20 Lesser-Known Tools for Smart Content Creators

Steve Jobs once said “Real artists ship.”

If you want to make your content marketing strategy successful, you need to regularly ship (i.e., deliver) great content. Using the right tools is crucial to maximize productivity. The right tools help you create more and better content with ease.

Though 56% of marketers have a bunch of content marketing tools in their arsenal, discovering the best ones for your specific needs can be a challenge.

I am going to show a list of little-known tools (free and paid), from headline analyzers, research resources, meme-makers, and more that will help you make your content research and creation easier and faster.

Headline generator and analyzer tools

1. Impact blog title generator (free)

Designed by BlogAbout, Impact blog title generator helps writers generate awesome headlines for blog posts. It is easy to use: Just add your topic, click a button, and get a lot of awesome titles for your posts.

When you find a proper title, press the heart icon to save this title to a notebook. The generated list with picked titles can be sent via email.

A creative way to help writers generate fantastic titles distinguishes it from similar tools. The tool also has a “writer’s block” that allows you to visualize your thoughts.

2. CoSchedule headline analyzer (free)

Every content creator needs to have this tool in their arsenal. Just enter your title to start headline analysis. CoSchedule gives your headline a score out of 100.

CoSchedule analyzes the following things:

• Headline type (e.g., a “list” post can increase the overall score)
• Character count (e.g., titles with more than 55 characters typically get a higher level of clicks)
• Word count (e.g., an ideal title should be six words or fewer to get the most clicks)

Titles w/ more than 55 characters typically get a higher level of clicks, says @irinaweber048 via @coschedule. Click To Tweet

The tool also provides insights about which words stand out from the crowd and shows keywords based on your titles.

3. Thrive Headline Optimizer (fee)

Thrive Headline Optimizer is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that helps you find the most click-worthy titles to boost user engagement on your site and decrease the bounce rate. The tool helps analyze different headlines until you find the perfect one for your post.

The tool is easy to use. Just enter different variations of the titles in the WordPress post editor screen and let the plugin do the testing. The plugin also optimizes titles on older posts to find winners.

4. Sharethrough (fee)

Sharethrough is a powerful headline analyzer that shows the quality score based on a multivariate linguistic algorithm using the rules of behavior model theory, and the neuroscience and advertising survey of Sharethrough.

The tool has an extremely user-friendly interface. It discovers the strengths in your headlines and suggests how to make more impact on the target audience.

5. Portent Content Idea Generator (free)

Portent’s Content Idea Generator is a simple, creative blog title generator. The tool also generates topics. Just enter a keyword and it will create unique titles for your post.

Another great thing is the tool breaks your headline into chunks allowing you to easily tweak and refine. It also explains why certain elements should be used in a headline and the reasoning behind the suggested words.

Research and discovery tools

6. Google Trends (free)

The Google Trends tool is one of the most useful tools available for the content creators who want to get quality links and traffic. The tool tracks the popularity of the keywords in Google Search. Use the Top Charts feature to develop content ideas that people are interested in. When creating a content calendar, look at the seasonality of certain trends. You also can search for ideas by searching for different trends across similar terms.

7. ContentIdeator (fee)

ContentIdeator is a great content intelligence solution that provides data-driven insights into content performance via crucial channels. This nifty tool not only generates attractive titles but gives ideas on what you could write about in the future.

You enter a keyword and look though a good list of headlines while discovering various angles for the subject you are researching.

8. Feedly (free and fee versions)

Feedly is a great tool to manage all your favorite magazines, blogs, podcasts, news sites, YouTube videos, and more. It is a great way to gather all your online media content in one place. Many marketers underestimate the value of the RSS feeds, but they are still one of the most effective ways to track your vertical for new content ideas and news.

RSS feeds are an effective way to track your vertical for new #content ideas & news, says @irinaweber048. Click To Tweet

9. SE Ranking (free trial and fee versions)

SE Ranking (full disclosure, I work here) analyzes your content’s uniqueness and its performance in search. This task is easily done with SE Ranking On-site SEO audit. To get into this part of the tool, just click Tools -> On-page SEO Audit. As a result, you kill two birds with one stone. You get a detailed analysis of the landing page based on the main parameters, and know if your content is SEO friendly and keyword optimized.

10. Instapaper (free and fee versions)

Instapaper is the best for people who want to read articles and watch videos across their devices, save interesting information they come across while browsing, and create notes for safekeeping. The tool is useful for doing research on the go as it lets users work on different devices throughout the day.

Content creation tools

11. Piktochart (free and fee versions)

Piktochart is one of my favorite tools when it comes to creating infographics. The tool includes useful templates and drag-and-drop options that make the process easy and fun. If you are not a specialist in web design, Piktochart is a good solution.

12. Easel.ly (free and fee versions)

Easel.ly is an amazing tool for “design-challenged” content creators. This online infographic editor can help you create stunning story lines thanks to its huge selection of premade and customizable templates. We know that a visual representation of data is a crucial thing to help us present the results of our projects. Easel.ly creates a good foundation to build on and allows us to understand how to collect important information and images.

13. PowToon (free)

PowToon is a free tool that helps create animated presentations and videos with zero assistance from a graphic designer and will help you stand out from your competitors. The tool is not only easy to use, but it produces great results. The best part of the tool is that it allows you to record a voice with your presentation or video.

14. Storify (free and fee versions)

Storify is a simple, straightforward way to collect and create the best evergreen and live blog stories. The best thing about the tool is how easy and efficient it is. You can instantly connect social media accounts and easily promote content. What’s more, you can find tweets, images, and videos from social networks and integrate them into the content.

15. Polldaddy (free and fee versions)

Polldaddy is a great way to make content interesting and interactive. It helps the user to create single-question polls or surveys that can be easily integrated into a website, posted on Facebook, or emailed. The tool’s interface is clean and easy to navigate.

Other content marketing tools

16. Copyscape (fee)

Copyscape is one of the best plagiarism checkers that’s cheap and effective. Each search costs 5 cents. The tool also helps you view whether the content is being “lifted” and used elsewhere. Copyscape is a requisite when you outsource your content creation activities or guest blog posts.

17. Gravity (fee)

Gravity is a surprisingly powerful personalization engine for your website. The tool enables personalized content experiences and suggests content for each reader considering personal preferences, age, location, and other parameters. Gravity interacts with 50 powerful companies, enabling your content to catch the right type of audience.

18. ThingLink (free and fee versions)

ThingLink is an interactive image-creation tool designed to improve your reader engagement rate. It is fun to use and can help you achieve better results for your blog. You can easily augment your visual content using text, audio, images, and video. It is a fun type of content that adds entertainment to your blog posts.

19. Mou (free and fee versions)

Mou is my favorite app for thinking. For developers, Mou is a great Markdown editor. The tool is loaded with keyboard shortcuts, sync scroll, custom themes and CSS, live preview, auto save, HTML and PDF export, and more. You only see what you need to see. Mou is clear of clutter between you and your content.

20. Quickmeme (free)

Memes are known as a creative way to present your content on the internet. Generally, it’s a recognizable image with text relevant to a certain part of your vertical. Memes are more and more integrated into blog posts because they are easy to make, funny, and memorable (and shareable).

Quickmeme is a great tool. You just need to press “caption a meme” on the top menu, select a relevant meme background, type the text, and save it.

Conclusion

The tools I’ve listed can be used to enhance weak points of your content creation process, helping you to come up with high quality and informative materials for your target audience.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Discover how tools can help your productivity, maximize your efficiency, and ultimately improve your content marketing results. Register today to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 5-8 in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100 on registration.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute