30+ Must Have Tools For Any Digital Marketer

Online marketing involves knowing a good amount about a whole lot of things; it’s sort of a jack-of-all-trades type of business. It requires the marketer or business owner to have a whole toolbox full of handy things to help them promote their content, improve website traffic, increase conversions, and more.
To help digital marketers save time and fill their toolbox with everything they need, we’ve rounded up thirty must-have online marketing tools for small and big businesses alike. This list includes links to tools from important aspects of digital marketing, such as SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and analytics. Some of the tools are complex and involved, some are pretty basic. Some of the tools are free, some are not, and some are a bit of both.
Whichever aspect of digital marketing you need the most assistance with, check out the list and you’re bound to find the tool you’ve been missing.

SEO Tools

 1. Google Suggest

Cost: FREE
Google Suggest is an absolute must-have online marketing tool when it comes to finding keywords or content topic ideas. These suggestions can vary by search history, region, and language, but they all come from how people actually use the search engine. So, rather than offering suggestions worded in a way that is best for robots, they word them in a way that is best for people actually conducting the searches.
For example, type in the phrase “pet food coupons” and Google suggests:
1.   Pet food coupons online
2.   Pet food coupons printable
3.   Pet food coupons 2016
4.   Pet food coupons Canada
Try it with just “pet food coupon” and Google offers:
1.  Pet food coupon
2.  Pet food coupon deals
3.  Pet food coupon code
4.  Pet food coupons printable
These are all genuine searches conducted by other people, ranked by popularity. If there are lots of people doing searches for “pet food coupons” and then go type “pet food coupons printable”, that can help make “pet food coupons printable” appears as an autocomplete suggestion.

2. Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

Cost: FREE
This online marketing tool functions exactly like it sounds, and is a must-have if you’re worried about Google penalties. The Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool allows the user to search for and identify any over-optimized anchor text links on external sites. This is good, because these types of links tend to look unnatural to Google and can end up getting flagged. The tool also lets the user send in a change request directly to the site webmasters.

3. Domain Hunter Plus

Cost: FREE

The Domain Hunter Plus is a free Chrome plugin that lets the user scan the page for any dead links and available domains. It can crawl hundreds of links on just one page, and provides error status codes to make your diagnostic process easier, and even lets the user export results in .csv format.

4. Ubersuggest

Cost: FREE

Ubersuggest is a super handy tool that lets you quickly find a whole batch of new keywords you wouldn’t normally find when using the common Google Keyword Planner (which is still a great tool!). They also have a free KeywordEverywhere extension for both Chrome and Firefox.

5. KeywordTool.io

Cost: Basic is FREE, but the Pro version has several plans, ranging from $48/month to $88/month.
KeywordTool.io is a free online marketing tool lets you get up to 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions for each search term you enter. They’re based on Google searches and the language you select. This tool is a great way to increase your content marketing, especially if you’re trying to drive more people to your website. By using this tool, you get insight into what they are searching for on Google and what they are looking to buy. You can create product offers or content that directly reflects these trends (using these keywords!), which would draw more people to your website.

6. Website Grader

Cost: FREE
Website Grader is a free online marketing tool that scans and grades your site, and then sends the results to you in an email. It evaluates your site based on key metrics like performance, SEO, security, and mobile optimization. If you’re trying to improve your site, boost your SEO, and increase your website traffic, this is a must-use tool.

7. Website SEO Score Checker

Cost: FREE
Its name may be long, but the Website SEO Score Checker tool from Small SEO Tools is easy to use. Just enter in your domain or a website’s URL, check the box to let them know you’re a real person, and then click on “Check SEO” to get a full report. If you’re trying to figure out what you need to improve in order to grow your online presence, this online marketing tool is a must-have.

8. Keyword Density Analyzer

Cost: FREE
The Keyword Density Analyzer from SEOBook lets you find the most commonly used keywords and phrases on any given page. If you’re trying to include enough keywords to boost your content’s SEO, but don’t want to overdo it, this tool is a must-have. It’s also great for learning from your competitor’s, and getting an idea of what keywords they’re ranking for.

9. SimilarWeb

Cost: Trial is FREE, plans are not.
SimilarWeb lets you compare two websites side-by-side. This is great for gaining insight about competitors, and figuring out how you can step up your SEO game.

10. Browseo

Cost: FREE
Browseo lets you see your website in the same way a search engine would. It’s helpful when you want to see the hierarchy you’ve assigned to certain elements of your site, even if you weren’t aware of it. You can also get insight into your website and that of your competitors.

Social Media Tools

11. Hootsuite

Cost: FREE for limited use, but they have plans that start at $9.99/month.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular and widely used online marketing tools for social media management. It has virtually every function you could possibly need, all presented within an easy-to-use format.

12. TweetDeck

Cost: FREE
If you’re going to focus your social media marketing efforts on Twitter, TweetDeck is a definite must-have tool to store in your proverbial toolbox. It makes it easy to see everything at once, manage multiple accounts at once, follow certain tags, check your notifications, and post new Tweets.

13. Buffer

Cost: Limited use is FREE, but plans start at $10/month and go up to $399/month
Buffer makes it easy to share any article/post/webpage you’re currently reading. You can also schedule your own content to be shared across your connected social media accounts.

14. Paper.li

Cost: Basic plan is FREE
Paper.li lets you share content from your own site, or that of others within your industry, and then publishes it in the format of an online newspaper. This is a great way to get your content seen by a new audience, as well as get it in front of others within your target audience.

15. Bitly

Cost: FREE
Honestly, what would a social media tools section be without Bitly? This link shortening tool is incredible useful for posting updates on Twitter, and saves on character space. It also just makes your update look less cluttered!

Content Marketing Tools

16. Prezi

Cost: Plans start at $4.99/month
Prezi lets you create a slideshow presentation that isn’t yawn-inducing. It’s easy to use, and has plenty of templates to choose from. It makes it easy to share information in a visual way, rather than just relying on written content.

17. Blog Topic Generator

Cost: FREE
This content marketing tool does just what it says it will do – it generates topics when you’re stuck in a blog post rut. The Blog Topic Generator is easy to use, and has some great topic ideas.

18. CoSchedule

Cost: Plans start at $60/month
CoSchedule is a must-have online marketing tool that makes it easy to schedule your content across various social media platforms. It also has a handy Headline Analyzer to help you measure how effective your headline is.

19. SlideShare

Cost: FREE
SlideShare functions a lot like a social network for presentations. It’s a great way to put together content for webinars, lectures, and conferences. You create the presentation, and then share it with your audience.

20. Social Studio FX

Cost: $49 One Time ($99 Optional Template Upgrade Available)

Social Studio FX is a simple yet powerful way to make your graphics for your social media and advertising. Easy to use point and click interface, combined with a ton of images and templates, it’s a powerful and highly recommended. Also a best seller of Snaptactix!

21. PicMonkey

Cost: Basic plan is FREE
PicMonkey is a great tool for creating or editing images and website/blog graphics. It’s easy to use, and they have different themes and special fonts and graphics available for different occasions, holidays, and needs.

22. Quora

Cost: FREE
It may not be the first site that comes to mind when talking about online marketing tools, but Quora can be a gold mine for content marketing. You can answer questions others may have, and then link to relevant pages on your site. You can showcase your industry authority by offering expert advice or solutions, and you can drive traffic to your site with blog posts and links.

23. Google Alerts

Cost: FREE
As simple as it is, Google Alerts is one of the best online marketing tools to have when it comes to your content marketing. It lets you keep up on the latest trends and happenings within your industry, providing you with an immediate look into what’s going on. Your brand will be up-to-date on all of the latest information, as it’s published, and able to create or share relevant content.

24. Evernote

Cost: Basic plan is FREE, other plans are $34.99/yr and $69.99/yr
If you tend to have multiple folders with bits of research or notes scattered about your computer, Evernote is a must-have online marketing tool. This lets you save practically anything you find online into a completely personalized folder arrangement that syncs across all of your devices.

25. Twitter Chats

Cost: FREE
Now, Twitter may be a social media site and tool, but the Twitter chats serve as a great resource for your content marketing. You get into discussions with other industry experts and brands, get a feel for what’s trending right now, and find out what the hot issues are. It also helps you see what your prospects are currently interested in, what they’re struggling with, and what solutions they are looking for. It gives you a focus for your content, and provides an excellent way of demonstrating your brand’s value.

26. Pixel Studio FX

Cost: $67 (one time only!)

Pixel Studio FX is a user-friendly web app makes it easy to create eCovers for your online marketing business. It also includes an Enterprise/Commercial license for free, so you can sell these designs as your own and still keep 100% of the profits.

Analytics Tools

27. Google Analytics

Cost: FREE, but premium plans are available
The biggest name in analytics, Google Analytics has everything you could possibly need to track the effectiveness of your website content, campaigns, and other types of marketing collateral. You can see how many people access your site, where they come from, how long they spend on each page, how many pages into your site they venture, and more. It’s a complex online marketing tool, but designed in a way that makes it extremely user-friendly.

28. ClickTale

Cost: Free demo, priced plans
ClickTale is a handy online marketing tool that provides video recordings of real user sessions. This lets you go through and see what people clicked on, what they didn’t, and what they interacted with the most.

29. SubjectLine

Cost: FREE

If your subject line isn’t compelling enough, your subscribers or other recipients probably won’t bother to open them. So, how do you know whether or not your subject line is enticing? SubjectLine is an easy-to-use online marketing tool that will analyze your subject line and tell you where to improve.

30. Formisimo

Cost: FREE trial (7 days), plans range from $50/mo to $180/mo or POA/mo
Formisimo picks up where other analytics tools leave off. They can tell you which pages were visited, where your visitors came from, and what they did on your site. What they can’t tell you is why your visitors left without converting to customers or subscribers. This online marketing tool can tell you exactly that.

31. Piwik

Cost: FREE, but you must download it and host it on your own server
Piwik offers a lot of the same features other analytics tools do, including visitor maps, keyword search, and session tracking. However, this tool takes things one step further by offering a mobile app and unlimited data storage. The setup is pretty complicated, and the program is a bit involved, but the dashboard can be customized to fit your preferences and needs.

32. ClickPerfect

Cost: FREE for 30 days, $19/month after

ClickPerfect is custom software was built from the ground up, designed as an easy-to-use click tracking click targeting platform. This tool lets you mask/cloak links and track their clicks in real time. Tracking every click on your site can help you maximize your audience reach and revenue, making this tool an absolute must-have.
Choose an online marketing tool from each section to try out.
Oh and don’t forget to like this article and share with your fellow digital marketer.
If you found a new tool from our TOP 30 list to help in your marketing efforts, I’m sure they will too!
Make sure you let us know which tools you use and which ones you plan to get in the comment section BELOW!

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The Only 14 Startup Tools You Need to Build a Unicorn

Imagine if you had to send marketing emails manually, or keep your records in a tattered binder on your desk.

Every company, even startups, needs to make a minimum investment in SaaS tools for work like email marketing, project management, and tracking sales.

But the catch is that some of these startup tools can cost huge amounts of money, and when you’re a young startup you don’t want to be forking out in excess of $2,000/user/month for just one piece of software.

The point of this post is to explain the minimum viable SaaS stack your startup should invest in, based on what we’ve found out at Process Street in our many (many, many, many) tool-testing escapades. I’ll even do the math for you, and collate the estimated annual cost at the end.

Ready to start building up your toolbox with the best SaaS out there?
Here we go: 

Database management: Airtable

Without Airtable, we’d still be storing data in various random spreadsheets, constantly having permission issues, and be unable to get a proper picture of all our data. With it, we now store all of our marketing and product data in one place that connects to over 750 different apps via Zapier.

Airtable takes you a step further than spreadsheets because it’s a relational database.

Setting up a database sounds harder than it actually is, probably because databases used to have to be made in complex apps or by using something like SQL.

Thanks to Airtable, everyone can have access to the power of a database that can hold everything from SEO data to customers and marketing contacts, all linked together so you can keep the data in a single, automatable, accessible place and stop scrambling to find what you need on your hard drive or inside Google Drive.

Pricing: free, or $12/user/month 

Marketing automation & support: Intercom

Intercom is an all-in-one platform for communicating with your customers, both for marketing and support. Last year we were using MailChimp for marketing automation, and Intercom for support, but we recently switched over to purely running our email marketing through Intercom.



Intercom consists of three products: Respond, Engage, and Educate:

Respond is an awesome support solution, with assignments, notes, automation, team inboxes, and performance metrics. It’s priced from $53/month for 250 customer contacts, but the price doesn’t rocket up as your business grows, it climbs gradually. For example, it’ll cost you $101/month for 4,000 customer contacts (and unlimited team members at every level).



Engage is Intercom’s marketing automation side. It lets you send messages manually at any time, based on user activity (perfect for SaaS and subscription businesses), or drip out a sequence of messages to anyone added to your blog subscriber list. In short, it does everything you’d expect from a marketing automation/email marketing service, but also has the layer of user insights because it’s linked to your product or service, too.

Total pricing for Intercom’s Respond and Engage products: $150/company/month for 1,000 contacts
Integrations: Zapier

Zapier is a platform that builds integrations between apps that wouldn’t usually integrate. For example, Intercom doesn’t have a natural integration with Sumo, but we need to send all blog subscribers (some of which come in through Sumo pop-ups) to Intercom. To solve that, we use Zapier to connect the two together.

And that’s just one of the hundreds of use cases. We even use Zapier with our own product, Process Street, to run checklists and add assignments to tasks when an action happens in another app.

Some of my own Zapier use cases at Process Street include:
Add new tagged Airtable URLs with titles to multiple Buffer accounts at once
Create a Google Sheet of incoming emails for analysis
Listen for the words ‘run meeting’ in our content creation Slack channel to fire off a Process Street meeting checklist
Run a Process Street pre-publish checklist when a blog article card is moved into a Trello list
Automatically tweet all RSS feed content
Add Trello cards in the ‘inbox’ list to Todoist with the same due date

So, as you can see, it’s a tool that helps you cut down on masses of data entry. Want to learn more about Zapier? We’ve written a huge ebook on the topic! Get it here.

Pricing: free, or $18.33/month for 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks 

Process management: Process Street

The scalability of your startup depends on how well new hires can pick up the pace, learn your processes, and start being efficient. Without documented processes, it’s practically impossible to scale because you’ll be spending time explaining tasks to new hires over and over again. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just hand them a process and check their progress quickly?

That’s where Process Street comes in. With Process Street, you can transfer your company’s knowledge to checklist templates that explain exactly how your team is expected to get the work done. This is great for things like sales qualification, blog pre-publish, employee onboarding, or client onboarding. That’s because all of these tasks have a structure and margin for error.

Here’s an example of an employee onboarding checklist built inside Process Street:

As you can see, each step has a checkbox and can contain form fields, images, videos, text, and more — all to help you explain the tasks that need doing, or to capture structured data.

A library of up-to-date, properly documented processes means you can scale your team with little effort and quickly check the work of your organization at a glance from the Process Street dashboard, which shows you how far each task is progressing:



Process Street also has a Zapier integration, which means you can either link checkboxes to actions in other apps (like sending all form field data to a spreadsheet when a task is checked) or run and assign checklists automatically (e.g. when a new card is labeled in Trello or when you get an email with certain text in the subject line).

Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

CRM: Close.io

A CRM is where sales and marketing teams can add leads, communicate with them, and track conversations in one place. It’s an alternative to separate email inboxes, and Close.io is our CRM of choice here at Process Street.

Even the cheapest package comes with unlimited leads, contacts, and opportunities, meaning there’s no cap on the number of companies you can reach out to. But what really sets Close.io apart is its amazing search functionality. Using the app’s own variables (or even custom variables you add yourself), you can quickly filter your leads to get a targeted list. For example, you could get every lead in New York City who you haven’t emailed in the past week but have spoken to on the phone at least once.

I find it useful for marketing, too. We use Airtable to collate contacts we’ve mentioned in our blog posts, then use Zapier to automatically add them to Close.io with a tag; when you search the tag, you get a list of everyone to email telling them they’ve been mentioned, and you can bulk email them a template using the tag as a snippet for the URL of the promoted post.

We also use it in conjunction with Process Street for sales qualification.

Close.io might seem expensive at first, but it also covers the cost of calls and won’t need to be purchased for every member of the organization, like a lot of these tools do.

Pricing: $59/user/month 

Chat: Slack

Slack is a chat app for teams — check our review here. With it, you can cut email out of the equation entirely and focus on using the most efficient kind of interface instead of the long-outdated email.

Inside Slack, you can direct message your co-workers and create channels for each team inside your company. For example, we have a content creation channel where we share resources, have a quick morning catch-up chat, post our WIP articles, and generally communicate a lot more than we would do with just email.

Slack also has a ton of integrations meaning you could take it from being just a chat app like Facebook Messenger to being a fully-fledged dashboard for your notifications.

For example, you can link Slack to Trello and get a constant flow of notifications fed into the relevant channel. If you often work with someone in particular on a board, you can add a Trello integration to that channel and automatically update each other alongside the chat.



Pricing: free, or from $6.67/user/month 

Cloud storage: Google Drive

Cloud storage is one of the most basic requirements for modern businesses. Without it, you’re stuck in the ancient days where files had to be emailed from your hard drive, or accessed through the company intranet. I was always under the impression that most businesses used cloud storage, but when a recent study revealed that only 8% of companies share documents using cloud services, I was shocked.

Here are the usages and benefits of cloud storage:
Store files outside of company servers, minimizing risk of losing resources
Access files anywhere that has an internet connection
Use another server’s bandwidth, don’t clog up your own company’s
Save money on internal storage space
Control permissions and access to all your company’s resources

And, while there are a ton of different cloud storage services out there, we chose Google Drive because it gives you the best value for money and natively integrates with the rest of the tools we use in the Google suite, like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs.

Pricing: $10/user/month including unlimited storage and all G Suite features 

Google Suite vs. Office 365

This little section could be an entire article, but for the purposes of this article it’s worth quickly mentioning that Google Suite and Office 365 are parallel products as far as the tools go (Docs = Word, Sheets = Excel, etc) but the best way to create email accounts and control access for your company domain is to use Google Suite. You can get a plan that we use at Process Street that costs $5/user/month.

However, in some cases it might make more sense to get both. With Office 365, you also get Microsoft Flow (which can replace Zapier in some situations), Microsoft Teams (Slack alternative), and Microsoft Planner (Trello alternative).

I’ll talk more about this later on when we get to pricing, but due to their dominance it’s obvious some companies are looking for a Microsoft-heavy solution.
Project and task management: Trello

Trello is a kanban board app that you can imagine like an infinite amount of sticky notes, lists, and boards.



We divide our team’s functions up into boards, and use lists to denote progress through the flow, from ‘idea’ to ‘work in progress’ to ‘done’. With Trello, all of our team’s work is centralized and it’s easy to quickly see the status for particular tasks or add tasks from other apps using their integrations.

Trello is such an open-ended app you can use it to organize pretty much anything: make an editorial calendar, a list of blog post ideas, a list of growth hacking experiments, or just your personal to-do items. Because of that, it organizes a lot of our day-to-day work at Process Street and has just about every feature you could need.

Here’s an example of a Trello board we use at Process Street for managing our editorial calendar and our blog article creation process at the same time:



Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

Payment processing: Stripe

For subscription businesses (SaaS included), ecommerce, or anywhere that collects payments from customers over the internet, Stripe is an essential tool. Basically, it’s a payment processing API you can build into your software or website to let users put in their credit card details, be charged, and then notify you.

With Stripe, you can accept debit and credit card payments from customers in any country in over 135 currencies. Without Stripe or a similar API, it’d be a pain in the ass.

Pricing: 2.9% of charge + 30 cents per transaction
Source control: GitHub

Most startups are in the software industry, so it makes sense to assume you need source code control and a repository.



While GitHub is most well known as a network for open source software, it can also be used privately as an internal tool to control edits and rollbacks on collaborative coding projects. At Process Street, we use GitHub to push updates live to the server after they’ve been through the review process. That way, we basically make sure nothing’s going live that will break everything.

Pricing: $9/user/month for the teams plan

 

Design prototyping: InVision

If your startup is involved with any kind of digital design, whether that’s UI design or web design, you’ll find it hard to get anywhere without a product like InVision.

InVision was built to combat the problems designers have when trying to show clients and team mates how their design will work, and what it’ll feel like to use. By uploading screenshots of your design, you can build working prototypes inside InVision complete with clickable elements.



And, when you get feedback from your team, they can comment directly on the part of the interface they’re referring to, eliminating a frustrating clarification process.

InVision is priced per active prototype, which means that if you only work on one project at a time, you can use it for free. If you need more, the pricing starts at $15/month.

Pricing: free, or from $15/month

 

Accounting: FreshBooks

FreshBooks is a full accounting suite for startups and SMBs. It includes invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, tasks/projects, and reporting (for profits, expenses, etc.)

It’s an alternative to managing your accounts using spreadsheets, or even an alternative to hiring an accountant because much of what FreshBooks does negates the need for a dedicated accountant, especially in a small startup.

Scan receipts, request payments, and have everything automatically logged in one place so you don’t run into any compliance issues.

Pricing: from $15/month 

Social media management: Buffer

For an organization without a dedicated social media team (or at least a member of the marketing team that spends a certain number of hours per week managing social media), maintaining multiple social channels can be a huge drain on your company’s time, but with Buffer you can run social media on autopilot.

At Process Street, we combine Buffer with Zapier to automatically add new RSS feed items and new Airtable records. We also have a zap that adds any newly Buffer’d article to all of our Buffer social channels at once. These methods are much more effective than manually adding content, especially for use cases such as adding new posts to every employee’s Twitter feed, too.

Pricing: $10/month 

SaaS metrics: ProfitWell

ProfitWell is a 100% free tool from the creators of Price Intelligently. It works with Stripe, Braintree, and Zuora, all of which are tools for processing payments. So, whenever a customer pays you for your SaaS product, you get free metrics that guide the future of your product and give you an indication of its health.



Pricing: free forever 

The total annual cost for your startup: free plans where possible

The cost of a SaaS stack is different for every startup, so there’s not an entirely accurate way to estimate costs, especially when some tools are priced per company, some are priced per user, and some will only be used by one member of the organization.

Regardless, I’ve tried my best to make an estimate based on assumptions like: the CRM will only be used by one person, Airtable will be used by everyone, etc. In this estimate, I’ve assumed that a startup consists of 10 people, but there’s also a per user cost breakdown for tools the whole company will use.

Phew. Here goes:



Notes:
Intercom costs the same no matter if one person uses it or the whole company uses it. What you pay for is $X/contact, and this example assumes 1,000 contacts
I’ve listed the necessary users for Close.io as 1 because it’s likely to be a shared account with multiple email addresses connected
Stripe has been omitted from the list of costs because it’s impossible to calculate 

The total annual cost for your startup: premium plans without Office 365

Because of the nature of freemium, any growing company will get too big for the free plan in time. For a company of 10, it’s likely some of the tools will need to be paid.

Using the same estimated user counts and going by annual pricing, here’s what you’d pay to use these tools on the premium plan:



Notes:
I’ve kept Trello on the free plan because it’s not absolutely necessary to upgrade when there’s so many great unlimited features already. 

Alternatives: Microsoft Office 365

While we were brainstorming for this article, we realized that some of the tools listed here are bundled together in Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Namely:
Microsoft Flow replaces Zapier
OneDrive replaces Google Drive
Microsoft Planner replaces Trello
Microsoft Teams replaces Slack

It’s cheaper to get the full Office package than pay separate charges for every product ($12.50/user/month) — but only marginally, because you’ll still need Google Suite otherwise you’ll be using gmail.com email addresses at your workplace. Here’s a version of the table with Office 365 substituting out similar products, saving $120 annually.



While it makes financial sense to opt for Office 365, you’ll still need to pay $5/user/month for G Suite if you want to use a company email and bulk-control the Google accounts of your employees.

So, in conclusion, it’s possible to pay just $2,600 annually for a high quality SaaS stack for your startup. Some tools, like CRMs and marketing automation, don’t come cheap. In contrast, a lot of tools are available for free.

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SEO Tutorial For Beginners Step by Step 2017

SEO Tutorial for Beginners 2017: Learn step by step how to optimise a site, get to the top of the search results and increase sales!

Free Bonus: 26-Point Checklist for New Websites & SEO Audits: http://www.completedigitalmarketingco...

Section 1: Introduction to SEO 
- Course Introduction
- Websites vs. Webpages - The Crucial Difference for SEO! 4:29

Section 2: How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Business 
- Keyword Research: The Foundation of SEO 6:08
- How to use the Google Keyword Planner Tool 10:25

Section 3: On Page Optimisation (SEO Best Practices) 
- A Template For The Perfectly Optimised Webpage 17:10
- URL Optimisation: Best Practices for SEO 18:17
- Title Tag & Meta Description: Skyrocket your Click Through Rate! 20:53

Section 4: Off Page Optimisation: Link Building Introduction
- The Types of Links that Really Matter and How to Get Them 27:38
- Black Hat SEO: Are Paid Links Worth it? 35:30

Section 5: Final Thoughts & Thanks
- FINAL TIP: How to Get Instant #1 Search Engine Results Ranking! 40:58

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10 Content Marketing Tools That Will Improve Your Efficiency

DID you know that 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each and every day? Furthermore, those who adopt content marketing have 6x higher conversion rates than others who don’t!

There is no question that content marketing is effective and it’s growing in popularity, but it also demands time and effort.

There is a little secret, however, that the most successful content marketers don’t want everyone else to know…Content marketing tools can take a lot of the work out of the process of content creation while maximising productivity.

In this post, we’ll show you 10 amazing content marketing tools that industry experts are using to simplify the content creation process.

Let’s dig in…

1. Trello – Project Organizing Tool

When creating content, staying organised is of the utmost importance. You need to know who is in charge of what, when things are due, and what all is going on. Trello is a tool (essentially built to be used by teams, but great for individuals too) that’ll help you keep your work organised. Groups of users can join together in this one place to collaborate and stay on the same page (literally and figuratively). No more searching through email threads to piece together your content campaigns.

You can create “boards”, each with their own “cards” as shown above, to organise projects. Also, add members to work on tasks as needed and move cards between boards to keep up to date with what’s been done and what items are still due. An added bonus about Trello is it’s free.

2. Feedly – RSS Feed Tool

If you’re looking for hot topics that’ll help you come up with ideas for a piece, the best place to look is at what’s being published on popular blogs in your niche. Visiting each blog one by one is an enormous time vacuum. Enter here Feedly.

Feedly is a super easy place to search for industry leaders in specific niches, add them to your feed, and then stay up to date on what they are posting. The interface organises them all in one neat place for easy browsing. What you can do manually in an hour, Feedly can do in just a matter of seconds. Do you feel your day getting freed up already?

3. MozBar – Domain and Page Authority Stats Tool

MozBar is a toolbar you add as an extension in your browser that allows you to measure domain and page authority along with social sharing stats. Once installed, your Google search results will look like the screenshot below.

If you click on link analysis, a new tab opens which gives you a wealth of information about that search result. See below.

This allows you to research your competition very easily and in depth in terms of domain/page authority and backlink data. If you’re keen on exploring niche competitiveness in search results, there’s also a button available with the premium subscription that lets you get keyword difficulty.

4. Easel.ly – Image Creation Tool

It’s no secret that traffic and conversions get a boost when visual content is integrated with the text, but creating images, videos, and infographics can be time intensive, hard to make to a professional standard, and expensive to continuously hire out. This is why I love Easel.ly. With templates like this one below, you can simply input the text you have in the graphic and you are good to go.

Seriously, anyone can make awesome looking infographics in just a few minutes. If you want more templates and variables to choose from, you can upgrade from the free version to the premium option.

5. Grammarly – Proofreading Tool

The biggest turn off for someone reading your content is annoying grammar and spelling mistakes. However, it can be hard to catch every little one yourself. That is where professionals use a tool like Grammarly. You can download Grammarly and integrate it into Microsoft Word and your internet browser. It will automatically scan your documents, show your errors, and offer suggestions to fix them.

You can also upgrade to a paid version to get a more in-depth analysis of your writing. A bonus is that Grammarly analyzes the corrections it suggests to your documents each month and sends you a summary which can help you improve your writing skills.

6. TrendSpottr – Trend Spotting Tool

How do you gain attention and engagement? Create and share content on a trending topic before the competitors catch up with the hype. However, spotting a trend isn’t always easy (even for experts), but with TrendSpottr, it becomes virtually effortless.

You simply log in and search for the general term you are interested in using the search bar at the top of the page. Then, you will get results like these that show you top trending specific terms on the left, along with recent posts on that topic in the middle column. You can also look at the sentiment the term is receiving, the momentum it’s gaining or losing, and compare your search term to another term to gauge trending strength. This is very cool and allows you to write about what people care about most at the moment.

7. Buffer – Social Media Management Tool

In order to see real results on that great content you’re creating, you need to effectively promote and manage it on social media. But, you don’t want to do this manually because it’s truly like a full-time job in itself. This is where Buffer is the perfect tool because you can connect your social media accounts (like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc.) and automate posting to them.

The page you see above is where you schedule your posts on Buffer so you can create a consistent stream of content for your followers. This helps to keep them engaged and grows your follower base without missing a beat. The content tab on the left is where you add in the posts you would like to be scheduled and then, of course, you can monitor performance with the analytics tab. This is a huge key to saving time and taking a few steps closer to content marketing success.

8. Buzz Sumo – Industry Listening Tool

Buzz Sumo is a resource that listens to what is going on in various industries. It is another tool that is helpful for spotting trends. You simply type in the topic you are interested in and you can see which content is most shared and trending. You can also analyse the content, compare domains, and see top authors. Easily view how many shares each piece of content has received on various social media platforms, as well as the backlinks each piece of content has.

This can help when researching topics to write or share and also to locate influencers in your desired industry.

9. Check My Links – Link Auditing Tool

Broken links on your website hurt your SEO and the experience of your users. You don’t want to risk losing a visitor because your link is a dead end, so it is important to ensure that your cited resources deliver valuable and contextual additions to the content on your page. Check My List is a very simple extension to your browser toolbar which will check any page for broken links. Easily identify and fix them, without using up hardly any time.

10. SEMrush – Competitor Research Tool

Last but not least we have SEMrush. In order to ensure that you’re creating and marketing content that’s going to do well, you’ll need to know what the competition is putting out there (yes, you need to do a little spy work).

SEMrush is one of the best tools for this purpose. If you want to find out what keywords the readers and researchers use to find a specific website online, SEMrush will pinpoint that data. The tool tracks and analyses rankings, competitors, links, keywords and PPC ad spending for any domain you need info on. Plus, the dashboard is really nice and easy to understand.

Industry Experts Agree

There you have 10 of the best content marketing tools to help boost efficiency and save your precious time. We all want to be successful, but also want to have time to enjoy off. Not only do these help you do that, but they can significantly increase how effective your content is at the same time. Don’t just take it from me, see what other content marketing experts are saying about these tools:

TopTenReviews named Grammarly the “The best overall online grammar checker; it offers thorough and accurate tools, features and explanations of grammar rules. You can’t go wrong with this online service.”

Gael Breton from Authority Hacker says “Who doesn’t want to know what their competitors rank for?” He says SEMRush is his #1 way of finding keywords.

Adam Connell of bloggingwizard.com says Buzz Sumo is one of his favourite tools. He says the following “Not your usual keyword research tool and well, it’s not. Keyword research has been a foundation of content planning for a good while and it’s about more than specific keywords, it’s about topical reliance and intent. I use BuzzSumo to validate my keyword research and get an idea of how much certain topics get shared.”

Are there any other tools that we missed? Help us out by sharing your favourites!

Or, perhaps you need a bit more help in the content management area? This 2-in-1 spy tool for Facebook Advertising helps expedite your content creation and eliminate the guesswork of creating relevant ads for your target audience. Check out Adsviser today!

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