When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog. Here are some blogging tools that help content marketing.

So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. These are among the areas these blogging tools help.

To avoid getting stuck in a creative rut, I’ve collected a series of tools I call upon whenever I need a little help getting the wheels turning and help productivity. Whether you’re into doodling or inspiring quotes, this roundup is designed to provide you with the resources you need to get unstuck and start creating.

Quora

The crowdsourced answer website can help lead you to the types of questions that real people are asking, questions that you can answer in-depth with a blogpost. Search for your keyword, and follow topics related to your blog’s focus.

Quick Sprout

Enter a URL into Quick Sprout, and you get an analysis of the site’s performance and content. The “Social Media” tab shows you which posts from the site have been home runs, and you can take inspiration from the highlights on the list.

Blogging tools that help content marketing … Lucidchart

From brainstorming to project management, Lucidchart provides users with the tools they need to create professional-looking charts and diagrams to illustrate their ideas.

The platform is built for collaboration and employs a drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easy for non-designers to produce high-quality content without the hassle.

It’s also compatible with many other programs, including Google Apps, which makes exporting and sharing different file formats a breeze.

business productivity tools — Business productivity tools.

Portent Title Maker

Enter a subject into the Portent tool, and you’ll get a sample blogpost title, complete with helpful and witty breakdowns of why the title might make for a good read. Refresh as many times as you’d like for new ideas.

Twitter trending topics

The trending topics section on your Twitter homepage can be a super spot for grabbing ideas from the latest news. You can tailor your trending topics to go uber-local (the big cities near and around you) or even receive fully tailored tweets that take into account your location and those you follow. (Click the “Change” link at the top of the Trends section on your Twitter homepage.)

Trello

We like to add all our blogpost ideas into Trello, turning each idea into a card that we can spec out with notes and move from list to list with a simple drag-and-drop.

Doodle

Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution, wrote about benefits of doodling :

I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them.

When it comes to the versatile power of doodling, we couldn’t agree with Brown more.

To help unlock your creative spirit, check out Doodle.ly — a social drawing tool available for desktop, iPhone, and iPad.

It provides users with a space to scribble down their thoughts and ideas and easily publish them to share them with their network. Plus, it’s free.

Evernote

create amazing content — Create amazing content.

For super fast idea collecting, you can drop everything into Evernote—notes, snippets, photos, webpages, and more. The tagging system in Evernote is incredibly robust, so you can keep your ideas with a simple tag in a number of cool ways—by topic, by idea stage, and more.

Inspiration strikes at the most unlikely times.

With Evernote, you always have a place to record your bright ideas — no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Evernote is a modern workspace that is designed to sync across any computer or phone. This enables users to jot down their idea on one device and pick up where they left off on another.

Photocopa

Whether you’re a seasoned designer or just getting your feet wet, Photocopa is an awesome tool to inspire your efforts.

With Photocopa, users can upload a photo from anywhere on the web, and the tool will generate a color palette inspired by the colors in the image. To retrieve the hex code for each color in your custom palette, simply hover over the square.

This makes it easy for you to put together high-quality visuals for your blog articles, social media posts, or website.

Todoist

Place your ideas into a to-do list where you can schedule when blogposts might go live and break down the blogpost writing process into manageable steps. Todoist lets you collaborate on

Dropbox

When your ideas come with files, Dropbox is one of the best spots to store and share things like pdfs, Word Docs, design files, photos, and more.

Coffitivity

It’s not uncommon to walk into a Starbucks and see a dozen people tapping away at their laptops. The hum of the coffee machines and the murmur of conversation creates a work environment favored by creatives of all kinds.

While it’s nice to escape to a coffee shop and pump out some work every now and then, some days getting out of the office just isn’t a possibility.

For those days, there is Coffitivity.

Coffitivity is a unique app designed to simulate the ambient sounds of a coffee shop to help boost concentration and creativity.

Google Trends

Is your blogpost idea a popular one? You can run the topic through Google Trends to see search volume for the different keywords and phrases you’re considering using.

Toggle

One of the most straightforward and fun time tracking tools you’ll find, Toggle lets you add a task, push the Start/Stop button, and check back in to see a full dashboard of stats on how you spend your time. It could be really useful for bloggers who want to focus on the time they spend writing, researching, and editing.

Hemingway

A really interesting free marketing tool, Hemingway analyzes your text for readability, highlighting sentences that are a bit too complex or dense. The readability for the list post you’re reading now: A seventh grade reading level.

Another aid we found useful: WRITE BETTER BLOG POSTS: HOW TO WRITE POSTS PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ

Grammarly

Copy and paste your article into Grammarly’s online grammar checker to how it performs against checks for spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, style, and more. The initial score is free to see. The specifics of what to change (as well as suggestions from Grammarly) come with their paid plans.

Death to the Stock Photo

Every month, receive an email with links to a new collection of free, high-res lifestyle photos. The site offers a premium subscription as well to be able to access and search its full archive.

Skitch

Grab screenshots and annotate with notes, arrows, and icons. Skitch connects directly to your Evernote account so you can save all the screengrabs you take.

Canva

Probably our most-used image tool at Digital Spark Marketing, Canva makes image creation super easy (especially for non-designers) with their premade templates, custom image sizes for every social media channel, drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and more. Most every original image you see shared from our social accounts was made in Canva.

Buffer

Once your blogpost is written and published, you can set up an easy sharing schedule with Buffer. Schedule your new article to go to your social channels multiple times with different headlines or images attached to each update. A huge time saver for us.

Click to tweet

Built by the team at CoSchedule (which also makes a helpful WordPress calendar and scheduler), this WordPress plugin makes it simple to highlight snippets of your blogpost for readers to easily share on Twitter. For sites not running WordPress, consider a tool like clicktotweet.

Filament

In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the biggest and best (and free) ways to send email to your list of contacts. You can set up automated campaigns that deliver each new post that you write, or you can create campaigns from scratch. MailChimp offers free accounts for those with fewer than 2,000 contacts in their list.

I can’t believe I used a paid ($20/ month) service with less functionality for 3 years before I switched!

Summary

What are your favorite blogging tools? Which ones did I not include here that you would add to the list?

I’m always keen to learn more about what tools are out there. Please do share in the comments if you have any tips or tools to talk about!

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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

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Improve Success with Small Business Tagline Designs

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Blog Post Ideas … Sweet Spots for Successful Content Marketing Results

Creative Content Marketing Tactics to Increase Website Traffic

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Are you one that works too many hours? They probably don’t pay you by the hour, do they? More about results than time, right? Certainly, all three are a yes answer for me. And I definitely like to find ways to reduce time on simple, mundane tasks. So my favorite productivity apps guaranteed to add a great deal to make my work life easier.

Innovation occurs at the intersection of previously unconnected and unrelated planes of thought.

– Idris Mootee

I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using. Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought, as Mootee states. There are many apps for workers looking to improve productivity like me that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.

Related: How Steve Jobs Would Change Your Social Media Engagement

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days. But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.

This makes you think: What productivity apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

Here are my favorites:

Sunrise

Like your Google Calendar with key improvements, several friends swear by this app.

It offers shortcuts for adding events and also bakes things like weather reports and Facebook birthday reminders into the mix of your daily calendar.

They certainly have convinced me. I use it often.

Productivity apps … Pocket

This is one of those apps on this list that you may already know about. It lets you save blog posts and articles to read when you’re offline. Very valuable for those of us that like to read a lot online.

I’m able to keep track of all the articles that get sent my way. In this post-Google Reader world, it’s my primary way of keeping up with things. Another feature that is very valuable is the fact that you can set the font size because it strips out the content’s original formatting.

This is because the pocket-sized versions of articles are usually stripped of extraneous eye candy, collapse multi-page articles to a single page, and are generally more readable than the originals. The only drawback is that you cannot search within a pocket article, and printing is disabled.

MeMail

This app does one thing really well—you can send yourself an email in two taps, for quick reminders or ideas you don’t want to forget. A very useful task handler for me.

Trello

A slightly more visual rendering of your to-dos, this app allows you to create boards for different projects and separate sharable lists within them.

Each task goes on a separate card. I’ve tried tons of task apps, and Trello is by far my favorite. I love how easy it is to customize, color code, and rearrange things.

Perfect for the organizer that I like to be. It’s also really easy to make collaborative boards and store information — like files, notes, or images — within a task.

Evernote

Easily the best note-taking app on the app store. Hands down my favorite. Evernote will not only store out the notes you tap onto the onscreen keyboard but also the notes you record with your voice.

You can even store photos and synchronize your notes with your Mac or Windows-based PC. You can also geotag notes to make them location-based.

Evernote is an organizational tool that you can use as a storing place for short notes, or as a place to collect all your thoughts—links, photos, notes, checklists—for larger projects. An app that is super versatile.

You can take notes, create to-do lists, record voice reminders, and save your ideas and URLs to websites you visit. Access to Evernote is available on almost any device, and you search through your notes by keyword.

Stacks, Notebooks, Notes, and Tags are how you keep track of everything in Evernote. It’s a great app for eliminating clutter and staying organized while working on multiple projects or working with several clients. Amazing.

Boomerang

This is an app for Gmail that is a valuable app for me. It lets me set a notification to pop up if I haven’t gotten a reply on an email within a specified amount of time.

It also lets you boomerang messages back to the top of your inbox, closer to when you actually need to pay attention. But the feature I like best is that you can schedule emails to send later. It’s nice to be able to schedule an email for a more appropriate time and hit send.

Scanner Pro

ScannerPro is one of those Evernote related apps. It is designed for quickly getting a hard document into digital form for easy sharing and sending. Scan documents, business cards, receipts, and more by taking a picture with your iPhone, and then save or send the document.

By linking ScannerPro with Evernote, you can go totally paperless by taking pictures of all your documents and then saving them to Evernote. Photos will be saved, and we’ll recognize the text in them, making all your documents searchable and accessible from anywhere.

Goodreader

Working with PDF documents is something I do regularly, and this app is a good way to do it. It has many features that make viewing and editing PDFs productive, including full markup capability.

There is a file manager built into Goodreader that works with both local files and those stored in major cloud storage services.

iA Writer

I do a lot of writing and often struggle with all types of distractions. When it comes to distraction-free writing, iA Writer has no parallel. The app strips everything else away so you can stay productive.

Focus Mode tames your compulsive editing by highlighting the sentence you’re working on and receding the rest into the background.

WINNING ADVERTISEmeNT DESIGN — **Want to build a winning advertisement design?**

Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.