Tools that every content marketer needs

If you have chosen to invest in the field of content marketing and you are looking to enrich your knowledge, then this is the perfect article for you. This is the perfect article for people who have been writing content continuously without getting a single page-view from online searchers. Nothing is more frustrating than starting a career in content marketing and yet no one wants to read your content for the sole reason that “it is not catchy,” “takes too long to load the page” or other reasons that you can easily correct. Some of these problems that your readers complain about involve a bad headline that doesn’t catch the reader’s attention or having very bulky content that takes forever to load. Here are some of the best solutions for getting (and keeping) readers interested.

Great headlines

When skimming through content, most online readers tend to check the first three and the last three words. Most readers are only interested in reading headlines very quickly before deciding whether they should continue reading. Your readers want a headline that is easy to scan and easy to digest. A great tool to use for this is a headline analyzer.

Are you not sure whether the headline you just put up is catchy enough? You can also check how catchy it is before you post the content. Headline Analyzer considers all the aspects of your headline: How many common words you used, how many uncommon words you used, how many powerful words and how many emotional words.

Take a headline such as “Is it my destiny to die alone?” There are four common words, and they constitute 56 percent of the headline, 0 common words, 1 emotional word and it constitutes 14 percent and 2 powerful words which make up 26 percent of the headline.

1. Emotional headlines.

Headlines that capture at the soft spot of human emotion have the biggest effect, and they get the most shares. Human beings are emotional creatures and the more emotional the headline is, the easier it will be for you to attract your readers.

2. Word balance

For any post, you’ll want a nice balance among common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. A structure like this helps your post remain readable while commanding attention from your audience. Common words should make about 20-30 percent of the headline, uncommon words about 10-30 percent emotional words make a good headline and should be about 10-15 percent and at least one power word.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Every content marketer requires a good VPN because there are numerous perks that come with having a virtual private network on your side. Having a VPN allows you to browse with absolute anonymity and protect yourself from hackers or people that might be looking to steal your identity. VPNs give you online security through encryptions and other VPN protocols, and that ensures you have the privacy you need while using the Internet or when you are using a public Wi-Fi. This is one of the important tools that a content marketer needs in order to make their investment worthwhile

A VPN enables content marketers to access geographically blocked content and enables them to get through firewalls that they may encounter during their research. A VPN will enable you to use search engines without your entries being logged, which is very important because privacy for a content marketer is a basic right.

Tiny PNG

We all want fast, scalable and fun websites that we can easily use. The loading time for most images is long. This is because fetching them from the website server takes about 50kbs per second. So an image of about 5mbs would take almost 100 seconds. This is time that we don’t have. This was the inspiration towards the creation of tiny png. Tiny png is an online algorithm that uses lossy compression techniques to reduce the size of png files. It works by selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, which in turn reduces the bytes used to store the image. The effect of this color decrease is almost invisible but makes an important difference in the size of the image. This decreasing of colors is done by combining colors that are similar. It is called quantization.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files are some of the most used and most widely supported format that can store partially transparent images. This format is usually slightly compressed, but you can use TinyPng to further compress your image and the efficiency of your website and your content. The image output is compatible with all devices and all modern browsers including on mobile devices.

This tool is free for use on the Internet.

This is a tool to reduce the size of your png and jpg images, it reduces the time taken to fetch the image and hence increases the speed of getting your content ready for the readers.

Buffer

After your content is uploaded, you will want to share it on all social media platforms so that your users and other potential readers come across it when visiting and using those websites. Buffer is an online social media management tool for marketers and agencies that can be used by individuals and companies to share and market content on their websites to the social media platforms.

How does it work? Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans can see your updates more often and you get the most out of each post. Buffer checks for some of the busiest times on the Internet and therefore maximizes on those user surges to share your content so that it is seen by the maximum number of people. As you add content, you can easily select which of your social accounts you want to post to. Post the same message to all accounts or add content by customizing these accounts and their posting times.

With Buffer, you can engage your readers with images, videos and audio on all and any social media websites of your choice.

Buffer has the benefit of:

1. being online the whole time.
2. Incorporating and being available on all the social networks.

Google Analytics helps you track website traffic and review how your online content campaigns are performing. (Source)

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a freemium. Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering or application such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods. This is the web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). These goals include lead generation, viewing a certain page or downloading a particular file. The Google Analytics approach is to show dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the reports. Unlike the previously mentioned techniques to attract and keep users and readers on your website, Google Analytics isn’t really a tool to market your product. It’s more or less like an analyzing tool that will show how well or how badly your website is doing. After installing Google Analytics on your website, Google will teach you a few basic things such as seeing your visitors, their referrers and the like. You can change the date range to see when and how many visitors you are adding or losing every single day.

With Google Analytics you can know what display ads and campaigns are working for your website by looking at the traffic sources. Traffic sources are divided into

1. Search traffic: this is the traffic generated if someone searches for a particular type of content and your website comes up and they click on that link to your website.
2. Referral traffic: If you have your ads on other websites and when visiting those websites users see ads to your website and they follow them by clicking, then that website is known as a referring website.
3. Direct traffic: when a person types the address of your website manually or clicks a link in their browser bookmarks then that is direct traffic.

Yoast SEO

Formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO Plugin that is in existence. It incorporates everything from a snippet editor and real-time page analysis that helps you optimize your page’s content, images, titles meta descriptions and more to xml.

By using the snippet editor functionality, you can completely optimize your post and page title and meta descriptions to see what they would look like on the Google search engine.

Robots meta Configuration: this is used to instruct Google not to index your page or pages. You can also instruct it not to follow the links on the page.

Readability check: Apart from checking the SEO friendliness of your post, Yoast SEO now also analyzes the readability of the copy you wrote! It checks the length of your sentences and paragraphs, and whether you use transition words or subheadings. Moreover, it assesses if you don’t use passive voice too often.

Primary category: Did you just write a post that fits in one category, but should definitely be in another category as well? Of course, you can select both categories, but you probably consider one the main category. Yoast SEO has the solution: you can select a ‘primary category’ for the category that’s most important and should be shown in the breadcrumb.

With these tools, every content marketer should be able to make a successful career and have the motivation to invest even more of their time and energy in content marketing without facing any additional difficulties.