Being a successful business owner doesn’t only mean managing your core duties efficiently. It also includes many different additional actions, from financial planning to content marketing.
Creating a practical content marketing strategy is the key prerequisite to present your business in the best light possible.
It’s easier to achieve that goal if you choose the right content marketing tools.
In this article, we’re going to discuss seven crucial solutions that can be used free of charge.
Blog Ideas Generator by HubSpot
When experts say that content is king, they mean that every bit of content you publish on your website has to serve your customers.
To be more precise, your content needs to fulfill two main functions.
First, it should provide valuable information for your audience, which will help them solve their problems.
Secondly, the content that presents your business needs to be put together in an original way to grasp your readers’ attention.
One of the most powerful ways to catch their eye is to come up with witty article titles for your blog and website.
This is where the Blog Ideas Generator tool by HubSpot comes on stage.
What you should do is simply choose one or more words as the gist of your article. The tool will generate several different titles for those particular words.
For instance, you can organize your articles around some specific keywords to improve your SEO rankings. Also, the core words can serve the purpose of popularizing some of your unique products or services.
Feedly for collecting relevant content
No matter what kind of a writer you are, you need to read as much as possible.
In other words, there’s no skillful writing without extensive reading.
It’s good to know that the world of content marketing is constantly changing. This means that you should always stay informed and alert about the current affairs in the niche.
Feedly is a tool that will help you collect the relevant data for various types of SMB-content.
First and foremost, you need to register on the Feedly website. The procedure is extremely simplified so you can create your account using an existing Google, Facebook or Twitter account.
Once you enter the website, you can start adding your favorite online resources to the Feedly dashboard.
You can either add website URLs or RSS feeds to your folders and always have everything important for your business in one place. What’s more, it’s also possible to use client emails to extract their domain names and gather their RSS feeds on your dashboard.
As for personalization, you can use a hashtag and a keyword – e.g. #fashion – to see different articles and sources relevant for that topic.
Also, you can search Feedly by specific website names to start following the key websites for your industry.
WordPress for smooth content publishing
No matter if you want to launch a full-scale website or just a blog, WordPress is one of the most effective content management systems.
What makes it so popular is the simplicity of use and a wide range of different plugins.
To be more precise, it’s an open-source tool that has thousands of contributors. They create different themes and plugins. Some of them are free of charge while others have to be paid.
That way, SMB-owners can choose from a sea of various additions for this platform. As a result, you can actually build an attractive, efficient, optimized, and secure website at a fraction of the cost. As a matter of fact, you might just need to pay the hosting services for a fully functional website.
What’s more, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize all your articles, newsletters, and publications for search engines. Also, this tool will help you improve the structure of your content pieces.
Grammarly for structured and accurate content
Many business owners need to deal with things that they haven’t been trained for. For instance, writing cohesive, well-structured, and authentic content might be a demanding task for some ingenious businesspeople.
The fact that you have come up with an original business idea doesn’t mean that you know how to properly explain it in an article or a copy.
Since you might not have enough assets at the beginning of your business to pay professional copywriters, you’ll find the Grammarly tool more than helpful.
First and foremost, you can select whether it’s a formal or informal article. What’s more, it’s possible to set whether your article is meant for the general or expert audience. Also, you can choose the level of emotion that the article is supposed to convey.
Moreover, this solution corrects both the grammatical mistakes and wrong word choices.
Apart from that, you’ll get the punctuation suggestions in case you misused punctuation marks.
Also, Grammarly will warn you if you’ve chosen wrong collocations.
It’s good to know that there are two packages of Grammarly, the free and the premium option. The latter provides a higher number of suggestions and corrections.
YouTube for multimedia content marketing
Probably the most important content marketing tool after Google, YouTube, is a vital online channel for every small business owner.
For starters, go to YouTube and create your own channel.
Then start searching for the key trends in your industry and subscribe to the most important channels. Try to make a compilation of channels run by your rivals and the pundits of the industry. As a result, you’ll stay in trend with all the current tricks of the trade.
Apart from that, publish your own original videos on your YT channel. These features will be more than useful in promoting your business across social media and other online channels.
What’s more, you can embed your own videos to your website and avoid piling up data on the website server.
Last, but not least, make sure to add hashtags to video descriptions to increase your online visibility.
Conclusion
No matter how much experience you have with content marketing, it’s vital for your branding to start using it from day one.
You should pay special attention to the article you publish both on your website and on other blogs.
It’s important to create original titles and base your pieces of writing on the relevant sources from your niche.
In addition, SMB-owners need to use as simple and effective content tools as possible. Grammarly, YouTube, and WordPress make the holy trinity of content marketing. They’ll help you improve your content and generate more leads.
To conclude, always make sure to publish up-to-date content and offer your potential customers something relevant and trendy. As a result, your brand will grow rapidly and you’ll keep attracting new leads to your business.
