Creating quality content is a demanding and complex process. It is better to have a wide range of applications in your toolbox. Even though there is no one solution to fix it all, one can increase your productivity and save you time. Considering this, I will share my favorite content creation tools. These are both written content and visual content.
Also, this post is a growing list of applications which means I've been updating the list regularly.
Let's start with metadata of this post before sharing content marketing tools.
Who is this list for?
- Written content creators
- Visual content creators
- Content marketers
- Bloggers
- Thought workers
What type of digital tools do I mention?
- Content research tools
- Content saving tools
- Readability tools
- Grammar and punctuation
- Tools for creationg search-engine optimized content
- Tools for visual content creators
- Other tools
Quality Content Creation
Creating quality content is very demanding, whether it is for your private blog or your company blog. It will take time to approximate the perfect one of your own.
First, you must think and shape your thoughts in a multi-plane world. Also, the consumers of your blog content are humans. Thus, being clear and concise is a must for your audience.
Second, you must optimize your content for search engines. Otherwise, waiting for people to come and read your content will not be rational behavior.
Third, the visual part of your content is also a factor. For instance, typography or decorative elements also influence your content.
Developing high-quality content is difficult, as it is seen. Therefore, choosing the right content marketing tool is essential for every creator.
The benefits of creating good content
Content marketing is still one of the most important digital marketing tools. One of the main reasons for this is that the return of investment (ROI) is relatively high.
- It grows your blog audience.
- It acts as a bridge between your company and your prospects.
- In-depth content builds your online reputation in your niche.
- Good content can generate years of organic traffic to your site.
In other words, having high Google rankings for specific keywords gives you a chance to deliver your message to other people for free. Although it is not entirely free, you provide this gain with relatively much fewer costs.
In addition, I recommend checking out this article that lists the best blogging sites.
Why use content creation tools?
Content creation tools basically decreases the time you spent while creating your content. In general, they can boost your productivity, your creativity and the quality of your content.
Content creation is at the heart of the evolution of any website. Whether you’re a blogger, journalist, marketer, or creative writer, publishing great content is half the battle.
If your ideas aren’t supported by great visuals and a knack for storytelling, they aren’t much good to anyone. Therefore, handy tools for content creation can be a gem.
Content Creation Apps That Will Skyrocket Your Productivity
Using the appropriate tools can make content creation so much easier and more successful. After the introduction, it is time to share the useful content creation instruments. I hope those tools will make you more productive during your content creation process. Here are the super-useful content development tools.
Content Research Tools
Research plays a huge role in what your readers think of your business, products, services, and website. Content creation can be as easy as digging up information or digging around on the internet.
In this section, I'll take you through some of the most useful applications out there so that you can get started on creating great content for your blog or website.
Content research tools are when creating content because the internet is vast, and there's hardly any limit to what you can find out about a subject matter. Let's see the best content creation tools for research.
Keen: Keen is an experimental product that scans the web, finds and curates content for your interest. It is one of the best content creation tools that will help you in research phase.
The unique feature of the product is that you say your interests rather than choose the givens. Moreover, you will get weekly emails with the new content pieces covering your interests.
Don't expect every Keen suggestion will fit your interests. However, you will definitely discover precious content pieces.
You can follow, collaborate and curate content with people. You can check my keen: content creation tools list and collaborate with me if you prefer.
Inspiration for art content: Collecteurs
We are creating, consuming and curating content. When you need inspiration/information about art and artists, Collecteurs would be a great choice..
Of course, Collecteurs more than this. It is a digital museum of private collections and they are reputable among artists. (Check the interview with Jānis Zuzāns)
They have a great community. The content they post on Instagram is brilliant.
Waldo: Waldo is a chrome extension that boost your Google searches with its unique features. It deserves a shot.
Glimpse: Glimpse is a tool that makes Google Trends 100x more powerful. It will powers your research process.
Carrot: The short demo you watched above is from Carrot. It organizes your search results into topics. It clusters, categorizes and show them in different formats.
Occamm: Occam is another SERP organizer. It refines your search result and allows you to select based on the tags.
Entity Explorer: Entity explorer finds related entities in a graph map. It makes easier to see connections between entities.
Research Rabbit: This is one of the my best content research apps. A research and relationship visualization tool.
Semantic Scholar: A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature.
Paper Panda and Unpaywall: They both allow you to access millions of academic papers and researches for free.
Google Trends: You probably know this tool. Google Trends shows the popularity of a term among Google Searchers.
Answer The Public: Another useful tool to research people's questions.
Exploding Topics: Exploding topics monitors industries through Google and their database to figure out what people are looking for.
Content Management Tools
You need comprehensive document and knowledge management apps to get the most out of your content research. You can clip, capture, and annotate the content with these amazing applications. There are a bunch of apps that you can use for this purpose. Most of these applications have browser extensions.
Annotating is an excellent way to get your creative juices flowing. It gives you the ability to take notes on what you're reading or thinking, making it easy to revise later.
I love using various types of notes apps or knowledge-saving tools and would recommend them to anyone looking to improve their own writing skills.
These wonderful content tools allow anyone to collect ideas, quotes, share knowledge and other content in an easy and intuitive way.
The apps in this section may also help your content strategy process. Those save you a lot of time looking for relevant information while creating your blog posts and videos.
Additor: Additor is a knowledge base for remote teams with a shiny user interface.
Capacities: Capacities is a Notion-like application promoting itself as for being your second brain. If you like Notion, you will like it. I am sharing an example from my own notes as an example.
GetGuru GetGuru or Guru is another knowledge base application that allows you to create complex content hierarchy. You can organize company information and content, and access it anywhere. A document of Getguru written in Turkish
Polar: You can manage and save your content from PDFs, EPUBs, and web pages in one place. It allows tagging, shows reading progress, and shows detailed document information.
Weava: You can highlight, annotate, and organize the content in one place.
Memex: It is a bookmark manager. It is an open-source tool that allows you to annotate, organize and share.
JustClip: A tool for collecting content that is suitable for individuals and teams. You can capture information and annotate content. You can easily build your knowledge connections and stay organized.
Wakelet: Wakelet is a tool for collecting and curating content. It is particularly used by the education industry. It is one of my favorite tools. You can create a Wakelet collection and publish your curated lists in various formats.
Liner: Liner is another productivity tool that helps you find and learn reliable information faster. You can highlight web pages and PDF files. It suggests trusted content from other Liner users.
Obsidian MD: It is also my favorite tool that I dumped every piece of note into it. It is offline-first meaning that your notes stay on your PC. It is a markdown editor and has a wiki-style backlink feature with built-in graph view options. There are other popular options for an alternative to Obsidian are Notion, Nimbus Note, and Roam Research.
Raindrop: Raindrop is one of the best bookmark manager in the market. It has cross-platform apps/extensions, intuitive user-interface and a generous plan.
Zeef: You can easily collect, curate, and share your favorite links with Zeef in your profile. Zeef is also useful for discovering tech products. For example: My unfinished Zeef page
Almanac: Document creation and collaboration tool along the lines of Google Docs.
Airtable: You probably know Airtable, however it deserves to be in the list. It is basically a spreadsheet app that is more user-friendly than Google Spreadsheets.
Readability Score Tools
Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.
It is an essential parameter for the user as well as for SEO.
It is also known that artificial intelligence, and thus the Google crawler, is better at distinguishing short sentences than long ones.
As a result, short sentences are easier to understand for both the reader and the Googlebot. Of course, you have to consider your readers.
There will be no problem for them in writing complex articles on relatively tricky subjects if your readers are experts on your case.
The content creation software in this section are applications that measure at least which age group can understand your articles. It is called the readability score.
There are some popular formulas and metrics calculating the readability score of your text.
However, creating short and concise content can be hard to create. With the products below, you can make your copy more readable and quickly shorten sentences. Run your written copy through the web app and you'll see the opportunities to make it better for your readers in seconds.
It should also be noted that most of them are either free or freemium with a generous plan.
Hemingway Editor: It is one of the most well-known content readability improvers. This popular readability tool judges the “grade level” of your text using the Automated Readability Index.
Typewipe: This helpful content creation program offers both readability analysis and helps you improve your content according to your keyword.
Twinword Writer: Twinword Writer is a tool that analyzes the tone of your content. It highlights the words that have negative and positive impacts on the tone of your text.
Grammar and Punctuation Checker Tools
In this section are handy for creating content in English. Those can be classified as grammar correction and punctuation checker tools. Using these tools will help you write better content about topics that matter to you. The tools in this section are awesome grammar and punctuation checker tools. Those will help you finish your sentences, spot typos, and get the words right no matter how much time you have. The most popular grammar tool on this list is Grammarly. It offers a good user experience along with rich suggestions.
However, it should also be noted that Grammarly doesn't improve its tool and features. There are various alternatives to that provide different writing features that Grammarly doesn't provide.
Here are the best grammar and punctuation checker tools.
Grammarly: It is one of the most well-known grammar tools. Grammarly is the best tool for this task. It has a really intuitive interface and a lot of fun features. It has a desktop and mobile application. Those apps exist both for macOS and Windows.
Linguix: Another Grammarly alternative, this English content creation assistant also stands out with its paraphrase feature.
ProWritingAid: Although this content creation software does not offer as good a user experience as Grammarly and Linguix, it has much more advanced features.
Atomic Editor: It is an AI-assisted editor that boosts your writing productivity.
SlickWrite: A tool that shows grammatical corrections and useful statistics.
Ludwig: A search engine for sentences. You can find your sentence in the best contexts, get definitions, synonyms, and examples. Also, you can paraphrase your sentence.
Ginger: Another Grammarly alternative tool that helps you correct grammar and punctuation.
Writer: I just discovered the app. First, it has a great design. Moreover, Writer provides many useful features comparing its competitors like a more customizable style guide and a bunch of many other things. It also has a free plan. You can use its web app, browser extension, or outlook app.
WordTune: Wordtune is another tool that helps you write clearly. It stands out from the rest by focusing on only rewriting sentences. You can sharpen your sentences easily with WordTune.
Search Engine Optimized Content Creation
It is not easy to find both budget-friendly and skilled tools. Of course, I'm speaking particularly about digital marketing applications. Anyway, I'll share my relatively budget-friendly and search-engine-optimized content creation tools.
SEO Content Analyzer: It has a bunch of tools for copywriting.
Frase: This is one of my favorite tools. An AI-based content creation tool. Moreover, advanced paraphrasing and question-based features.
CanIRank: My other favorite SEO content tool that optimizes your content for search engines. When the first analysis is complete, it shows pretty useful keyword opportunities.
Ink: Another SEO web content writing editing tool that you can download.
Copy.ai: This app has one of the most generous plan that provides AI generated content. You can create marketing copy or any other free content with this product.
Visual Content Creation
I don't remember who said it but it is true: "If content is king, then design is queen". Whether you are creating visual content or written content, visually appealing content is preferable to the other. You can easily find the visual content creation tools you need such as:
- Image Creation Tools/ Social Media Tools
- Video Creation Tools
- Infographic Creation Tools
- Presentation Creation Tools
If you are more interested in visual design resources, you can check my other curated list.
Free design resources
Useful tools for design system creation, social media graphics manipulation, prototyping tools and graphic generators.
Let's start our list of digital content creation with some tools focused on creating and editing visual content elements.
Image creation/editing tools
There are a lot of free image editing tools out there. Some offer advanced editing features and others are more casual apps. But if you're looking for a basic set of image editing tools that can help you get your job done, then here are some of our favorites.
Figma: Oh great Figma. It is one of the greatest apps of the decade.
Canva: Canva is the most popular and the most used image creation tool. It has both free and premium plans. If you need quick visual content for your social media marketing operations, Canva is one of the best design tools.
There are also many image tools similar to Canva. Those are Crello, Artify, Projector, Taler, Design AI, etc.
Photopea is one of my favorite tools. It is a minified version of photoshop and it is working on a browser.
Remove.bg and Erase.bg: A well-known background remover. You can extract people from an image.
Remix by Buffer: This tool is made by Buffer and it transforms any link, tweet, or product into beautiful Instagram content.
Purple Photos: Create beautiful social media posts.
Magic Eraser: Remove unwanted things from your photos magically.
Presentation tools
Presentations are the core engine of any persuasive speaker. They establish credibility, inspire others, and move audiences emotionally. That's why the first step in any persuasive presentation is to select the right tools.
Presentations are a fundamental tool for any professional, whether they want to build a reputation or just sell products.
Pitch: This presentation creation tool allows you to collaboratively create your design asset.
Ludus: It is a collaborative presentation tool for creative teams
Premast Plus: You can use its professional templates to design better presentations and with a faster way. Even if you don't have any design experience.
Infographic Maker Tools
A well-designed infographic can go a long way towards convincing people to click through from a website or social media channel. Infographics are powerful, flexible, and can be used to achieve a wide range of results.
They’re an effective tool for getting immediate attention – without creating an overwhelming feeling. If it is done correctly, infographics can be a backlink magnet. Those are the popular infographic makers.
Visme: Visme is an online tool that allows you to easily create infographics. Those are very useful for visual explanations and building backlinks.
Infogram: Infogram is a visual creation tool that allows you to create infographics and visual stories with data.
Piktochart: Piktochart is another super functional tool for the visual content creation process. It helps you to make gorgeous infographics, presentations, and reports.
Venngage: An infographic design solution.
Graficto: Graficto is an infographic maker tool that is recently launched
Digital Whiteboard Tools
Miro: It allows collaboratively working on your content ideas. There are plenty of project management frameworks that make your ideation process easier.
FigJam: The digital board application of Figma.
Whimsical: Another digital whiteboard app that provides a unified workspace for thinking and collaboration for your content creation process.
Video creation tools
Video content is consumed super-fast compared to written one. Therefore, it is widely popular among the mass. Having a useful instrument will definitely make your life easier by decreasing your video edit duration and video creation.
Animoto: Animoto is a video creation tool with a drag-and-drop interface. It has templates that allows you start with pre-made graphics.
Biteable: One of the favorite video creation tools of content marketers. Express any concept. Personalize colors to match your brand.
RenderForest: Another tools for creating video content.
Runway ML: This tool is literally amazing. However, it has a steep learning curve because Runway has many features that use machine learning.
Powtoon: A suit of video creation tools. You can crop, rotate your videos. Powtoon also has a unique feature that removes watermarks from videos.
Miscellaneous Tools
Wrap: Wrap is a premium browser extension that makes your screen captures shine with carefully selected styles.
Buyer Persona: You should know who you are speaking if you have an intention to make your reader comfortable. This tool allows you to create a buyer persona.
Otter: A tool for generating notes from audio records.
Giphy: Who doesn't love GIFs. You can search and use millions of GIFs.
Wave Animated Snippets This one is for developers who need to show animated code in MP4 or GIF formats.
As I said before, this post is a growing list of content creation tools. I'm trying to add great content development and content creation tools to here. Therefore, it is better to bookmark and come back later.
These powerful content creation tools can boost your creativity and productivity. In the end, try all of them out for yourself to find out which fits you better.
Either way, stay tuned because there are still more tools that you could use to bring more value to your readers and make your content stand out.