Products that are remarkable get talked about says, Seth. Yes, that is very true Seth … great products get talked about often. Getting started creating remarkable content can be a challenging concept for folks who have limited experience creating great content products. It takes considerable work and experience. Even more work without any winning content creation tools.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 9 out of 10 marketers are using content marketing. While more marketers are shifting their content creation efforts in-house, at the same time, they state producing enough quality content is their biggest challenge.
Marketers certainly need to focus less on producing more content and turn their attention towards producing better quality in their content. And, while content marketing is more than just tools and needs a solid strategy to be successful, there are a plethora of tools out there that can make the job of creating content easier.
If your company is creating useful, relevant content that your audience wants to see, share and interact with, you’ll grow your audience, see more engagement and establish yourself as thought leaders in your field. In addition, there will be considerable SEO benefits for your website. Some of the best ways to create content are through images, videos, screencasts, and webinars.
Here are 9 content creation tools we’ve started using lately that make our content creation much easier. We just had two criteria for our list:
The tools are free
They help you physically create content (not distribute or measure it).
So what are you waiting for? Read on to discover these amazing resources that can ultimately help you create some incredible-looking content.
Content creation tools: writing
Word2CleanHTML
If you like drafting blog posts in programs like Microsoft Word, Evernote, or Google Drive, this tool can be your best friend. Why? Because apparently the CMS software execs all got together years ago and decided that drafting anywhere but inside their tools would lead to formatting madness for writers when you paste in your text: paragraph breaks come through too large or totally absent, and eliminating font stylizing is gone
Simply paste in your draft, click one button, and then copy the resulting HTML straight from the tool. When you paste that into your CMS (most will have buttons reading “HTML” or “</>” in their toolbar above your draft), it will appear nice and clean.
This Chrome extension allows you to capture three sizes of screenshots: the visible part of a page, the entire page (even below what you see on your screen), or an area you select. That’s not bad, but the real power of the tool is what comes next: cropping, adding notes and callouts, and the ability to print or save to your desktop or Google Drive.
This tool allows you to upload an image and add little icons that appear upon hover. Readers can interact with these icons, which range from images and videos you embed to links and messages you can create. You can also embed or share the image.
Two subtle but awesome features you should add: First, you can embed without needing to mess with code to resize it. It gives you a simple sizing option. A great feature. Second, after embedding, it adds a “source” link in the bottom right, so you get proper attribution when others use your work or share it.
Skitch is an app that helps you communicate more visually. It lets you mark up images, digital assets, PDFs, and other files with arrows, callout boxes, text, and more. Although it’s free, it does require you to open an Evernote account, but that’s also free (and a great tool to use). Skitch is incredibly powerful because you can do it all in one place.
Videos
PowToon
Let’s discuss PowToon, an easy way to make videos, but first, let’s look at YouTube because great content doesn’t help if no one sees it.
We are always looking for the next digital marketing opportunity to give a big advantage over competitors. Right now, that opportunity is YouTube PreRoll (a.k.a. YouTube in-stream) advertising. The barrier to entry is creating a high-quality video, which can be expensive because even the most affordable video creation companies charge at least $300 to $1500.
Here is where PowToon comes into adding real value for creating quality content. It’s one of the easiest and cheapest ways to create a good video and—this is the crazy part—it’s free.
If you take your time with PowToon, you can create something that’s more than adequate in a matter of hours and start taking advantage of YouTube PreRoll the next day.
Instagram and Vine: While these may be thriving social networks, don’t forget that each is a powerful video creation tool also.
Design is everything.
Design
Canva
Canva is an amazing tool. The time and resources it takes to learn design and/or pay for design assets and create beauty from scratch can be really difficult when you’re staring at a long list of action items. Canva, the latest addition to our tool list, offers a library of pre-made templates and assets that you can manipulate while also adding your own imagery.
Canva charges you $1 for more “premium” assets and graphics found through their image search, but they have so much to choose from, and there’s plenty of value for free. Keep in mind designing important assets would cost you much more than a few dollars through other means.
Infographics
With our short attention spans, infographics are becoming a great way to visually convey data and information. This content creation tactic will get your company more attention than most boring white papers.
Like Canva but this tool is specifically for infographics. A drag and drop editor with many backgrounds, shapes, icons and more. You can watch a review of easel.ly here.
PowerPoint
Some may cringe at the suggestion but you can really make some cool infographics using PowerPoint but it is certainly a viable option.
This tool is similar to Canva but focuses more on infographics and data visualization in those graphics. And, in keeping with the goal, it accelerates your content creation process and helps you circumnavigate the larger, more complex design programs.
They also offer compatibility with Microsoft Excel through Infogram Charts, and their infographics are responsive with mobile and tablet screens. That is a great value, in our minds.
This is more of a handy tool than it is a prolific content generator. Nevertheless, it helps you quickly and easily create tweetable links and text comments.
Remember the statement I opened with? “Great products get talked about often.” Maybe I’m hoping it’s a tweetable quote that gets people to share my post. But rather than hope and pray you to copy that text, open Twitter, compose a new tweet, and paste the phrase, I can just make it easier for you by doing something like this:
Setting this up took all of 30 seconds. On the Click to Tweet site, select “Basic Link” and type out the text you want people to tweet, then add your post’s URL. I recommend shortening the URL with a service like bit.ly or goo.gl so you can both save characters and track clicks to your link.
Click to Tweet will generate a link for you that you can then add to your post however you like. If you can hyperlink text, you can use Click to Tweet.
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.
