6 Tools to Improve Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content marketing isn't easy. One minute you’re doing something right, the next Google has penalised your website and you’ve shot right down the listings. As a content marketer it’s my job to stay ahead of the game and predict exactly where the industry is heading.

The problem I often face is that the more rules and regulations Google implement the harder it becomes to stay on top. For example, five years ago you could acquire masses of backlinks by submitting 250 word spun articles to content farms. Nowadays everything you publish should be long and original – note the word "should". While it’s a much better system and filters out the spammers, it can be a tedious process.

If you’re encountering problems with time management or simply want to speed up your content marketing operation, I’d recommend using the following six tools.

Buzzsumo

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is assessing your competition and trying to establish if and how you can outrank them. Manually browsing websites and search rankings can be a nightmare. That’ where Buzzsumo can help. Buzzsumo allows you to locate authoritative content on the web and discover the influential players within your chosen sector. This can help you maximise the results of your content marketing as you can monitor their output.

Vibbi

Gaining social media followers is a crucial aspect of building an online presence. As the fastest growing social network, with the highest levels of engagement, you must have an Instagram account. To get the ball rolling use Vibbi to buy Instagram likes and get that initial influx of followers. This will make you seem more legitimate in the eyes of organic visitors.

Followerwonk

Twitter can be hugely powerful. Amassing followers gives you instant reach if you ever want to promote your content. Followerwonk can help you maximise your Twitter marketing by providing information about your followers, such as where they are from and when they tweet about.

Kurasie

Most people get confused between content marketing and content creation; however, there’s a world of difference. Content marketing also covers "curation", which is the process of re-publishing other people’s work. Kurasie is a tool that’ll help you find suitable content to share by providing feeds from the best blogs on the Internet within your chosen industry. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is plagiarism. Curate properly by crediting the original author and it shouldn’t harm your rankings. In fact, most content marketing specialists recommend curating at least one third of your written content.

Contently

Finding a decent writer can be difficult and sometimes you’ll have to invest quite a bit of money to get quality results. Contently isn’t your average "content mill" with a pool of writers working for peanuts. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Writers on Contently are carefully selected and paired up with the appropriate brand. Many of them have professional experience working as freelance journalists, or are published authors. If you want quality, there’s no better place.

Optimizely

One of the challenges of content marketing is tracking results. Fundamentally, unless you have accurate statistics and figures you’ll never know what type of content is bringing in customers. Optimizely allows you to conduct split A/B testing with articles and web copy so you can monitor engagement, clicks and sign ups.

There are literally hundreds of tools available to content marketers, but very few are worth using, let alone paying for. These five, however, are highly recommended. While they may seem like a substantial investment, you’ll save a phenomenal amount of time and effort.

Writer and humanitarian from London, England.