Along with a solid marketing strategy, content marketers rely on tools to ensure they’re able to implement their campaigns easily and effectively.

There’s no shortage of tools available online—some are free, others are cheap, and some are very expensive. To help you sift through your options, I’ve rounded up some of the most useful ones I’ve used through the years and will continue to use through 2020 and likely beyond.

1. WordPress

It’s the most widely used CMS platform in the world, and for good reason. According to a W3Techs study, WordPress is the platform behind 36.8% of websites as of May 25, 2020.

As an open-source CMS, it’s easy to host and build a website on WordPress. There are thousands of plugins that can extend your site’s capabilities, including ones to help you with your SEO efforts and to customize your site so that you offer a tailored web experience. It also features a template system that makes it easy to build your site to fit your needs.

2. Google Docs

I’m very particular about versioning issues when it comes to content I produce. To avoid duplicates and confusion between myself and my team, I rely on Google Docs. I use it for everything from drafting blog articles to creating calendars. It’s one of the best platforms for collaboration, with a familiar and easy user experience that makes it simple and straightforward to use.

3. Grammarly

Typos are the bane of a content marketer’s existence. Any typo that we miss gets published on the site and will inevitably reflect poorly on the brand and business. With Grammarly, common mistakes and errors are easily caught and addressed before content goes live, ensuring all posts are typo and error-free.

4. Yoast

Yoast is a WordPress plugin that helps simplify my SEO efforts for my website. It helps me optimize content for a specific keyword or phrase, allows me to preview content, and edit meta-descriptions and URL slugs. This basically simplifies a lot of the technical SEO tasks into a visual plugin that makes it easy to optimize your posts for search engines.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is always on my lists of top tools for being a great marketing research tool. Simple, straightforward, and easy to use, you can analyze content that does well for your niche based on a specific topic, or even on a competitor. You gain access to metrics such as backlinks, social shares, and what major influencers are sharing.

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6. Ahrefs

Tracking metrics can be a very tedious part of content marketing. Ahrefs makes it so much easier for me to do this by tracking the ranking of my keywords, analyzing competitor keywords and phrases, and giving me insights on traffic. It even allows you to identify the most popular pages on a website and understand why they’re so well-visited so you can apply the insights to other sections of your site and improve overall performance.

Hope my answers help! Please feel free to email me via Leadspanda if you have any questions. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.