These days there are more digital marketing tools than you can keep up with as a blogger but the tools that I do use make my job a heck of a lot easier. I truly believe in the power of content marketing, so I want to share with you some of the tools I use to take my content to the next level.

1. Alltop– This is a great place to start your search when you don’t know what you should be writing about for your next blog post. Alltop aggregates all the best news on the web and it’s pretty much every niche you can imagine. I promise if you go to the Alltop website you will find a source of information that you never knew existed.  You can create your profile and house all the best blogs and information sites you need in one place.  I view Alltop as the Google for content marketing. All you have to do is search for a topic you are interested in and after that Alltop will populate the search results with categories within that topic.  Once you pick a category, you will subsequently be able to preview all the content just by hovering over the headline.  This is a great way to see what people are talking about in your niche, and it’s also a great resource for content marketers that like to curate content from a variety of sources.
2. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer– A catchy headline can go a long way in helping your content go viral. The headline is the first impression, and you know what they say about first impressions. This FREE tool helps you create attention grabbing headlines every time. It analyzes the verbs you use, length of the headline and also the emotional sentiment your headline portrays.  Once the analysis is complete, they give your headline a score and a letter grade.  You can then view how the headline would look in Google and adjust accordingly.  Coschedule Headline Analyzer is very user-friendly and will help you get more eyes on your content.
3. Grammarly– As a blogger, it’s hard to write and edit all of your material without missing something once in a while. I’ve been using Grammarly for about a year now, and I must admit it has been a time-saving life saver for me. I use it to edit all of my blog posts, but I also run my important emails through it, and it has helped me improve as a writer.  The once a year fee is very reasonable, and they often offer you discounts on the membership during your free trial. If you want to eliminate some of the headaches of editing your content and want to become a more polished writer with a few clicks of a button, then I suggest you start using Grammarly today.
4. Foter– This site gives you access to thousands of hi-resolution photos you can use for your content marketing efforts. It is free to register, and it has an attribution feature that helps you give credit to the photographers who have provided the images. Foter is also easily incorporated with WordPress so you can insert photos into blog posts and have the Creative Commons attributions automatically applied to the images you use.  The site has a wide variety of categories to choose from, and it’s a great place to ensure all your content has awesome visuals.
5. Pic Monkey– Pic Monkey is one of my all-time favorite tools to use as a blogger. Once you have an image picked out for your blog post you upload it to Pic Monkey to layer text and edit the photo. You can also size your images to the specifications needed for the platforms you are sharing them on.
6. Buffer– I believe in the mantra work smarter not harder. For this reason, I use a content management tool to schedule all my social media posts. Some people are not fans of scheduled posts, but I can’t see how I could operate my day-to-day life outside of content marketing if I didn’t have a tool that helped me deliver content all day every day without having to be online 24/7.  Don’t get me wrong there is a strategy to scheduling your content, and I never automate the conversation with the people who interact with me online.  I enjoy the networking process and value every single person that interacts with my content.  My content management tool of choice is Buffer.  I currently use the paid ‘Awesome” version, but I used the free version for a long time and had success with it.  The “Awesome” version lets me manage up to 10 accounts at a time, and I can attach up to 15 feeds to those accounts from my favorite websites and blogs for content curation purposes.  I am also given the analytic breakdown for each post and able to schedule the posts to go out at optimal times that I choose.  I know some people worry about the impact tools like Buffer, Hootsuite or TweetDeck has on organic reach, but I can tell you from personal experience, I have seen no difference.   However, I can tell you that before I started using Buffer, I was online all day every day, and it was impacting my productivity in other areas of my work.  Now I can work smarter by delivering my content with ease across all my social media accounts.