[YYYY-MM-DD] after:[YYYY-MM-DD]”

For example, if I wanted to see how many articles my competitor publishes every month, I could use this search to see everything a competitor published during the month of August 2021: “site:competitor.com before:2021-09-01 after:2021-08-01”.

Keyword and topic research

To discover the best keywords for SEO and dig deeper into different topics, the following tools are a big help. They show how popular a keyword or phrase is via average searches per month and display how fierce the competition is for that ranking.

1. Keyword.io: Free keywords for more than just Google

Keyword.io lets you look across numerous websites (Google, Amazon, YouTube, Ebay, etc.).

While Google is the biggest search engine worldwide, that also means Google has the most competition. Use Keyword.io to also optimize your content for other, less crowded search engines.

Pricing: Free

2. Keyword Tool: Google autocomplete but in a tool

Google’s autosuggest function is a bit hard to use. Luckily, we’ve got Keyword Tool to make it more intuitive for content creators who want ideas.

Keyword Tool uses Google’s autocomplete to recommend keywords based on an algorithm from objective factors such as how often past users have searched for a term. You can use these to find keywords that are sometimes hidden in Google Keyword Planner.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Keysearch: Low-competition keywords upfront

Keysearch seeks out relevant, low-competition keywords for your website, and includes SEO competition analysis and suggestions.

Keysearch differentiates itself by giving you keywords that you could actually rank for.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Keywords Everywhere: Literally, keywords everywhere

Keywords Everywhere gives access to metrics on the go via a browser add-on. Install on Chrome or Firefox to get active research.

It lives right on your search engine results page and gives you keyword data on your search query. It also suggests long-tail keywords that might be easier to rank for.

Pricing: Pay as you go

5. Ubersuggest: SEO + Training + Keywords

Ubersuggest simplifies SEO by reverse engineering a competitor’s website and strategy to gain insight into what works for them and how you can adopt and improve upon it.

In addition, you can use this tool to get different suggestions based on an initial keyword, and see rankings in terms of search volume, difficulty, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. Help a B2B Writer: Connect with other B2B writers

Tap into original data and insights to fuel your content with Help a B2B Writer.

Once you have your keyword and topic, use an outreach tool like Help a B2B Writer to get expert quotes, information, and advice on content creation.

Pricing: Free

7. HARO (Help A Reporter Out): More quotes and authoritative voices

Similar to Help a B2B Writer, HARO is another place you can connect with thought leaders and get invaluable insights.

Send in your query and other writers, business owners, and marketers will help you out with research and information.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. Vancery: A network of business professionals

Vancery connects you with professionals across the world. Use their platform to post paid consulting projects and get knowledge and ideas in return.

Vancery’s experts are in various fields, making it easy for you to learn more things from industry experts.

Pricing: Get a paid account

Compiling your ideas

Several great tools exist to compile your data, collect ideas, and collaborate with other blog writers on your team.

1. Evernote: The only note-taking app you’ll ever need

Evernote supports everything from short lists to lengthy research.

It’s like a work and life journal, to-do list, notebook, and calendar—but all in one place.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Trello: The kanban board where ideas are born

Trello uses a kanban board system that you can customize. Organize ideas by column and add more specific notes to each column.

Use Trello for article ideation, tracking important quotes, and storing data.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Google Keep: Your virtual post-it note collection

Google Keep lets you save ideas from anywhere. It’s like a notebook—but if your notebook was online and filled pictures, checklists, and single sentences on post-it notes.

Google Keep is free to use as long as you have a Google account.

Pricing: Free

4. Notion: Your office, online

Notion connects all projects and deadlines in one space with numerous templates.

Notion has different document templates for different purposes. You can create a kanban board for vague ideas. And a spreadsheet for tracking your specific project ideas.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Avrio: Easily share your research with the right people

Put all your research to use with Avrio.

This tool can share data analyses, user research, and other team findings with the rest of the company. It’s an excellent way to disseminate information with the context necessary for the entire company to understand and act on it.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. Bonus tool: Obsidian: Your virtual second brain

Obsidian is a knowledge base you can build on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. Depending on how you work, consider using this to map connections between your data and research.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2) Writing and editing

Formulating your title

Your title draws potential customers from the search results to your article, so you need to make it compelling and click-worthy.

Tools to find titles that perform well

Your title should be relevant to your target audience’s interests.

1. BuzzSumo: See what everyone else is doing.

BuzzSumo takes a keyword and suggests a title based on existing content that performs well.

Choose a keyword, add it to their search bar, then hit “Find Content.” It’ll show you some suggestions on what title you can use.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Ahrefs Content Explorer: Find titles that perform well

Ahrefs Content Explorer shows frequently shared articles so you can draw inspiration from their titles.

Ahrefs’s has tons of data on blogs all over the internet. It pulls information in your niche and tells you which articles are performing well so that you can get inspiration from those.

Pricing: Paid account options

Tip: Ahrefs also offers free SEO tools for website owners. They provide access to their Site Explorer and Site Audit tools with a free keyword generator, backlink checker, and even Amazon and Bing keyword checkers.

Tools to test title ideas

Once you know your focus, there are plenty of title generator tools online that can help you develop an eye-catching headline.

1. SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator: SEO titles that could rank

SEOPressor’s Title Generator randomly generates titles based on existing articles on the first page of Google.

It should give you an idea of what title formats are performing well for the topic you want to write for. We suggest making your keyword as specific as possible to get better title suggestions.

Pricing: Free

2. Portent’s Content Idea Generator: Fun titles for inspiration

Portent’s Content Idea Generator creates random titles based on your keyword.

Their titles are fun and interesting—but we suggest using it as a source of inspiration for your working title.

Pricing: Free

3. Capitalize My Title: Look smart with the right capitalization

Capitalization is hard! Make sure your titles are capitalized correctly by throwing your final title into Capitalize My Title.

Pricing: Free

Tools to find questions to inspire your titles

Find the right title based on what people are asking. Your titles can be answers to questions.

1. Quora: Directly answer real questions

Quora gets over 300 million users every month—users who ask questions that could be related to what you’re writing about.

Look for questions within Quora and create titles that answers those questions.

🔥 Pro Tip: After you’ve written your article, you can answer the question on Quora that inspired your title with a link to that article. It’s a great distribution tactic.

Pricing: Free

2. AnswerThePublic: Get questions based on keywords

AnswerThePublic pulls questions that people are asking based on keywords. Below is one of their search results for “remote work.”

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. AlsoAsked: See the questions searchers are asking by brand, question, or query

AlsoAsked collates and organizes frequently asked questions in search. According to their FAQs page, AlsoAsked “aggregates, organises and displays ‘People Also Ask’ data that appear in Google search results. You can interact with this data on the site to explore it, export it to image graphs for quick presentation to clients or into CSV format to process it with other tools, saving a huge amount of time.”

Learn about what questions are commonly asked alongside your brand, keyphrase, or even competitors to compile titles, outlines, and editorial calendars that checks all the boxes. You’ll be able to see the connections between various questions and topics to help plan out your pillar page strategies as well.

Pricing: Limited free searches per month, plans start at $15/month

Tools to make your title engaging

1. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer: Grade your title

When you have a title in mind, run it through CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to have it “graded.”

This program will let you know if your title is too wordy and will recommend alternative words you can add to make it more engaging. Aim for a score of 70 or higher.

Pricing: Free

2. Sharethrough: SWOT analysis for your title

Sharethrough checks how engaging your headline is and scores your titles based on their neuroscience and advertising research.

Put your title into their search bar and they tell you what your title does well and how you can make it even better.

Pricing: Free

Tools to measure your title’s emotional value

1. Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer: Emotional marketing value

Use the Headline Analyzer to measure your title’s emotional marketing value. This will show you how compelling your title is and the emotion it evokes the strongest.

Pricing: Free

Crafting an outline

Look at the common questions people ask about your topic to determine what you should include in your article. Then, analyze search results and use tools that investigate questions and intent.

1. Google’s autofill: Know what people are searching for

Google’s autofill suggestions are a great starting point for your outline.

Take what people are searching for and use those questions to guide what answers you need to have in your article.

Pricing: Free

2. Google’s People Also Ask section: Get specific questions directly from Google

Similar to Google’s autofill function, its People Also Ask section tells you what answers people are searching for on the web.

This is an excellent place to find key points for your outline. Answer all the common questions shown in the search results, and consider adding the questions to your outline structure.

Pricing: Free

🔥 Pro Tip: Use similar search intent discovery tools (e.g., Quora, AnswerThePublic) to uncover more questions and incorporate those into your outline.

3. Google’s Featured Snippet: Look for definition and itemized list opportunities

Lastly, look at Google’s Featured Snippet for relevant keywords so that you know if you need to define a certain term or add steps to a certain process.

Pricing: Free

Content creation

1. Surfer: Audit your content

Surfer has a search audit feature to help you refresh outdated content, identify SEO errors, and more, automating much of the work you’d otherwise need to do manually.

Surfer will suggest keywords to boost SEO, analyze content length, and give you the option to compare yourself to the competitors of your choice, ensuring the tips and data you receive from Surfer are applicable to you.

Pricing: Get a paid account

Tip: Use their free Chrome extension, Keyword Surfer, to see search volumes directly in Google.

2. MarketMuse: AI research and SEO writing

MarketMuse accelerates the process of content research, creation, and optimization.

Its automated content inventory quickly analyzes what you need to focus on, whether you’re at the research or writing stage, and the text editor gives live feedback with easy-to-follow colored flags.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Copysmith: AI brainstorming and content generation

Copysmith is an AI writing tool that helps you brainstorm topic ideas, generate content, and collaborate with your team.

It offers everything from outline generators to full articles.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. Frase: AI briefs for better SEO performance

Frase is another AI tool that assists in the entire content writing process, including research, developing the brief, writing, optimization, and analysis.

Frase promises to generate full-length content briefs in just six seconds, with a “Write for Me” feature that can autocomplete your sentences. Additionally, its dashboard shows content opportunities to highlight easy improvements that will boost your rankings.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

5. Content Harmony: Concise on-brand and optimized briefs

Content Harmony is a subscription-based tool that aids in building content briefs.

It helps identify and streamline keywords, study competitors, craft an outline that will cover readers’ key questions, cite and link sources, and detect any graphic and visual content needed.

Pricing: Get a paid account

6. Rytr: Speed up your content creation

Rytr is an AI assistant that helps you write blogs, emails, and other pieces of content faster by auto-generating content for you based on your keyword.

It also gives you outlines, emails, and other content types. It even gives you options—you can choose to generate two blog sections for a single topic and choose which section is better.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. Quip: Like Google Docs but for content creators

Quip is a Google docs alternative built for content creators. It has a live comment section and accessibility features that Google lacks.

The tool has a cleaner interface that makes it easier to write and has a “focus mode” that encourages distraction-free writing.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. Revive by Animalz: Find articles you need to update6

Revive by Animalz goes through your entire article database and tells you which articles have lost significant traffic due to content decay.

All you need to do is enter your email address and provide access to your Google Analytics account. From there, the AI tool will comb through your existing articles and tell you which ones can gain more traffic with a simple refresh.

Pricing: Free, but you do need to provide your email address

9. Marketing Examples: Brilliant ads

If you need help with writing inspiration, Marketing Examples is a great place to start. They take all kinds of ads—not just online ones—and tell you why those ads work well.

It’s like a swipe file for marketing content.

Pricing: Free

10. Copywriting Examples: Brilliant ad copy

Copywriting examples, similar to marketing examples, is your swipe file for well-written content. The tool gives you examples of great writing then itemizes the principles behind the writing that make it work.

Use it as inspiration for your writing.

Pricing: Free

Tip: If you choose to outsource your content creation, you can record video briefs for your writers using video tools like Vidyard and Loom. You can also find my project brief template in my content templates.

Content platforms

Next up is a platform to make your content accessible to your audience.

1. WordPress: My favorite open-source content management system

My favorite content management system (CMS) is WordPress. It’s customizable, beautifully designed, and has an intuitive user interface. WordPress.org also has a variety of plugins (I love Yoast for SEO) and eye-catching themes.

This blog, for example, is run on WordPress because it’s incredibly low maintenance, has striking themes, and is free. WordPress has a “distraction-free writing mode” that makes the visual/HTML editor full screen so you aren’t tempted to switch to a different tab or window.

Pricing: Free

2. Ghost: Platform for start-ups, built for content

Ghost is great for start-ups and entrepreneurs in need of a website, as it provides a comprehensive platform that covers content, newsletters, members, and payments through simple, subscription-based billing.

Pricing: Get a paid account

3. Squarespace: Beautiful and easy to use

Squarespace is great for creating simple and easily navigable websites that integrate payments and other related features. You pay one fee, and they take care of your domain and eCommerce compatibility.

Numerous extensions are available if you need to add more features to your website.

Pricing: Get a paid account

4. Medium: Your blog outside your website

Medium is a blogging platform I’ve personally used, and I find it easy to get your point across with it.

Medium also has amazing blogs you can explore according to your chosen topics of interest (I signed up for their email digests and enjoy the articles they send). However, it has since started putting paywalls on some of their blogs, which limits reach.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Start Page by Buffer: Create landing pages in a click

If you want a single landing page to host your content, check out Buffer’s new Start Page.

All you need to do is create an account and it’ll generate a landing page that works on both desktop and mobile. It has customizable templates so that you can build your page without the need to code.

Pricing: Free

Website design

After you choose a hosting platform, you need to design your website.

1. MarkUp: Collaborative design

MarkUp is a web design platform that lets you share your work with other people and get feedback.

It also works for PDFs, images, and other content types.

Pricing: Free with paid options

2. Mockplus: Prototyping made easy

If you have yet to find a blog design you like, you can create a prototype with Mockplus.

You can design how you want your blogs to look, how the navigation should work, any footers or CTAs you want, and incorporate interactions to make the functionality crystal clear.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. BugHerd: Feedback directly on your website or blog

Once website is live, you can use BugHerd to leave internal feedback directly on your live website or blog for tweaks and adjustment – perfect for calling out developer mistakes and fine-tuning.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. Figma: The collaborative UX tool for web design

Figma speeds up the design process by connecting everyone in the team so they can diagram, add sticky notes, and workshop together using their online whiteboard, FigJam.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Zeplin: Share your designs in a controlled environment

Zeplin allows you to pass designs to developers in a controlled manner.

You can finalize using your favorite software – whether that’s Adobe XD, Photoshop, Figma, or Sketch – and hand them to developers to build upon while keeping the design locked. It also has an accessible workspace for collaboration across the whole team, including non-designers.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. InVision Cloud: Whiteboard app for designers

InVision is useful for digital product design, workflow management, and team collaboration. Their Freehand whiteboard app is free to use and makes the online collaboration process more inventive, hands-on, and visual to help teams work together.

Their Cloud platform assists with putting together interactive prototypes, without the need for code – fantastic for when you know what you want, but are having a hard time communicating that to your developers.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. Marvel: Prototypes and mockups that you can share

Marvel can help you create prototypes out of your existing design mock-ups.

Quick URL sharing and embedded codes means you can easily share your prototypes with developers, stakeholders, and your audience to gather feedback, or move along the design to the final product. Marvel also provides heatmaps, user testing to give you feedback via voice and video, and firm goals for your test users to complete.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. Balsamiq: Blueprints but for websites

Balsamiq helps build wireframes of your website that are easy for visitors to use and navigate.

Think of it as a blueprint of what your site navigation should look like. They also have online resources and courses if you want to learn more about wireframing and UI design.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Bonus: Code-free website-building apps

While we’re on the topic of website platforms and design, let’s take a quick peek at apps as well. After all, your content can live in multiple mediums.

1. Wix: Build your business without code

Wix is much more than a website builder: it has all the tools you need to build and run your business with numerous features such as a logo designer, blog tools, online scheduling software that allows your customers to book services and pay directly, online stores for eCommerce, and SEO tools. No coding required.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. AppSheet: No-code solution for apps

AppSheet cleverly helps you move projects from spreadsheet to app, automating processes and saving you and your team time and energy.

Some examples of AppSheet’s capabilities include signatures, delivery notifications, location data, barcode scanning, reports, capturing images, dashboards, emails, and applying your own steps and logic rules. It also syncs with numerous existing programs, such as Dropbox, Salesforce, Excel, Google Drive, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Mighty Networks: Community builder for businesses

If you’re interested in a channel that supports online courses and communities, Mighty Networks provides a customizable website platform that integrates these directly into the website for a seamless user experience.

You can create memberships, subscriptions, and more, all with analytics at your fingertips to help you increase retention. It integrates with Zoom, Events, and more.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. Thinkific: Online course creator

Similarly, Thinkific is an educational app that enables you to sell your own online courses and memberships, as well as build a customizable website.

The integration of memberships and communities, quizzes and assessments, and live lessons are all at your fingertips to enhance learning for your users.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Stencyl: Create games—but without coding 🤯

For interactive game creation, Stencyl does require coding experience, but you can add your own if you wish.

It makes building game sequences and logic a breeze with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop style dashboard. You can reach just about any user or player since Stencyl integrates with all major platforms. Once you’ve built your game, the app can then help launch it on the App Store or Google Play, embed ads, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. CloudMatch: Generate a tinder-style app

For any type of relationship or matchmaking, CloudMatch allows you to create an app for it. It hails itself as “Tinder-style” with profiles, geographical matching, swiping through profiles, and chat rooms.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

7. Teachable: Share what you know

Teachable gives you a domain to host your courses. They provide ecommerce features for members and an interactive experience for learners.

They also give you your own domain.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Editing and proofing

Once you have your keyword, title, and written article, it’s time to edit the content. Read over everything you wrote and use these tools to clean it up.

You can use one of the following to verify readability and discover frequent spelling and grammar mistakes in your writing:

1. Grammarly: Real-time writing assistant

Grammarly works as you type, checking your writing in real time.

It can detect contextual spelling errors and will alert you if you use the wrong word, even if it’s spelled correctly. Extensions are available for Firefox and Chrome.

Pricing: Free, but with a premium plan option

2. Hemingway App: Tighten up those sentences

Similarly, Hemingway App analyzes your writing and offers suggestions, but only in the browser, so you either have to write directly or copy and paste your existing work in progress.

Pricing: Free

3. QuillBot: Get rid of clunky sentences

QuillBot can help you rewrite clumsy sentences by suggesting word and sentence structure changes.

It has options for word substitution recommendations, such as how formal or elevated you want the language to be. However, it only allows 700 characters at a time for analysis.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Readable: Simplify your writing

Your article should be as accessible as possible; the goal is to make it simple for your audience to absorb and comprehend the information.

Readable gives you a score on how easy it is for people to understand your writing, via copying and pasting your work or writing directly into the browser.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Readability Test: Check how readable your content is

You can also use this free Readability Test tool by WebFX to evaluate your content from a URL or direct input.

Pricing: Free

Plagiarism Checkers

If you outsource writing to external contractors, part of your editing process should include running their work through plagiarism checkers. This ensures you only upload original works to your website and avoid penalties for publishing duplicate content.

Whether you’ve outsourced or written content yourself and want to check, here are a few tools you can use:

1. Quetext: Near to “fuzzy” matches

Quetext checks your documents using a color code for feedback so you can see how close your writing matches others’, from nearly exact to “fuzzy” matches.

If the tool finds plagiarized content in your work, they suggest how you can either change that section or add a citation.

This tool is my personal favorite for checking for plaigiarism, and it even shows you a side-by-side comparison of those fuzzy matches so you can judge for yourself.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Plagiarism Checker by Grammarly: Compare your content to 16 billion webpages

Grammarly’s free plagiarism checker allows you either to enter text directly or upload a file. However, you will have to sign up to get your results.

Pricing: Free

3. Duplichecker: Check your words and photos

Duplichecker is another free plagiarism checker. Check your work via direct input, file upload, or a webpage URL.

The tool tells you how much of your content is plagiarized and gives you a list of links that contain similar content. You can even check your images for plagiarism.

The free version has a limit of 1,000 words at a time. However, their website is filled with ads so be careful not to click on a misleading one.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Plagium: Integrates with Google Docs

Plagium is also free for occasional use with Google Docs add-on available or copy-pasted text.

For more frequent use, they have three levels of analysis (quick, deep, and file level to compare text documents) with transparent pricing per page.

Their free web-based option only comes with 1,000 characters, so it’s best for short copy.

Recently, they’ve also added an AI checker to help you determine the likelihood your copy was written by a human.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Plagramme: Get your plagiarism score

Plagramme quickly scans even large documents via copy and paste in the browser.

Your goal is to have as little duplicate content as possible. This tool is especially useful for longer articles.

Pricing: Free for educators and students, with paid account options

3) Graphics

A good post needs graphics. Engaging images and videos will boost your blog posts, but it’s important to make sure you have the necessary permissions for whatever you use.

Tools to create your own images

Why not go completely custom? I love how easy the tools below are to use. You can select the perfect image sizes, and they provide stock images right on their platforms to make the user experience even easier.

1. Canva: Become a graphic designer in 5 minutes

My favorite is Canva. They have a library of templates, free stock photos and graphics, over 3,000 fonts, and more than 100 design types to help you create original graphics for your blogs.

Their Pro version has even more templates and stock photos, audio, videos, and graphics, as well as higher-tier editing tools such as removing backgrounds and saving design templates.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Piktochart: Create the perfect infographic

Piktochart is great for creating clean infographics, reports, and posters that clearly communicate content.

Their templates are easy to browse based on the intended outcome (e.g., “Ways to Increase Online Sales”).

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. VistaCreate: Customize your graphics based on platform

VistaCreate has a number of templates specifically labelled for each medium – Instagram post or story, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube Thumbnail, Intro, Banner, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Pablo by Buffer: No-nonsense image creator

Pablo by Buffer doesn’t waste any time: their website jumps straight into creating your own image with a range of stock photos and templates.

Pricing: Free

5. Remix by Buffer: Instagram graphics for mobile

Remix by Buffer is a mobile app that lets you create beautiful Instagram images from your phone.

Download the app to repurpose links, Tweets, and any other form of content into an Instagram post.

Pricing: Free

6. Easelly: Convey data creatively

Easelly is another great option to create infographics, and their template categories make it easy to get started with timelines, reports, comparisons, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. Photopea: Photoshop, but online

If you have some graphic design experience and just want a free photoshop-esque tool right in your browser, look no further than Photopea.

It has a similar interface and features as Photoshop, with a UX most designers would recognize.

Pricing: Free, but with premium options (click the “account” button on the right panel or the toolbar on top of the page)

8. Pinetools’ Invert Colors: Edit existing photos

Pinetool’s online color inverter can help you edit photos as well, with special effects like sharpening an image, adjusting color and lighting, inverting colors so you can find complementary palettes, and more.

Pricing: Free

9. Paletton: Create your brand’s color scheme

Paletton’s color scheme creator helps you produce a color scheme and see coordinating hues with the click of a button.

Pricing: Free

10. Nimbus Capture: Take screenshots and scrolling screenshots

Nimbus Capture is a Chrome extension that lets you take screenshots of whole websites.

It also has screen recording features that are useful for presentations.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

11. HTML Color Codes: Identify colors codes from anywhere

If you have a picture of a shirt and want to find out what color code it is, look no further than HTML Color Codes.

The tool can identify colors for you from images and URLs. You can then use your color codes to design your own images.

Pricing: Free

Get royalty-free images

You can search through a number of websites to find high-resolution, royalty-free photos to use without worrying about copyright infringement.

1. Gratisography: Quirky photos that work with your brand

Gratisography claims to have “the world’s quirkiest collection” of free stock images, so if you’re looking for something a little creative and different, this may be the place to start.

Pricing: Free

2. Unsplash: Free professional images (trust me, they’re astoudnding)

Unsplash separates their photos into useful categories such as “Business & Work,” “Nature,” “Architecture,” and “Textures & Patterns.” Their pictures are sourced from professional and hobby photographers.

Pricing: Free

3. Pexels: Beautiful stock photos and videos

Pexels has a useful search tool that makes suggestions as you go to help you find the image you need. For example, searching for “Professional” returns a number of related suggestions.

Pricing: Free

4. Pixabay: Illustrations by professionals

Pixabay has a unique feature that allows you to search across free illustrations if you’re not looking for a photograph. They also have free stock photos, videos, and more.

Pricing: Free

5. Burst: The image source for Shopify store owners

Burst is powered by Shopify and allows users to download both high- and low-resolution photos.

Their Business Ideas are collections of free photos and case studies directly aimed at assisting eCommerce businesses, ranging from Bluetooth speakers to tea and makeup products.

Pricing: Free

6. Noun Project: Turn words into icons

The Noun Project offers photos as well, but it’s their library of icons that makes them stand out from the crowd.

Their free add-on version provides unlimited use of 100 icons that you can drag and drop into almost any Mac, Google, Adobe, or Microsoft project.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. Dreamstime: Your source of free and paid images

Dreamstime provides stock photos, but also has a free photo section that’s open to use.

Pricing: Free, but with paid options

8. imgbox: Host your images for free

An extra tip for images: Use imgbox to upload photo galleries you’d like to keep available on the web, then edit or delete them with a link.

You can leave comments in communities and forums if you don’t want to be seen as too spammy or endorsing your brand.

Pricing: Free

Video

Moving on to videos. A video is a great way to summarize an article for visitors who aren’t in the mood to read, or who want to listen to the article in the background while they do something else.

If you don’t have a dedicated video team, record a video of yourself explaining a topic or host a few webinars (which are also great for lead generation). You can take clips of your webinar recordings and embed them into your articles where relevant.

Screen capturing tools

1. Screencast-O-Matic: Record and edit your video presentations

Screencast-O-Matic is a screen capture tool that can integrate screen recordings, video editing, stock images, screenshots, music, and more – all for easy video creation for training, marketing, and demos.

It also allows for quick publishing across a variety of platforms.
Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Screencastify: Easy-to-use video creation platform

Screencastify promises to be so easy to use, you’ll have the hang of it in the time it takes you to read a sentence.

It captures live in your browser without having to download any software, allowing you to record, edit, and send/share as needed.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. Loom: Say it with video

Loom lets you create quick videos of your screen or webcam to assist virtual and hybrid workplaces.

You appear as a little bubble one one of the corners of your screen as you present valuable insights to your team.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. Soapbox by Wistia: Share your screen, then send your video with a CTA

Soapbox is like Loom, but it has a few more features that really bring it to the next level.

After recording your presentation, you can edit your presentation to show yourself, your screen and yourself side-by-side, or just your screen. After which, you can send relevant parties a link to your video.

But its best feature by far is the customizable call-to-action button that it displays at the end of your video. So if you want your viewers to book a call with you after they watch, you can create a button so they can do it in one click.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Video hosting and creation

1. Wistia: Video hosting and data analysis

Wistia is a video hosting service with a customizable platform that can group videos and podcasts together, and integrate with your CRM, advertising, and marketing tools to track engagement and A/B testing.

The platform also has countless webinars, tools, and educational guides to help get you started. Its free version grants access to all the standard features on three videos or podcasts, with paid subscription plans available for extra capabilities.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. PlayPlay: Tell stories with video

PlayPlay is an online video maker that has all the tools you need to create interviews, ads, and visual storytelling.

You can easily customize to add your branding and use their professional templates to get started. Their library has millions of free stock photos and videos to integrate with your content, and their formatting options let you create one video and adjust for different platforms (for example, landscape for website, square for social).

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

3. BombBomb: Video messaging that integrates with email

BombBomb is a video messaging service that allows you to record via your webcam, screen, or a combination of both.

It integrates with your email service to send videos easily, the same way you’d send text, to give your recipient a simple gif preview that encourages them to click and watch.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Webinar recording repurposing

1. BigMarker: Webinar tool for before, during, and after your event

BigMarker is an excellent webinar tool that supports events of all sizes.

They have a breadth of useful features you may or may not have even thought of, like redirecting webinar attendees to a certain URL once the event ends, or creating a presenter test room environment.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

2. Demio: The webinar tool for small- to medium-sized businesses

Demio is a no-download webinar service that makes registration and viewing a breeze for your customers.

Event analysis at the end shows your audience’s attendance and focus rates. Demio integrates with a range of existing marketing software as well, making them a strong contender for small- to medium-sized events.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

3. Livestorm: The webinar tool for mid-sized events

Livestorm is another webinar service that’s straightforward and easy to use.

I recommend this one for small to mid-sized standalone events. They also support live polls and Q&A within the webinar, and have a no-download meeting product for virtual brainstorms.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

4. YouTube: You know what YouTube is

YouTube is the video hosting platform that everyone uses.

While it’s congested because there are so many creators on the platform, it’s probably also where your target audience is hanging out. You can repurpose your webinars as recorded, unlisted videos for premium access. Or just upload them as public content and drive more traffic to your website.

Pricing: Free

5. Vimeo: The YouTube for business

Vimeo is another major video hosting websites, but it differentiates itself from YouTube by focusing more on professionals.

Again, you can upload your recorded webinars to Vimeo and let other people access it for free or put a paywall so that members can only watch it after signing up. Vimeo also gives you an embed code or URL that you can use on your website.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Read: 45 Webinar software options: The tools you need to execute webinars and drive leads

4) SEO and sharing

Search engine optimization

Hooray for search engine optimization! I love SEO because it adds a technical aspect to a creative pursuit. SEO is like a game: our content competes with countless others to reach the top spot on search engine results and land on readers’ screens.

1. Yoast: WordPress’s SEO partner

The Yoast plugin previously mentioned helps you create optimized articles based on a set of best practices.

Here’s a quick rundown on SEO best practices.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account (for Shopify, for WordPress)

2. Keyword Density Analyzer: Don’t keyword stuff

Use this Keyword Density Analyzer to ensure your article mentions your keyword with enough (but not too much) frequency.

Pricing: Free (their paid option is currently closed to new members)

3. Clearscope: Know what your competitors are talking about

Clearscope is a web-based tool that offers tips and suggestions as you write.

It takes the top-ranking articles for the keyword you want to target and tells you what other keywords those articles are ranking for. It then displays those keywords in an easy-to-use dashboard and then grades your article based on word count, readability, and number of key terms used.

All plans include training, onboarding, support, unlimited exporting and sharing, flexibility to change plans, and a highly intuitive interface that makes it easy to jump in. It integrates with Google Docs and WordPress as well.

Pricing: Get a paid account

4. Semrush: Powerful tools to optimize your content

Semrush (mentioned previously) is a sophisticated content and ranking tool that comes with multiple useful features to optimize your content strategy.

Semrush has a full suite of SEO tools that give you a good overview of how your website is performing relative to your target keywords, your backlink profile, and gaps in content. Their free plan allows you to monitor one project (website), and track 10 keywords.

Pricing: Free, with paid options

5. Lighthouse: Webpage performance in an easy-to-understand chart

Lighthouse is an open-source tool for web developers. It plugs into Google Chrome and can run through any web page to audit SEO, accessibility, and performance.

If you give Lighthouse a URL, it will produce a report that indicates how the page performed against a series of audits, each with a reference document providing further explanation and suggestion. The program can operate from the command line, in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module, or from a web UI so you can work however you prefer.

Pricing: Free

6. WAVE: Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

Speak of accessibility, it’s important to ensure your website is accessible so people of all different abilities can consume your content.

WAVE is a tool that allows you to input a URL to see how accessible the page and content on it is. You can see contrast issues, missing alt text, and more. All of these elements are not only great for SEO, but they help ensure your content is easy to access.

Pricing: Free

Read: Technical SEO checklist for developers: How to rank higher in Google

Amplification and sharing

Next up comes amplification. This is how you disperse your content everywhere so your audience can see it.

A quick checklist of amplification channels:

Email newsletter
Social media
Online communities
External pitches
Paid ads

Email marketing

You can follow a few email marketing best practices and share your content in your newsletter. Be sure to check your emails’ spam scores with an email spam test. You can also share them with marketing partners to see if they’ll add it to their own newsletters.

Some email marketing tools you may want to use are listed below.

1. HubSpot: Drag-and-drop email builder

HubSpot does so much more than just email, but thus far, its drag-and-drop builder has been my favorite to work with.

Their UI is intuitive, and if you also use them as a CRM, you get easy access to an updated list of tagged and segmented contacts to email.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Constant Contact: Email templates that convert

Constant Contact has an email template builder that includes mobile-optimized templates to suit a range of needs, along with reports in real time and analytics to show you how effective your campaign is.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

3. Emma: Monitors your emails so you know what works best with your target audience

Emma is a comprehensive email service that offers automation, segmentation, A/B testing, landing pages, analytics, and more. Share logos and templates across your team to save time and ensure consistent branding.

Pricing: Get a paid account

4. Goodbits: No-code (but engaging) email newsletters

Goodbits helps you create email newsletters without prior coding or design experience.

You can drag and drop saved content to add links and stored material to newsletters in minutes.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Mailchimp: The best choice for new email marketers

Mailchimp employs an AI creative assistant to help with design, audience management, automation, marketing across multiple platforms, and brand tools for a comprehensive email marketing experience.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. GetResponse: Email automation for companies of all sizes

The GetResponse email creator tool allows you to drag and drop for easy customization.

Templates, free stock photos and GIFs, and full customization of sections with desktop and mobile previews ensure you can deliver high-quality emails to your audience.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

7. SendGrid: Streamline sales emails with SendGrid

SendGrid by Twilio is an email service that can streamline email newsletters, promotional emails, shipping notifications, password resets, and more.

They offer custom plans so your email campaigns have exactly what they need to succeed.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. HEY: Organize your inbox

HEY claims to have “fixed emails.” It’s a comprehensive email service that organizes your inbox with a range of features.

You can screen emails like call screening, bundle emails from the same sender into a single row, fix bad subject lines without starting a new email thread, send large files that are prohibited on other email services, add “reply later” and private notes to emails, and more.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Email marketing tips for increasing your open and click-through rates

Social media

1. Buffer: The top social media scheduler for small businesses

I personally use Buffer to schedule social media shares across Twitter and LinkedIn.

You can play your social posts across in advance and have them go live whenever you like. If you have a team working on your social profiles, you can set up drafts for approval to ensure only on-brand content is shared.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Hootsuite: Powerful analytics for medium to large companies

Hootsuite is another great social scheduling tool with stand-out analytics.

I use them for many of my clients, since their reports are so customizable, in-depth, and easy to understand. As far as I know, they are the only platform that allows pre-scheduled Instagram stories and also has content libraries and calendars on its dashboard to make posting easier.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

3. Sprout Social: All your accounts in one place

Sprout Social saves you the hassle of manually logging in and out of your social media accounts on their platforms to post content.

It automates much of the process through helpful integrations and displays a broad overview so you can see your content calendar across multiple platforms.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. Share Link Generator: Get retweets and re-shares on your website

Encourage blog readers to share your post by generating automatic sharing links with this Share Link Generator.

Make it as easy as possible for readers to share your content.

Pricing: Free

5. Social Warfare: Get engaging buttons without sacrificing page speed

Social Warfare adds quick and customizable social share buttons to your website or blog without bogging down your loading times.

It has numerous other features and benefits, including Twitter-friendly quotes, image-rich shares, and keeping your social share counts even if you change your domain name or move to SSL.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

6. Better Click to Tweet: A plugin for WordPress

Emphasize “Tweetable” quotes and add a button to them that says, “click to Tweet.”

Better Click to Tweet integrates with your WordPress site (for free) and makes it as easy as possible for your readers to share your inspiring quotes.

Pricing: Free

7. CoSchedule’s Click To Tweet: Another WordPress click-to-tweet plugin

CoSchedule’s Click To Tweet generates click-to-tweet content directly in your blog article.

Pricing: Free

8. Planoly for Instagram: Visualize your account

Instagram is known for beautiful grids—and marketers make those grids with Planoly.

Planoly comes with an Instagram grid so you can visualize exactly what your content is going to look like as soon as you publish it. It also has a scheduler for Pinterest.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

9. Kontentino: Combine, schedule, and monitor every channel

Kontentino is one of the few social scheduling tools that supports video scheduling. It also makes it easy to manage contractors and freelancers with post approvals and support for multiple clients.

Pricing: 14-day free trial, then paid

10. Tailwind: Community for Instagram and Pinterest

Tailwind is a scheduler like all the other ones on this list—but their differentiating factor is that they have a built-in community that will re-share and like your posts.

When you schedule posts to Pinterst, Instagram, or Facebook, you can also upload your posts to Tailwind’s community where other Tailwind users can discover your content.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Social media marketing: How to promote your brand and support your customers using 7 channels

Online communities

To expand your content reach, join online communities that your target audience is also a part of

1. Reddit: The forum of the internet

Reddit is a digital forum with sections dedicated to specific topics and interests. It has everything from news to memes to subreddits (i.e., niche communities on Reddit) that focus on marketing topics.

Join a subreddits that could benefit from the content you create and that can also benefit from. But make sure that you engage genuinely on Reddit—marketers often get banned from subreddits for marketing instead of helping.

Pricing: Free

2. Slack: More than just a messaging tool

Slack is a messaging tool that brings teams and communities together, useful for tapping into your niche market. You can also find a list of free Slack communities to join at Slofile.

For content creators, we recommend Online Geniuses, Superpath, and Freelanship.

Pricing: Free

3. Digg: Make your own custom feed

Digg allows you to create custom feeds and browse topics containing content across the web, reducing clutter, and delivering the content and stories you want to see.

Pricing: Free

4. GrowthHackers: Community of growth-minded individuals

GrowthHackers is a community dedicated to sustainable and scalable growth, providing Q&A sessions with leaders, training, virtual events, and more.

Pricing: Free to join, but with premium rooms

5. Quora: Answer questions with your content

Quora (mentioned previously) is an excellent place to find people asking questions that you (and your content) can answer.

An added benefit of posting to Quora is that your answer will reach further than the asker. Quora has an excellent SEO strategy and often ranks for questions that people are searching on Google, which gives you the potential to get in front of many more readers.

Pricing: Free to sign up

How and why to make Quora a cornerstone of your B2B eCommerce content strategy

6. Hacker News: Powered by Ycombinator

Hacker News is a community and news website with a focus on computer science and entrepreneurship.

Pricing: Free

Pitching your content

1. Fast Company: Learn from other tech professionals

Fast Company accepts guest contributions for their Work Life section from professionals across the globe to share knowledge, tools, best practices, and strategies.

If you have articles relevant to Fast Company, pitch your ideas to the news site and they might just publish it.

Pricing: Free

Tip: Many news leaders similarly accept article pitches. Search the websites of Inc, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and more to find instructions.

2. Tech in Asia: News about tech in Asia

Tech in Asia is a news website that covers topics relevant to entrepreneurs, start-ups, and innovators in Asia.

Similar to Fast Company, you can pitch your content to Tech in Asia and become a contributor.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. JustReachOut: Get help connecting with journalists and influencers

Beyond social media, you can use JustReachOut to pitch to journalists and influencers in your sphere so you can enhance your exposure and publicity and build quality backlinks easily.

JustReachOut doesn’t just give you an easily searchable database of people you might want to pitch. It also gives you ll the tools you need to craft a good pitch and get it in these peoples’ hands, including verified emails, templates, and opportunity notifications.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. HARO: Become a source for journalists

HARO (mentioned previously), is dedicated to connecting bloggers and journalists. Its simple pitching process targets expert sources in the field, industry, or experience needed for any project.

To get started, register yourself as a source, check your inbox for source requests regularly, and then respond with well-thought-out pitches when a journalist reaches out so you can start getting exposure and valuable backlinks.

Pricing: Free

5. Help a B2B Writer: Get your content talked about by other companies

Help a B2B Writer (mentioned previously) connects you with B2B writers so you can get backlinks and exposure through long-form content. Or if you’re the one creating content, you can find authoritative sources that make your content more valuable to your readers.

Once you register, you can start sending requests or receiving them so you can create better content and get featured as an industry expert.

Pricing: Free

5) Monitoring, analysis, and development

If you don’t monitor data, it’s like uploading content into the void. You won’t know what converts, what your audience likes, and what you can improve.

Here are some tools to measure your results.

Web analytics

1. Google Analytics: Insights into website and blog performance

Google Analytics lets you see how many visits a certain blog post earns and how many views you get each day, week, month, or year.

Check out where your visitors come from, how long they spend on your site, and where they go after they leave.

Set up goals within Google Analytics to track conversion rates for each blogs. You can measure these with first-touch, assisted, and last-touch attribution.

First-touch: The blog was the entry point of an eventual conversion
Assisted: The blog was visited sometime along the conversion path
Last-touch: The blog was the last page viewed before conversion

Pricing: Free

2. Google Surveys: Check for brand recall

Send surveys to a group of respondents to find out whether your branding and content is making an impact.

Pricing: Free

3. Google Search Console: Find out if people are searching for your brand name

Check out Google Search Console to see if people search for you by name, which can gauge consideration and assist you in optimizing your content to achieve better results.

Pricing: Free

4. Moz’s Link Explorer: Backlink checker

Analyze your site or blog post with Moz’s Link Explorer to discover how many backlinks you received and where you’re mentioned on the web.

Simply create a free Moz account, enter your webpage’s URL, and receive a report analyzing the page. This can show how you compare to competitors, fix broken links, and reduce spam.

Pricing: Free

Single source of truth for all your data

Finally, you can pull all your dashboards together into one place with any of the tools below.

1. Databox: One place for all your data and more

Databox pools data from multiple tools and allows you to track them on any device. With 70+ native integrations and 300+ dashboard and template examples available, you can visualize data across numerous sources more easily than ever before.

Beyond having your data all in one place, Databox also lets you set goals, create notifications, and calculate metrics so you can do more with your data.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Google Data Studio: An easy to customize data platform

Google Data Studio pools data from over 100 data sources including from Google’s own products like Google Analytics. The interface is more readily customizable than other solutions like Databox, but it has fewer templates to choose from.

The best part is Data Studio is free. There’s also plenty of documentation on the web to help you get started so even newer users should be able to use it with only a bit of work.

Pricing: Free

3. Metabase: An open-source data aggregator

Metabase pulls multiple databases together, allowing you to create custom dashboards to edit, analyze, and share with your team. User-friendly to non-SQL users, it’s also SQL-friendly for those who know how to use it and want to ask deeper questions.

Metabase is easy to use but lacks some of the features of other data aggregators that make some power users turn away.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

4. Dreamdata: Know where your traffic is coming from

Dreamdata gives insight into every customer’s journey, from a first-time anonymous visitor to an existing subscriber. It shows actionable insights to boost revenue by streamlining multiple data points.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Heap Analytics: Measure every action

Heap has a visual event definer that allows you to go into a preview of your website and click exactly what action you want to measure. This is a great option for those who want a visual way to define goals and conversions.

Heap can take all of those definitions and measure conversion rate across your funnel, track different actions, and monitor audience data such as visits and sources.

Pricing: Free, with paid options

6. Baremetrics: Get rid of churn

Baremetrics can help you reduce churn by providing insight into subscription data, with detailed analyses of month-to-month revenue, forecasting cash flow, and more.

Baremetrics gives you data in an understandable format so that you can find and patch the leaks in your customer funnel.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

7. Woopra: Single source of truth for all departments

Woopra is a related analytics and customer journey tool, connecting multiple data points (sales, support, marketing, and more) into one dashboard to give you actionable insights and analyses.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

8. Klipfolio: Data charts in a visual, easy-to-understand format

Klipfolio converts data into easy-to-skim dynamic visuals to help you and your team analyze leads, monthly recurring revenue, new conversions, and more.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

9. Trust Insights: Learn to track or get help

If you don’t want to handle the analysis and attribution tracking yourself, Trust Insights is a service that provides training and education for marketers, and solves issues with data collection and measurement.

They can also assist with data mining, analytics best practices, metrics selection, predictive analytics, and more.

Pricing: Book a call for analytics services or get their data course for marketers

10. Firstparty: Bypass ad blockers

Gather first-party data even when your visitors are blocking ads.

Firstparty gathers information about your website visitors using their own proprietary cookies. They then give you the data in a “warehouse” so that you can search through it and do what you want with it.

Pricing: Pay as you go

Read: A guide to customer-first data: How to collect zero-party and first-party data in a privacy-first world

Monitoring coverage

A number of services exist that can help you monitor your brand’s reputation and mentions across the web. Below are just a few examples.

1. Mention: Grow your brand awareness

Mention allows you to monitor online media (including reviews, social media, news, and blogs) to see who’s talking about you and what they’re saying so you can better plan how you engage with your audiences.

Use this information to stay on top of the public’s perception of you and your competitors’ brands. Then use what you learn to build and nurture your brand and craft your social media strategy.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

2. Talkwalker: Know how your brand stacks up against the rest

Talkwalker helps you monitor what’s being said about you across the web and then analyzes that data to give you an idea of how your brand outreach is working compared to your competitors.

Use their tool to monitor your brand online so you can get ahead of negative conversations early, compare your brand against competitor benchmarks, and create content clusters to help you better visualize all the topics your audience is talking about.

Pricing: Book a free demo

3. Brand24: Know who is saying what about your brand online

Brand24 is a brand monitoring tool that makes it easy to stay on top of your digital reputation.

Brand24 uses AI to segment mentions of your brand into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. You can then get notified of these mentions so you can join conversations and shift perceptions in real time.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Heatmaps

Heatmaps show how your readers and viewers interact with your page, visualizing data through a color-code system representing different values. These can reveal, for example, how far your reader scrolled down a page or what they clicked on.

1. VisualEyes: Know where your users’ eyes will be

VisualEyes uses AI to provide near-instant feedback on your site design so you can gauge how users will interact with your site and where their attention is likely to linger. provides you with three key reports: Attention Map, Clarity Score, and Areas of Interest.

Instead of relying on laborious eye-tracking studies, VisualEyes gives you this data right away. Simply upload your site design and VisualEyes will tell you how audiences are likely to react through three reports: Attention Map, Clarity Score, and Areas of Interest. Using this product you can test designs before release to speed up product cycles and spend less time wavering on the particulars.

Pricing: Free, with paid account options

2. Hotjar (mentioned previously): Get access to in-depth user behavior data

Hotjar (mentioned previously) speeds up arduous data analysis by generating intuitive heatmaps to show viewer behavior on your page. You can also gauge user behavior with Hotjar by viewing user behavior recordings and adding feedback forms and surveys to your site.

Hotjar also integrates with dozens of existing tools so it can easily slot into your tech stack without compromising data privacy compliance.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

3. heatmap: Get heatmap data with no extra fuss

heatmap integrates directly with your website to show user heatmaps within seconds so you can make data-backed changes and influence user behavior with better UX and UI.

heatmap is easy to install with a small footprint (i.e., it won’t slow down your pages), the tool guarantees privacy for your readers, and you can order extra consulting services if you need more advanced data.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Session replays

1. FullStory: Understand how your users actually interact with your site

Instead of just giving you quantitative analytics like clicks or scrolls on heatmaps, FullStory takes things another step by giving you qualitative data from user session replays so you can craft an even better user experience.

FullStory helps you understand where the user is clicking, where they may get confused or frustrated, and how easy it is for them to find what they want. This provides a detailed picture rich in behavioral insights for you to act on, all while maintaining user privacy.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

Conversion optimization

1. VWO: Optimize your site or product with A/B tests

VWO is an A/B testing tool that helps you set up tests between two versions of a webpage, app, or product so you can use data to improve your UX, UI, and messaging.

VWO makes optimization easy by laying out test results with performance statistics like conversion rates and total revenue so you can better understand how to continue to improve your product for even higher retruns.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

2. Mutiny: Personalize your website for better lead generation

Mutiny helps optimize your content for conversions and lead generation by cleverly identifying and targeting visitors with personalized copy and content.

Mutiny works by helping you create personalized web pages aimed at specific segments that it identifies in your web traffic. By tailoring your messaging to each segment’s needs, you make it more likely that they’ll convert and take that next step with your business.

Pricing: Request a demo

3. Appcues: Increase product adoption through smarter user flows

Appcues helps you create, track, and optimize onboarding flows complete with in-app messaging and personalization options through a no-code builder.

To boost product or feature adoption with Appcues, simply go through the process of build, track, optimize, and repeat. The more you experiment and improve your user flows, the better your user retention numbers should become.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Miscellaneous

Here, I’ve listed a few other useful tools that don’t quite fit into any of the above categories.

1. Brain.fm: Scientifically designed mood music

We all need help concentrating from time to time. Brain.fm utilizes science to create the perfect background soundtrack to reduce distractions.

They’re open about the research behind the music, with white papers and sleep studies if you want to learn more. Try five sessions for free.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

2. Growsurf: Grow your user base through a smart referral program

Growsurf is a simple and powerful automated referral program that can track who promotes your most popular content on your team or among your users.

Features include copy-and-paste code to embed into your app or website, quick setup, automated reward fulfillment, and integration with your brand for a seamless, custom experience for your customers.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

3. Flow Club: Find focus with friends

Flow Club is a place to find virtual coworking spaces that help you stay accountable and on task for blocks of time.

Each flow club session is guided by a leader and set for a pre-determined amount of time. Users state what they hope to accomplish in that time and then report back with how they did at the end of the session.

Pricing: Join the waitlist

4. Toggl: Keep track of your time efficiently

Toggl allows users to track how long they spend on specific tasks and projects through a mobile app, web app, or browser extension.

To track your hours all you need to do is name your task and press start and stop as your work and take breaks. If you ever forget to start or stop your timer, you can always go back in and make changes manually.

Pricing: Free, but with paid account options

5. Web Page Highlighter by 7labs: Targeted URL creator

Web Page Highlighter helps users easily create links that open to specific highlighted text so users no longer have to hunt through a page for a specific stat, image, or section you’re referencing.

Once this extension is installed, simply highlight the text you want to link to, right-click, select “Copy URL with Highlighted text,” and drop your custom URL wherever you need it.

Pricing: Free

6. Awareness: Unique time awareness solution

Awareness is a zen approach to introducing breaks into your workday.

Awareness plays the sound of a Tibetan singing bowl after every hour you send continuously working on your computer. This gentle nudge is to remind you of time passing so you can take the small breaks your body needs.

Pricing: Free

7. Statista: A single place for authoritative statistics

Statista is a complete database of business statistics, reports, and outlooks sourced from reliable data sources like government agencies and industry leaders.

Simply type in what you want to learn and you’ll be presented a list of relevant statistics. To find exactly what you need, filter by country, time, or the kind of report you’re looking for.

Pricing: Free, but with paid options for reports

8. KingSumo: Host giveaways seamlessly

KingSumo is a giveaway platform that helps you host giveaways on social media.

It tracks comments, mentions, and tags so that you know who your contest participants are within a single, unified dashboard. It also sends rewards to your contest winners based on parameters that you set.

Pricing: Free, but they also have a one-time fee option

9. TextExpander: The shortcut to writing

TextExpander helps you write faster with programmable shortcuts or snippets.

For example, when I type “fpao” it automatically turns into “Free, but with paid account options” so that I don’t need to type the whole thing. You can use TextExpander for words and links you regularly use like the site search feature we mentioned earlier.

Pricing: Free trial, then you need to get a paid account

Wrapping up — Use the right content tools and strategies to elevate your efforts

With more than 200 content tools (and growing), there’s something out there to help you take your content creation to the next level. I hope you found something useful in this directory.

P.S. I keep a running list of neat new tools that come out so I can update this article every now and then. Did I miss your favorite tool? Please let me know!

Originally published December 7, 2015
Updated December 7, 2020
Updated February 7, 2022
Updated April 28, 2022

1) Inspiration and collecting ideas

Industry trends

1. Google Alerts: Monitor what people are saying all over the web

2. Talkwalker Alerts: “Better than Google Alerts”

3. Pocket: Put interesting content into your virtual “pocket”

4. Flipboard: Make interesting content into a personal magazine

5. Exploding Topics: Discover trends before they happen

6. Muck Rack: Stay on top of industry news

Audience research

1. Audiense: Visualize your audience segments

2. SparkToro: Resonate with your audience by knowing how they see themselves

3. Attest: Reach 110 million people for consumer research

4. Pollfish: Get audience data from over 160 countries

5. Dynata: Reach 62+ million business professionals and consumers

6. SurveyMonkey Audience: No fuss customer research solution

7. AYTM (Ask Your Target Market): Demographic targeting for over 100+ million respondents

8. Respondent: Reach and reward business professionals

9. Conjoint.ly: Data in days, not weeks

10. Wynter: Get customer reactions on your content

11. Find My Audience: Audience overview in seconds

12. Facebook IQ: Audience Insights: Get to know your audience

13. Market Finder by Think with Google: Know where your best audience is

Customer research

Building your own surveys

1. Bellini Slushie: Survey question database

2. Typeform: Survey beautifully

3. Google Forms: Survey + Data

4. Airtable: Survey to workflow in seconds

5. Hotjar: Survey ALL your website visitors

6. PMF Survey: Free and powerful

Customer interviews

1. Tactiq: Google Cloud’s official technology partner

2. Fireflies: Fred will take care of the notetaking

3. Rev: Accurate AI and human transcripts at your fingertips

4. Otter: Beautiful notes from a reliable “assistant”

5. Descript: Edit videos—but through text!

6. Avoma: Your AI assistant before, during, and after meetings

7. Epiphany: Organize your qualitative data into a searchable database

8. Grain: Record Meetings AND add notes to them below

Team brainstorms

1. Gong: AI that analyzes your calls

2. Vidyard: Record your sales pitch and hit send

3. Dialpad (formerly Uberconference): Easy interface for all conversations

4. Zoom: Breakout rooms, screen recordings, and more!

Competitor analysis

1. Ahrefs: All things SEO

2. Semrush: Market research made easy

3. SimilarWeb: Analyze companies similar to yours

4. BONUS TOOL: Google site search

Keyword and topic research

1. Keyword.io: Free keywords for more than just Google

2. Keyword Tool: Google autocomplete but in a tool

3. Keysearch: Low-competition keywords upfront

4. Keywords Everywhere: Literally, keywords everywhere

5. Ubersuggest: SEO + Training + Keywords

6. Help a B2B Writer: Connect with other B2B writers

7. HARO (Help A Reporter Out): More quotes and authoritative voices

8. Vancery: A network of business professionals

Compiling your ideas

1. Evernote: The only note-taking app you’ll ever need

2. Trello: The kanban board where ideas are born

3. Google Keep: Your virtual post-it note collection

4. Notion: Your office, online

5. Avrio: Easily share your research with the right people

6. Bonus tool: Obsidian: Your virtual second brain

2) Writing and editing

Formulating your title

Tools to find titles that perform well

1. BuzzSumo: See what everyone else is doing.

2. Ahrefs Content Explorer: Find titles that perform well

Tools to test title ideas

1. SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator: SEO titles that could rank

2. Portent’s Content Idea Generator: Fun titles for inspiration

3. Capitalize My Title: Look smart with the right capitalization

Tools to find questions to inspire your titles

1. Quora: Directly answer real questions

2. AnswerThePublic: Get questions based on keywords

3. AlsoAsked: See the questions searchers are asking by brand, question, or query

Tools to make your title engaging

1. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer: Grade your title

3. S imilarWeb: Analyze companies similar to yours