If you’re a blogger or an Internet marketer, you would probably know that there are hundreds of thousands of marketing tools online that makes Internet Marketing much easier. A good percentage of the content that resides in my Evernote are actually “tools” — for almost anything.
Read: Why Evernote Is My (And Probably Your) Perfect Blogging Companion
And that’s how I recently came up with a list of 101 Productivity Tools and 101 Social Media Tools (with over 30 Image Tools). Today I’m going to focus on Content Marketing — just content marketing — and want to feature some of the best content marketing tools to streamline your marketing efforts.
So, that’s why your favorite Productivity Tools (Evernote, Pocket, Feedly, Trello, etc.), Social Media Tools (Buffer, IFTTT, etc.), and Marketing Tools (Moz, Open Site Explorer, Raven Tools, Ahrefs, etc.) are missing here.
Just in case…
Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you. — @Copyblogger
The Best Content Marketing Tools — Curated!
Content Marketing, as you would have imagined, is one of the most powerful ways to acquire customers by effectively creating and publishing valuable content. So here is a comprehensive list of some of the best content marketing tools. Ever.
Everything is perfectly organized into the following categories: Content Audit, Discovery, Ideas & Insights, Creation, Writing & Publishing, Data Collection, Curation, Promotion, Blogger Outreach, Premium Software, and Browser Extensions.
Content Audit Tools
Content audit, according to Wikipedia, is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on some part or all of a website. In other words, it’s all about analyzing the existing content on your website to see how well it’s performing.
You can try the following tools to do a complete audit of your website’s content. Just in case you’re curious, check out this step-by-step content audit tutorial to learn how to make use of the above content audit tools.
Screaming Frog — is a desktop program (available on Windows and Mac) that crawls a website’s links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective.
URL Profiler (Premium) — to quickly audit links, content & social data. Pricing starts at $14.95/month with a 14-day free trial — no credit card required.
Google Analytics — is the web’s favorite web analytics tool — yep, it’s free — that gives insights about your website’s traffic and also lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
Google Webmaster Tools — provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. Also try, Bing Webmaster Tools.
SEMrush (Freemium) — to get benefit from your competitors and create a perfect content strategy. Pricing starts at $79.95/month for the premium version.
SharedCount (Freemium) — to track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more. Pricing starts at $40/month for the API version. Also try, Like Explorer (Free).
Content Discovery Tools
To find great content — to share, and to write about.
BuzzSumo (Freemium) — shows you the most shared links and key influencers for any topic or website. Pricing starts at $99/month for the premium version.
Swayy (Freemium) — helps you discover the most engaging content to share with your audience on social media based on their interests and engagement. Pricing starts at $9/month for the premium version.
ContentGems (Freemium) — monitors the best online sources, including 200,000+ news sources, blogs, and social media accounts, and filters the results based on your keywords, social signals, and more. Pricing starts at $9/month for the premium version.
Topsy — allow you to search by time & place, set alerts, and analyze sentiment for every tweet ever made.
Social Crawlytics — to identify the influencers and your competitor’s most shared content and find out who shared their content.
ShareGrab — to get the most shareable content from any Facebook page, whenever you need it.
Google Alerts — to monitor the web for interesting new content.
Trapit (Premium) — lets you discover meaningful content from over 100,000 sources, including blogs, journals, magazines, news services, videos, and podcasts.
Read: 25 Content Discovery Tools To Find Great Social Media Content
Content Ideas & Insights
To find out the most relevant keywords for your content, and also to get better insights about the topic.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner (formerly AdWords Keyword Tool) — helps you find keyword ideas and estimating how they may perform. Also try, Übersuggest, Grepwords, Suggester.
Quora — for expert opinions and content ideas.
Yahoo Answers — to quickly ask questions and get information.
Google Trends — to explore trending topics on Google search.
InboundWriter (Premium) — is a content optimization app that tells you which content ideas will perform before it’s written and helps you reach and engage your audience.
Content Creation
If you want to outsource the content creation process, then look no further.
Scripted — is a content agency that you can hire for blog posts, white papers, and product descriptions.
WriterAccess — is a content marketplace that connects clients with freelance writers. Pricing starts at 2 cents per word.
Copify — for blog packages, website pages, blog posts, copywriting, etc. from U.S. and U.K. writers.
CopyPress — for content creation as well as promotion.
Textbroker — order content from native speakers in up to 10 languages for as little as 1.3 cents per word.
Wordy — real-time, human, copy-editing and proofreading for everything you write. Costs up to 3 cents per word.
Zerys — is a project management tool designed specifically for content projects, with a built-in marketplace of thousands of professional writers. Pricing starts at 1 cent per word.
ProBlogger Job Board — to hire a professional blogger.
Elance — to hire an individual freelance writer who meets your requirements. Also try, oDesk, Freelancer.
NewsCred — for licensed content from over 4,000 of the world’s best sources.
Skyword — find skilled and influential writers, designers, and videographers to help you tell your story.
Contently — helps brands create great stories, engage audiences, and deliver business results — at scale.
Visual.ly — is a marketplace for infographic design.
99designs — is a marketplace for graphic design.
Writing & Publishing Tools
Some nifty writing and publishing tools.
CoSchedule (Premium) — is a drag-and-drop editorial calendar for WordPress. Schedule blog posts with your team and automatically send messages to your social networks. Costs $10 per month per blog with a 14-day free trial — no credit card required.
KingSumo Headlines (Premium) — to A/B test your WordPress titles. Costs a one-time $99, that’s good for up to 50,000 visitors per month.
Portent Content Idea Generator — to get content ideas by only entering a keyword or two. Also try, Link Bait Title Generator, HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator.
Read: The 101 Best WordPress Plugins — For Anything & Everything
Data Collection Tools
Use the following tools to collect or analyze data for your upcoming article or blog post.
SurveyMonkey (Freemium) — is a free questionnaire and survey software that lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes and view its results graphically in real time. Pricing starts at $26/month for the premium version.
Zanran — is a search engine that gets you more meaningful numerical results.
DataMarket — brings complex and diverse data together so that you can search, visualize and share data in one place and one format.
MarketingCharts — offers marketing data, plus charts for marketers, analysts, and consultants.
Socialbakers — is a provider of social media analytic tools, statistics and metrics for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Facebook Audience Insights — to know the people who matter to your business, so that you can understand what matters to them.
Google Consumer Surveys (Freemium) — is a fast, affordable, and accurate market research tool that helps you make informed business decisions by asking Internet users survey questions. Costs $0.10 per complete for one question. Also try, SurveyMonkey Audience.
Google Consumer Barometer — is a tool to help you understand how people use the Internet across the world.
Google Public Data Explorer — makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand.
Content Curation Tools
A content curator is someone who aggregates content from across the web and organizes them in a meaningful way. They’re not the ones who copy stuff from the Internet and repost the same on social media, blogs, etc.
Content curators are passionate about what they share. Hence, they “curate” content — before sharing — by adding more information and value to it. The following are some of the best tools that will help you curate content from the web.
Meddle — turns your thoughts into a post, complete with a headline, photo and excerpt from the original article.
SlideShare — to share (and discover) presentations & infographics with the web’s largest professional content sharing community.
List.ly — to curate, crowdsource, and engage readers via live embedded list content inside blog posts.
Storify — to create stories using social media. You can collect photos, video, tweets, etc. and turn what people post on social media into compelling stories — that can be embedded anywhere.
Curata (Premium) — to find, organize & share relevant content for your business.
Read: 12 Content Curation Tools That You Never Thought You’d Need
Content Promotion Tools
If content is King, then by all means promotion is the Queen. Use the following tools to ensure that your valuable content doesn’t go unnoticed.
Sniply (Freemium) — to attach a call-to-action to every link you share. So you can include a link back to your website and get more targeted traffic. Pricing starts at $19/month for the premium version.
Scoop.it — to generate leads, improve SEO, increase brand awareness and also to discover and publish great content.
BuzzBundle — to generate more social buzz.
Facebook Groups — to get more targeted traffic from Facebook. Join relevant Facebook Groups and share your content with the members of the group. Also try, LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Communities.
Outbrain Amplify — gets your content discovered. Your content will appear as recommendations on the web’s largest content publishers including sites like CNN.com, Slate and ESPN. Also try, Taboola, Disqus, nRelate, Zemanta, Gravity.
Twitter Ads — to amplify your Tweets and get discovered.
Google +Post Ads — to amplify your brand’s content by easily turning Google+ posts into display ads that run across the web.
Facebook Boosted Posts — to boost your Facebook Posts and reach more audience. Boosted Posts appear higher in News Feed, so there’s a better chance your audience will see them. Also try, Facebook Ads.
StumbleUpon Ads (or StumbleUpon Paid Discovery) — delivers an engaged target audience directly to you: no clicking through ads or links. Pricing starts at $0.10 per visit.
Reddit Ads — to promote your content on Reddit and reach more than 170 million engaged and passionate users. Pricing starts at $1.00 CPM with a $5 minimum spend.
Content BLVD — allows brands to find media partners across the web to get more brand integration deals done.
750 Subreddits — A Google Doc of over 750 popular subreddits (categorized by industry and submission type).
Read: Over 30 “Cherry-picked” Web 2.0 Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
Blogger Outreach Tools
Blogging is more important than ever, and it’s such a powerful marketing medium.
According to Technorati Digital Influence Report,
When it comes to community size, 54 percent of consumers agree that the smaller the community the greater the influence. The survey findings also indicate that many of those consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase. Blogs were found to be the third-most influential digital resource (31%) when making overall purchases, only behind retail sites (56%) and brand sites (34%). In fact, blogs were found to be the fifth-most trustworthy source overall for information on the internet.
So what exactly is blogger outreach? Blogger outreach is the process of pitching bloggers — or say, influencers — and developing a relationship with them to ultimately promote your brand. If you want to dig deeper, then check out the “why, what, and how” of blogger outreach here.
BuzzStream (Premium) — is one of the most popular blogger and influencer outreach tool.
BlogDash (Freemium) — is a platform by which you can reach 200,000+ bloggers. Pricing starts at $199/month for the premium version with a 15-day free trail.
JustReachOut — offers a way for startups and individuals to find and pitch relevant reporters based on the best fit for topic, recency and relevancy.
NOD3x (Freemium) — is a social media analytics and data discovery tool that helps you identify influencers and key engagers within your chosen niche. Pricing starts at $9/month for the premium version.
Inkybee (Premium) — is a suite of blogger outreach tools. Pricing starts at $79/month with a free trial — no credit card required.
GroupHigh — helps companies find bloggers, manage and track relationships, and measure the results.
Triberr — is an influencer marketing platform. Also try, Inbound.org, Blogger LinkUp.
Sidekick (Freemium) — shows you information about your contacts right in your inbox and with email tracking, get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one of your emails. Costs $10 per user per month for the premium version. Also try, Rapportive.
Read: The Email Marketing Handbook – 101+ Resources, Tips, Strategies & Tools
Premium Content Marketing Tools / Software
Here are some premium software to assist you in your content marketing efforts.
Rainmaker — offers a complete website solution for content marketers. Build powerful content-driven websites, start a sophisticated membership program, sell digital goods the smarter way, etc. without wasting time with plugins, complicated code, hosting, maintenance, or upgrades. Costs $95/month with a 14-day free trial.
Scribe — is a content optimization software that analyzes your content, and tells you exactly how to gently tweak it for better search engine rankings. It also helps you crosslink your content, identify websites for guest blogging & link building, and find bloggers and social media users who will want to share your content. Pricing starts at $97/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Shareist (Freemium) — helps you keep your social media channels, blogs, and email newsletters active with Shareist’s research, curation, scheduling, and page creation tools. Pricing starts at $25/month for the premium version.
Percolate — connects and automates key marketing tasks — from brand governance, planning, content sourcing and creation to audience acquisition, social relationship management and analytics — to increase your productivity and help you distribute content that wins customers.
GatherContent — is a content organization and website planning tool (designed for agencies and their clients) to help gather content from clients, painlessly. Pricing starts at $79/month with a 30-day free trial.
Browser Extensions
I haven’t individually featured any browser extensions on this blog post as I’ve already listed some of the best Google Chrome extensions for bloggers and marketers in these two blog posts.
25 Google Chrome Productivity Extensions
25 Google Chrome SEO Extensions
Conclusion
Like I’ve already mentioned there are a ton of Internet marketing tools out there. The real challenge I faced while writing this blog post was to ensure that the tools I’ve listed here are in one way or the other related to “Content” and not “Social Media” or “SEO” or “Productivity”.
Once again… if your favorite marketing tool is missing here then it’s more likely that it’s listed in 101 Social Media Tools, or 101 Productivity Tools, or it will be featured in the upcoming list of SEO and Marketing Tools.
And if you please let me know that as a comment below, I’ll be glad to feature it! 
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Over 101 Content Marketing Tools (Free & Premium) You’ll Ever Need is a post by Minterest