Content creation is an inherent element for every digital publisher out there. Once your blog or website grows, you might consider delegating this task to others, but in the beginning, you’ll likely have to do everything on your own. It’s not necessarily easy to find the proper solutions right at the start of your carrier, so to help you spread your publishing wings, we’ve prepared an intuitive guide on which tools to opt for at the most important content creation stages you’ll face. Let’s go!
Tools for content creation
Well-performed content creation can be done without investing in various tools designated to facilitate this complex process. The milestone here is to know precisely what you do and what’s the purpose of your actions. It’ll make it easier for you to determine how to plan your steps and where you could actually use some help.
Let us present you with free content creation tools that you’ll undoubtedly need during the three essential stages of your publishing journey:
1. Idea and research
This stage’s purpose is to determine:
- what you want to say,
- how you want to express your message,
- what your buyer persona would need,
- how your brand should be presented.
Of course, no tools can replace a creative mind and expert knowledge. You have to know your industry and constantly monitor the changes in the market and your competition activity. To know if what you want to write about is searched by your desired audience, you have to perform keyword research. To verify what exactly people are looking for online, you can use AnswerThePublic, which collects search engines’ autocomplete data (in its free version, you can run even 500K searches per month). You can also use Google Trends, which reveals how popular are the top queries people enter in Google’s search engine. There, you can see which phrases are trending in your country or check how’s your chosen keyword doing.
2. Plan and creation
The second stage consists of:
- establishing what will be the form of your content,
- planning where, when, and how you want to publish it,
- the process of content creation,
- introducing improvements (like checking grammar and overall style of your content and adding graphic elements).
As a lone creative wolf, you just must be organized! Being present in your audience’s lives means being constant. It’s easier to engage them when you regularly publish than when dropping something once in a few months. And to keep yourself well-organized, you can even put all your content creation-related plans into a paper planner or a calendar made in an Excel Spreadsheet. While writing, you can count on tools like Grammarly or LanguageTool, whose free versions verify your texts’ spelling, grammar, punctuation, and style. To make your content more appealing, you can always spice it up with free graphics from websites like Pixabay, Pexels, or Unsplash and personalize it with simple designs made in the basic version of Canva or engage users in data by presenting them in a more attractive form of charts created, for instance, with Google Charts.
3. Publication and supervision
During this stage, you need to:
- publish your content,
- distribute and promote it accordingly,
- supervise your content,
- analyze users’ reactions.
Once you publish your content on your website or blog built in a CMS platform, let your audience know about it by enhancing them to read your new article by posting about it on your social media accounts. Then, try tracking their investment in your content using tools like Google Analytics, which provides you with essential information regarding users’ interaction with your digital creation. But another vital tool at this stage is your time and engagement. You should pay particular attention to the feedback people may give you via comment sections or by reaching out to you directly. If, despite everything you do, there will still not be many people reading your texts, you can adapt some of the improvements on how to drive traffic to your website.
Conclusions
All of the above may seem like quite a tough nut to crack, but if that’s the price of pursuing your publishing dreams – then it’s worth paying! And eventually, once it grows enough, you’ll be able to start looking for ways to make money from website you created. A profitable and straightforward method to do that is placing advertisements next to your content with the help of a monetization partner that would help you with the entire process – such as optAd360 😉 . We are waiting for this moment to happen, and keep our fingers crossed for your content to succeed!
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