Content creation can be difficult to keep up with. 7.5 million blogs are posted each day and most bloggers publish at least one article per week. It can seem like an endless loop of idea sourcing, blog writing and post creation.
From blogs to emails to social media, you may be creating new content each week, but still not having enough. With content marketing making big demands on your resources, we can all appreciate a little help where we can take it.
Today I will be sharing the top 3 free content tools we use for writing blog posts that’s perfect for beginners to pro bloggers.
Why do I need to write blog posts?
Content is a great way for businesses to reach their target audience. Especially with blog posts, you can gain visitors to your website by sharing industry information. You are building trust within that community and recognition for your brand. Companies that blog actively have 126% better lead growth.
Writing blog content on your website and sharing that content across social platforms is a great way of directing your followers to your site to explore your company and what you do.
Blog content is also one of the top ways for building SEO (search engine optimisation) for your website. 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc) is their highest quality source of leads. If you are sharing content related to questions that your target audience is likely to be asking on Google, search engines will direct them to your site, because it knows you will have the answers to their questions.
So, how do we go about finding the questions your target audience is asking?
Answer the public – https://answerthepublic.com/
This is where our first tool comes in. Answer The Public allows you to search keywords and it tells us the questions that the public are asking in regards to that topic. We can explore the many questions that it generates and choose a handful that we want to use within our marketing strategy. These can spark ideas for topical questions to answer in our next post or even be used as titles for our next blog.
The best way to utilise this tool is to search for keywords that are prominent in your industry and your business niche. Once we have those questions we can start writing content that answers them. Not only does this help us come up with ideas for new and innovative blog post titles. But we also know that our target audience will be looking for this information and will be drawing new visitors to our sites through SEO. If you are answering questions that no one else is, then you are more likely to get more views.
I don’t know where to start?!
You now know what you want to write about, but you’re struggling to get started and getting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard rather). We are all also very busy and want the ability to create content quickly. So my next tool helps you with both and is something that is widely available on most document editing tools as standard.
Voice Typing
Voice typing is immensely useful for the initial stages of blog writing. When you are starting to write content for your topic, you can quickly get your ideas down before you forget them.
In both Microsoft Word or Google Docs the tool voice typing is available, but there are also many browser voice typing applications if you aren’t using those editing tools.
It saves you time, allows you to get your thoughts out and written quickly, and you can write in your own tone of voice. There are so many reasons why this tool could help you in writing your next post. So next time you are writing a document take a look to find out where this tool is and give it a go.
How to enable voice typing in Google Docs?
- Check that your microphone works.
- Open a document in Google Docs with a Chrome browser.
- Click Tools and then Voice typing. A microphone box appears.
- When you’re ready to speak, click the microphone.
- Speak clearly, at a normal volume and pace.
- When you’re done, click the microphone again.
So you’ve got lots of content now. Or maybe you are sorting content from other sources, reading blog posts, news articles and social media posts. You are collating all of this information. This next tool is a great way to rewrite and reword content to make it your own.
Frase.io – https://www.frase.io/tools/paragraph-rewriter/
Frase is a paragraph writer and is a wonderful AI tool that is free to use, (although there is a premium option). You simply copy a sentence or paragraph and paste it into the browser tool. It then regenerates the text and the next thing you have is a new reworded paragraph of copy.
This is excellent if you want to say something that someone else has said but don’t want to copy the exact phrase. Also if you want to reword something you’ve said before in a previous post, as duplicate content is bad for SEO. So if you haven’t got time to rework it or need some inspiration, throw the text into the generator and see what it comes up with.
I wouldn’t recommend copying someone else’s blog post and rewording it, that’s not original! However, this tool is great for shorter sentences and getting across a similar point but want to do so in a different way.
Let’s get blogging!
Blogging can be one of the most rewarding endeavours for your business growth. With relevant information on your service and industry being shared consistently, you will be sure to see an increase in website traffic and in turn, your brand recognition will grow within the industry and should gain you more customers or clients. So start using tools to help keep your content relevant and consistent. These are only 3 of thousands of tools available to help your content creation. So what tools do you recommend?
