8 Content Marketing Tools to Take Your Blog from Unread to Viral


June 9, 2016

content marketing tools

Writing a blog post is hard work. You have to decide on a topic, do some research, find or create a compelling (and legal to use!) image, and do at least one round of editing before you can take pride in pushing the publish button.

But if that’s where your preparation ends, you may have missed some valuable opportunities to take your blog content to the next level. With a little extra effort, research, and formatting, you can take your blog post from unread to viral.

Here are a few tools to help you do just that.

1. Answer the Public

Free

preposition-visualisation

What it does:
Answer the Public generates content ideas based on your queried or suggested keywords. It goes beyond more well-known keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner by appending search terms with prepositions like ‘for’ or ‘with’ to produce more content ideas. Search results generate simple data visuals.

Why it’s important:
Keyword research is important, but you can’t beat seeing actual search engine queries related to a topic you’re writing about. Give people what they want — that’s the point of Answer the Public.

2. BuzzSumo

Freemium – Basic functionality on the free version, additional functionality available from $99–$999/month

buzz sumo

What it does:
BuzzSumo is an incredible tool for content research and influencer outreach. It can help you discover new topics that may be of interest to your audience, as well as influencers in the field that can be valuable sources to link to or involve in a promotional strategy. It provides a lot of analytics/insight tools to show performance and reach.

Why it’s important:
BuzzSumo has so many different beneficial features, it’s hard to make generalizations. But BuzzSumo is a great tool for creating high quality content that people actually want to read, and making connections to help that content go farther than your network.

3. Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer from Advanced Marketing Institute

Free

emotional marketing value

What it does:
The Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer provides an analysis of your headline to measure its EMV score (Emotional Marketing Value) in terms of emotional, empathetic and spiritual word choice. Furthermore, the EMV score is calculated based on the total number of EMV words in your headline, corresponding to the total sum of words your article contains.

Why it’s important:
The blog headline is the first item that your customer notices in your copywriting so it is important to write emotionally-appealing headlines to attract your targeted audience. Obviously, my headline got enough attention to convince you to read this article.

4. Blog Post Headline Analyzer from Co-Schedule

Free

coschedule

What it does:
CoSchedule’s Blog Post Headline Analyzer scores the overall quality of your headline and rates its ability to be shared on social media, its value in search engine rankings, and its ability to generate traffic to your website. They take many dimensions into consideration for a very comprehensive analysis.

Why it’s important:
Again, headlines may be the difference between your post getting read or not. CoSchedule has a different approach than the Advanced Marketing Institute, and using them together can unveil a lot of insights.

5. Grammarly

Free for basic functionality

grammerly

What it does:
Though Grammarly provides plagiarism detection as a feature, it’s main use is as an automated grammar and spelling checker.

Why it’s important:
Atrocious grammar is a turn off. Catch it as it happens so people don’t leave your page because of it!

6. Hemingway Editor from Hemingway App

$9.99, one-time for the desktop app

hemmingway

What it does:
The Hemingway Editor is an app that aids your writing to make it concise, readable, and grammatically-correct. It also formats your text. In terms of functionality, it works with Microsoft Word and HTML. The desktop app does not require internet connection to use.

Why it’s important:
Sometimes, when creating blog content, writers focus too much on making sure to implement keywords and other SEO best practices. Hemingway helps you write for humans and makes suggestions for how to make text more readable. Ultimately, a viral post is more concerned with the reader – not a search engine.

7. Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Free

yoast seo premium

What it does:
The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin makes WordPress site optimization easy by providing real-time content analysis based on a keyword you’ve given it (from the result of separate keyword research). If you’re interested, the premium version features includes a redirect manager, multiple focus keywords, and premium support. But the free version will cover most of what you’ll need.

Why it’s important:
If you’re not trying to optimize for SEO, you’re missing free traffic. It’s as simple as that. Yoast makes it such a no brainer that anyone can do the basics without in-depth SEO knowledge.

8. Atomic Reach

Free trial, with monthly plans ranging from $249 – $1,200

atomic reach

What it does:
Atomic Reach allows you to analyze an entire blog post to gain audience insights, perform predictive analysis, and gain insights related to linguistic intelligence. It makes suggestions for how to improve content performance by tailoring content based on the needs of your target audience. It then tells you when to schedule a blog post to maximize engagement and drive traffic.

Why it’s important:
What could be more important than optimizing for your specific audience? Atomic Reach is not cheap, but for an organization putting out a lot of content and relying on an effective content marketing strategy, this tool makes a lot of sense.

No one said content marketing was easy. With a limited amount of time to consume content and a proliferation of content outlets, you need to take extra time to make sure your content stands out. These tools are a great way to take your blog from unread to viral.

Of course, they aren’t the only tools on the market! We’d love to hear what tools you use to take your blog from unread to viral in the comments below.

 


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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.