4 Content Creation Tools to Help You Save Time

About our guest blogger:
Three-time entrepreneur Simon Slade is CEO and co-founder of SaleHoo, an online wholesale directory of over 8,000 prescreened suppliers; Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal with 300,000 members and over 100 free video lessons; and their parent companyDoubledot Media Limited, which provides seven different training and software applications to over 500,000 customers worldwide. Learn more about guest blogging on MediaLeaders.

Are you spending way too much time creating content for your website, blog, social media or marketing campaigns?

You are not alone. Content creation takes up huge chunks of time for any business owner with a website or social media account—yet content marketing is constantly becoming more important for your relationship with Google as well as your readers/customers. Your content needs to be genuine to create organic traffic for your website and social media accounts. Here are four great content creation tools that can help you provide better, more engaging content in less time.

• Buzz Sumo – Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor

Buzz Sumo is a tool for generating ideas for your content. When you hit a writer’s block, Buzz Sumo can show you what content is working in your niche and help you brainstorm. Enter a topic in the search bar to see headlines and links to the most popular content that others are writing. You can sort the results by Total Shares or by a specific social media outlet: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
There is a limited number of daily searches unless you are using BuzzSumo Pro. The service offers a 14-day trial without a credit card. When you set up your profile, it offers to track your website and company name as well as any competitors you wish to monitor. One of the most beneficial aspects of Buzz Sumo is that it allows you to analyze what is working for your competitors, which can help you come up with new ideas for your own content.
Even if you choose to just use the service a few times daily without purchasing the Pro package, Buzz Sumo can help you come up with ideas for content when you have a topic but aren’t sure which direction to take.

• Hemingway – Makes your writing bold and clear

Named after an author famous for his simplicity, this tool can help you simplify your own content so your readers don’t become bored or confused. We might think our writing is easy to read, but often our own material is far clearer to us than it is to our readers. It’s easy to get carried away with complicated sentences and big words — Hemingway shows you where this has happened.

Using Hemingway is incredibly simple, too. Paste in your content and the app highlights mistakes in different colors. Yellow means a sentence is a bit too long; red means a sentence is way too long. When the app highlights a word in purple, you could substitute that word for something more basic. When a word is highlighted blue, it’s an adverb — you should avoid these entirely for more clear, punchier content. Green highlights mean a phrase is in passive voice; active voice is almost always preferable.

The app has basic formatting for font, numbers and hyperlinks as well. It breaks down your content into the number of paragraphs, sentences, words, characters, letters, and gives you an estimated read time and a grade for readability. All of this information can help you assess how easily your readers will (likely) digest your content. Easy-to-process content is key to gaining a loyal readership. If your readers feel overwhelmed by your posts, it is unlikely they will come back for more.

• Jing – A simple way to start sharing images and short videos of your computer screen

Visual content is the king of content marketing. Jing is an excellent tool to help you create high-quality, engaging visual content with ease. Jing allows you to highlight a specific part of your screen for screenshots or videos. You can also edit the screenshots by adding arrows, highlighting words and circling parts of the image. The screenshot video feature makes it especially easy to create tutorials and instructional videos, which make for excellent content in almost any industry. Jing streamlines the content-creation process by giving you the option of saving your creation, sharing it via social media, or uploading to your blog.

• Buffer – Save time on social media with powerful scheduling and analytics

This one is for all the people who struggle with social media content creation. Social media requires consistent content in a shorter format, which can be just as difficult to provide as larger posts. Scheduling is the key to providing consistently good social media content. Save yourself the hassle of logging into each social media channel every day and let Buffer handle this for you. Buffer is especially good for adding third-party or curated content to your social media feeds. Furthermore, Buffer optimizes your social media posts by sharing your posts at the best possible times throughout the day so that more people see your updates.

The Free Individual Buffer plan lets you schedule 10 posts for each profile on Google +, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You also have access to the Buffer image creator called “Pablo” and the ability to upload video and GIF. The Chrome plugin is a time-saver: every time you find a piece of content you think your audience will enjoy, simply hit the button and it goes into your Buffer feed.

Creating great content is always a challenge, but it’s a vitally important part of your marketing strategy. By using these content creation tools, you ensure that you aren’t wasting any time and your readers will still be impressed with what they’re getting from you.