The Content Marketing Tools I Use to Optimize My Content Creation Process

When I was in college, there was a bead store just off campus that I would walk past almost every day. I resisted as long as I could, but finally the day came when I walked in and it was all over. I became fascinated with the idea of making my own jewelry because I could make whatever I wanted!

But I needed much more than just beads. I needed wires to put the beads on. I needed pliers to manipulate those wires, wire cutters for trimming those wires to the right length, and clamps for compressing the small tubes of metal that would hold the wire in place. Essentially, I needed the right tools. Without them, my beautiful jewelry was just a handful of beads.

The same goes for my content marketing strategy.

When I started out, I was basically a freelance writer who provided blog posts (as well as other forms of written content) to my clients. But as I learned more about SEO and the need for a comprehensive content strategy, the more I realized I needed to invest in the right tools.

Without the right tools, you’re just shooting in the dark with your content creation process, which is a great way to waste a lot of time and effort. It might seem tedious to do your keyword research and analyze your headline before you start writing anything, but that effort is going to pay off more than creating content without a strategy ever could.

With that in mind, I thought I would go over the content marketing tools I use in my own content creation process and how each one helps elevate my content from just another blog to a comprehensive content strategy.

Notes

A writer’s most important tool is a notebook and pen/pencil. When I was growing up, I never went anywhere without one.

Now that we’re in the digital age, I take advantage of some of the digital options for taking notes.

Evernote

I use Evernote to take notes on all kinds of things, and I have a dedicated note for keeping track of my blog post ideas. Every time I have an idea, I go straight to my note titled “Blog Post Ideas”, which I use so much that it pops up under “Recent” almost every time I open it, so I can just click right to it.

Evernote lets me keep multiple notebooks, so if I ever needed to look for my note on blog post ideas, I could go straight to my “Writing” notebook and find it there. Failing that, Evernote has a search function where you just put in a keyword and it will show you all the notes that use that keyword, whether in the title of the note, or anywhere in the text of the note.

I like to use the Evernote app on my phone because that way I always have it with me, but there is also an option to use it on your desktop so you can switch back and forth, but you need a paid account to use it on more than one device.

Price: Evernote has a free option, a personal option, and a professional option. As of this writing, the personal option is $10.83/month and the professional option is $14.16/month.

OneNote

Microsoft users swear by OneNote, which is included with a Microsoft Office subscription. I haven’t used it myself, but it comes up again and again in conversations about digital notebooks, and I know a lot of people swear by it.

Voice Notes

I like to use the voice notes feature on my phone, especially when I’m out walking my dog, because of course that’s when I get all my best ideas. When I get an idea I want to remember, I can take out my phone and make a quick reminder for myself without waiting until I get to a computer or interrupting my dog’s all-important walk.

Once I have a chance to sit down, I take whatever was in my voice note and add it to my Evernote “Writing” notebook to ensure all my writing notes are kept in one place.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a great way to come up with blog post topic ideas when you’ve hit a writer’s block. You just put in a topic or search term and it generates all the most commonly asked questions using that word or phrase.

I tend to enter one of the services I offer to see what questions people are asking about it and use that as my starting point to come up with blog post topic ideas.

Answer the Public has a free version and a paid version. The free version lets you enter up to three search terms per day, which is more than enough for anyone just using it for their own blog.

Mention

Marketing should always put your audience front and center.

What pain point do you solve for them?

Which words do they use to describe that pain?

Which words do they use to describe your solutions to their pain?

What motivates them to address the problem?

You can always guess.

Or you can spend hours interviewing your clients to pull this information out of them one at a time.

Or you can use a social listening tool that tracks people’s conversations around a topic and analyzes the data so you can quickly and easily make better decisions about your messaging.

Mention is a social listening tool that is an absolute must for market research.

Similar to how Answer the Public will tell you all the questions people are asking the search engines around a given topic, Mention will show you what people are saying on social media about a particular product, brand, or topic.

You can use it to stay on top of trends, see how people are feeling about a given topic, see how you stack up against your competitors, etc.

I should Mention is not the only socially listening tool out there, but it is one of the more popular and well known.

Serpstat

Answer the Public is a good place to start, but once you find a question that would make a good blog post topic, you still need to do your keyword research to make sure that question is getting enough searches and there isn’t too much competition for it before you start investing the time and effort into writing your blog posts.

There are plenty of SEO tools to choose from, but the one I happen to use is Serpstat. When I was comparing and contrasting tools, I found it provided the most accurate data while also being one of the more reasonably priced options. Talk about a win/win!

I mention using Serpstat for keyword research, and while that is primarily what I use it for, it’s important to note that it is a comprehensive SEO tool that does much more than just help you find relevant keywords to use in your content.

Website Analysis

Want to see how your website stacks up against the competition? Want to know how another website is performing? You can use Serpstat to analyze any website to see how it’s doing overall, how its SEO and PPC strategies are performing, and how it stacks up against the competition.

I’ll get to Google Analytics a little later, and while it’s true that Google Analytics can give you all this information for your own website, it won’t tell you how another website is performing.

By contrast, I have used Serpstat’s website analysis tool to check the performance of new and potential clients so I can point out weaknesses in their SEO strategy and explain how I can help.

Backlink Analysis

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog the importance of backlinks as part of your SEO strategy, but it’s not enough to just get a backlink. The website providing the backlink needs to be a reputable website Google trusts, and while you can individually look at every website that links back to yours, it can help to have a backlink analyzer in your toolbelt to make sure the other website has a high domain authority, and that the content containing the backlink is relevant to the content it’s linking to on your own website.

I use Serpstat to analyze backlinks.

Rank Tracker

Want to know if your SEO strategy is doing its job? Use Serpstat’s rank tracker to see how your website is doing. You can check your overall status, or you can break it down by keyword to see the search terms where you’re dominating.

Site Audit

Last but certainly not least, is the all-important website audit. Everyone needs to do an audit of their website at least once a year (preferably once a quarter).

A site audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website that will identify any SEO issues that could be preventing your website from performing well with search engines. The more content you have on your website, the longer it takes to comb through everything to identify any potential issues, so save yourself a lot of time and energy by using a site audit that combs your entire website for you and presents you with the data you need to create a plan to improve your search rankings.

Not only can Serpstat perform on-demand audits of your website, you can also set it to regularly check your website for any issues, which is great, because it eliminates the need to remember how long it’s been since you last audited your website.

Headline Analyzer

If your headline doesn’t convince people they want to know more about your topic, they’re not going to bother clicking through to see what else you have to say, in which case the rest of your content doesn’t even get a chance to show itself off.

That makes your headline the single most important part of your content.

While ensuring your keyword is in your headline is a good way to get the attention of the search engines, it won’t always be enough to convince the real, live humans you want to read your content that it’s worth reading.

The best way to motivate people is to tap into their emotions, which is why I always use the Headline Analyzer by Advanced Marketing Institute.

Not only does it rate how emotional your headline is, it also gives a breakdown of the category of emotions the headline is evoking, as well as the kinds of people who are most likely to be motivated by that category of emotions. If those people describe your ideal clients, you’re good to go. If not, it’s time for some rewriting.

All In One SEO

My website is on WordPress and I recommend everyone use WordPress to build their website because it’s the only platform that allows you to own all your content.

WordPress has plugins you can install on your website to do pretty much anything you want, from increasing the accessibility of your website to connecting to Google Analytics, your email marketing system, etc.

There are also plenty of plugins that claim to help with your SEO, and while Yoast is probably the most well-known, it’s not my favorite. It tends to encourage keyword stuffing, so when I work with a client who uses Yoast, I use it for one or two things (like making sure the meta description of each page is optimized), but I mostly end up ignoring it.

Instead, I prefer to use All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

It lets you select a target keyword and additional keywords, which I like to use to keep track of the keywords I want to include in a piece of content.

AIOSEO also analyzes your headline for you, makes recommendations as to the readability of your content, the inclusion of backlinks, etc.

It even has an AI writing assistant to help you create content that’s more SEO friendly.

Price: AIOSEO has a free version and a few paid versions. As of this writing, the paid options include:

$50/month
$100/month
$200/month
$300/month

Photos and Images

We are visual creatures and it’s important to make proper use of images throughout your content. You can use images to help break up your longer content so your readers aren’t so overwhelmed by scrolling through a ton of text, but you can also use images to demonstrate a point or present data in a visual format, such as charts or graphs.

I’ve been known to take screenshots when explaining how I conduct keyword research, or how a particular content marketing tool works, but I also use Pixabay for royalty-free images (although I am not a lawyer, so I can’t guarantee this won’t get you into trouble some day if you decide to use it).

I also use Canva, the graphic design tool for those of us who are not graphic designers. Canva has a paid version and a free version. Even with the paid version, you can sometimes pay a dollar or two to include certain images or elements in your creation, so you can decide if you want to do everything free, pay piecemeal, or pay a monthly subscription fee.

I find Canva very easy and intuitive to use, and I love that you can save templates. So if you want, for example, the featured image of every blog post to have the same, branded look, you can create a template for your featured image and switch out certain elements to customize it for each blog post. And with Canva, you never have to worry about royalties.

You can also create a brand kit in Canva and include in it things like your logo, brand colors, brand fonts, even your brand voice. Then, when you’re creating your next image, all you have to do is click on the “Brand Kit” icon on the left-hand side to quickly and easily add your brand elements to the image.

AI Images

AI images are a whole new can of worms.

Canva says it can “create” images for you from a prompt, and while it’s certainly a fun feature, I’ve had trouble getting exactly what I want out of it, and providing feedback to improve the image has proven tricky.

Part of it is the frustration of dealing with a computer, but I’ll admit at least part of it might be user error on my part. I might have better luck if I get more specific with my prompts.

As it is, I’ve found the usual problems with AI images, namely too many hands or arms and/or limbs ending up in weird places.

When it comes to AI “generative” tools, it’s important to remember that they don’t “generate” anything. They take what they’ve been given and repurpose it into what they think you want.

That usually means copying the work of a human and reassembling it for you, in which case you might be in violation of someone’s copyright, even if you assumed it was a brand-new piece of content a robot drew just for you.

AI Writing Tools

As I said in the previous section, AI doesn’t “generate” anything, it can only repurpose what it’s been given.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t like to use ChatGPT or Claude to write my content for me.

First of all, I don’t want to sound like everyone else out there.

Second, I’m a writer, which means I write quickly and easily. I think better when I can write out my thoughts, so there’s not much AI can do for me as a writing tool.

That doesn’t mean I don’t use AI for other things.

I have absolutely been known to ask Claude what questions I should ask a client to clarify their messaging.

I have asked ChatGPT to tell me what I’m missing before turning in a proposal.

I also like to ask ChatGPT and Claude the same question and compare and contrast their answers. For the most part, I find Claude provides the better answers, although ChatGPT is much better at generating images. They’re still noticeably AI “generated,” but they tend to be much better than what either Claude or Canva can give me.

I will occasionally tell ChatGPT or Claude to write something for me as a way to help me get over writer’s block, but that’s about it.

If you want to use AI to help you create content, this article has tips on the “write” way to use AI when creating content for your business.

AI Transcription

My favorite way to use AI is to transcribe my interviews and meetings with my clients.

I remember the early days of AI transcription when we were told robots could transcribe our audio files for us, and they kind of could, but not really. We were usually better off doing it ourselves or hiring a human to do it for a few bucks an hour.

AI has gotten so much better at transcribing audio files, and I love it!

Now, when I want to check something a client said in a meeting, I no longer have to listen to the entire meeting, or fast forward to the part where I think we talked about that element of their content.

Now I can just have AI transcribe the entire audio file for me!

I just upload the audio file into a Microsoft Word document, click a button, and the transcription appears in minutes!

It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better than it was even just a few years ago.

Then, all I have to do is scroll to the section I want.

If you want a summary of a meeting, you can either drop the transcription into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it for you, or, if you use Zoom, you can use Zoom’s AI Summary to get a summary of the meeting emailed to you as soon as the meeting ends. I’ve been impressed by how accurate those AI summaries are.

There are other options, such as Otter.ai that can take notes and transcribe your meetings for you, so feel free to shop around and see which one best suits your needs.

Google Analytics

You can set up a Google Analytics account for your website for free and see all the traffic that goes to your website. You can see which pages are getting the most visits, how long people are visiting your site before clicking away, how many pages they tend to visit before clicking away, the geographic location of most of your visitors, etc.

Google Analytics is about so much more than your website’s rankings for certain keywords. It provides information on the people who are coming to your website and what they’re doing there. With that information, you can find out how effective your website is at engaging and converting leads, because if people are coming to your website, but they’re not sticking around very long, then you know there’s a problem with the content on your website, and that problem needs to be addressed.

MailChimp

There are plenty of email marketing tools to choose from, but MailChimp and Constant Contact seem to have emerged as the two giants in that particular industry.

MailChimp in particular is out to dominate the world of digital marketing by letting users create landing pages, in addition to managing their mailing lists.

There’s a free version of MailChimp and a few different paid versions, depending on how big your audience is and what you want to do with it. Even with a smaller audience, you might find you need to pay a subscription to access some of the premium features MailChimp offers, such as the ability to create segment your list.

If you’re running multiple businesses, you can maintain a separate mailing list for each business. If you want to be sure to send information and updates on certain products/services by sending them only to people who have expressed an interest in those products/services, you can create a separate list for each product/service. It’s the best way to make sure you’re sending information that interests them, which significantly increases the likelihood they’ll open your newsletter and engage with your content.

The other thing I love about MailChimp’s paid version is the ability to make sure different people get the same newsletter at different times. For example, if you want to make sure your newsletter subscribers on the East Coast get your newsletter at 8:30am their time and your subscribers on the West Coast get your newsletter at 8:30am their time, you can ask MailChimp to take care of that for you.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it for the content marketing tools I use to optimize my content creation process. If you have any other tools you like to use and think I should know about, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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