During my marketing career I have made it a practice to try all the current tools to see if I can find ones that make me more productive. Here are the tools I use all the time to get the most from my content marketing efforts – which include 7+ published books and many articles and posts.
1. Content Distribution: Leadpages Fee
You really won’t reap any rewards from your content marketing efforts if no one sees your content. You can post to your blog and other outlets, but for list building and traffic increases, you need LeadPages. Every type of landing page is available to you for customization. You also get the major benefit of using the top converting designs because you can sort them according to the results they produce. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
2. Content Repository: Evernote Free and Fee
If you don’t use Evernote, you’ve certainly heard about it. In its most basic form it is a repository for any content you want to save for research and development. I use it to organize my content marketing projects and make sure that everything is saved in one place when I’m ready to work.
3. Image Capture and Annotation: Snagit Fee
I have used Snagit for years to do screen captures for my books and to annotate images. You can not only capture an image, but you can add arrows and instructions directly on it with a few clicks. It’s great for customer service explanations and includes video capture. It’s dead simple which makes it a must-have.
4. Content Curation: Buffer Free and fee
Nothing beats Buffer for content curation scheduling. It lets you share articles to your social media accounts immediately or schedule them for later. First you set up the social platforms on which you want Buffer to share (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.) Then, when you’re reading an online article that you want to share, you simply click the Buffer share button (if there isn’t one, click the Twitter button and your Buffer account will show up next to it). It keeps your pipeline filled with valuable content
5. Image Organization: Picasa Free
This tool has been around forever and was purchased by Google. Are you surprised to see it here? Don’t be. It will save you loads of time when you forget where you stored your images for various e-books, posts and articles. Picasa indexes your entire hard drive and finds every image on it. To locate an image, just open Picasa and see the visual display of every image you have. I don’t use it for editing very often, but for organization, it’s awesome and free.
6. AWeber: Fee
This is the mailing list tool that I have used for quite a long time. It’s easy and not overly expensive. There are certainly other good tools out there. This is the one that I have stayed with.
