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Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Here are the 20 Free Tools to Make Your Day Better





Here are the 20 Free Tools to Make Your Day Better

Here are our 20 favorite free tools to help you kick more ass in life:
  1. Alfred: A productivity application for Mac OS X
  2. Launchy: A productivity application for for Windows.
  3. Honey: A chrome extension to save time and money shopping online.
  4. CloudApp: A Mac App to easily share images, links, music, videos and files.
  5. Currently: Chrome Extension to replace new tab screen with current time and weather.
  6. Rapportive: Gmail plugin that shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
  7. DownThemAll: Download manager/accelerator extension for Mozilla Firefox
  8. Prismatic: Awesome newsfeed app for web and iPhone.
  9. Reddit Enhancement Suite: The best way to stay in control of your reddit experience.
  10. Facebook Unseen: Hide when you've seen your friend's Facebook messages.
  11. Moves: Activity Tracker for iPhone and Android.
  12. Sequel Pro: Easy-to-use Mac database management application
  13. Instapaper: Tool for saving web pages to read later on your iPhone, iPad, Android, computer, or Kindle.
  14. Pocket: Put articles, videos or pretty much anything into Pocket.
  15. Glympse: Easiest way to safely share your location with someone in real time.
  16. Calibre: Comprehensive e-book software.
  17. Send To Kindle: Chrome/Safari extension to sending web content to your Kindle.
  18. LastPass: Online password manager and form filler that makes web browsing easier and more secure.
  19. Synergy: Mouse and keyboard sharing software.
  20. TeamViewer: Remote control any computer over the internet.
And check out these bonus free tools recommended by other sumo-lings:
  1. HelloSign: Legally Binding Electronic Signatures
  2. MightyText: Text from your computer, sync'd with your Android phone & number.
  3. Trello: Web organizational tool that keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details.
  4. Streak: CRM in your Gmail inbox.
Alfred is an amazing productivity tool if you use a Mac.
Here are 4 tips on how to use it:
  1. Contacts: Type in name of a person you want and then hit enter, you get quick access to any of their information.
  2. Find: Look for any file you are trying to find. The quickest way I've found on my Mac.
  3. Open or (') will actually open any file you want on your computer.
  4. Calculator. Type in any math operation and hit enter to save it to your clipboard. Then you can Command + V to paste it anywhere.
If you’re looking for an Alfred alternative on a Windows machine, try out Launchy. Launchy’s features include:
  • Launching applications and files
  • Killing tasks
  • Performing calculator operations
  • Running command prompt commands
  • Plugins that can interact with todo list apps and more.
Shop online and want to save money? Use Honey.
Honey is a Google Chrome and Firefox extension that finds coupon codes when you're shopping online. It works with over 100 sites including Amazon, Best Buy, CVS, Gap, Macy's, NewEgg and a ton others.
Honey crawls the web for coupon codes and tries them for you automatically right as you're about to check out.
CloudApp is the most convenient way to share screenshots for Mac users.
Make sure to select Autoupload Screenshots and choose default keys for Upload clipboard content. A good one to choose is: Command + Shift + A. Then you can hit 3 (full-screen) or 4 (drag to screen you want copied). Now you have any screen shot ready for you to paste (Ctrl + v) at ease.
Currently is a beautiful Google Chrome extension that replaces your new tab screen with the current time and weather.
Rapportive is a Gmail plug-in that shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
You can use it to find ANYONE'S email address in less than a minute. Here's a video showing you how:
DownThemAll is a download manager extension for Firefox. Imagine the scenario: Anton sends you a link to an album that has pictures of him and Kendrick Lamar hanging out in the AppSumo office. You think this is awesome so you want to download all the images to your computer.
Instead of right-clicking each image and downloading them individually, you can:
  • Right-click the site and click DownThemAll
  • Filter by ‘image’ files.
  • Filter further by filename.
  • Hit Start
DownThemAll will then download all images on the site that contain your filters. Additionally, you can set how many files to download at once and the amount of bandwidth to allocate to the download so you don’t slow down the network for everyone else.
Prismatic is a great tool for staying on top of topics that matter to you. It automatically pulls feeds from all over the web based on topics you care about. Then as you use it’s constantly getting more interesting because it learns what you like, finding more for you, and removing what you don’t.
Here are 3 tips on how to use it:
  1. Start off with high level topics you like, for example Chad wants to stay up to date on “programming” so he started with that. Once you start reading and find articles you like drill deeper by subscribing to the sub-topics of those articles. Chad's more interested in “Node.JS” so as I read programming articles about that I was able to now see more Node.JS specific ones.
  2. Use the bookmark icon to save articles you want to read or reference later.
  3. Because it’s constantly adjusting to what you like, it can easily become addicting, limit your reading time daily to make sure you get up and take action on what you learned rather than just learning for the sake of learning.
Reddit Enhancement Suite is the best way to browse Reddit.
It has some super awesome features like:
  • Inline Image Viewer: Opens images inline in your browser with the click of a button. Which means you don't have to leave Reddit to view a photo/video.
  • Never Ending Reddit: Gives you a never ending stream of reddit goodness. Just keep scrolling down and content loads automatically!
  • Comment Navigator: Provides a comment navigation tool to easily find comments by OP, mod, etc.
  • Subreddit Manager- Allows you to customize the top bar with your own subreddit shortcuts, including dropdown menus of multi-reddits and more.
If you're an avid Redditor, you need to be using Reddit Enhancement Suite.
Facebook Unseen is a Google Chrome extension that blocks Facebook's read receipts from being sent.
If you don't want to have your friends knowing when or if you've read their messages, Facebook Unseen is the perfect extension to block those pesky read receipts.
Which means that ex-gf that keeps bothering you won't know you've read her messages :-P
Pro tip: If you first view the message on your phone, a read receipt will be sent. Facebook Unseen only works when you read messages on your computer on Chrome.
Free is for me. A favorite saying in my family. I have worn Fitbits to help track my steps but always lost them or found them inconvenient. Pedometers are super useful in encouraging you to get out and walk. Even just the idea of them motivates me to get off my ass and walk around if I’ve been at my computer all day. I love the Moves app because it’s always on, can track when I’m biking vs walking and it does it all seemlessly.
-Chief Sumo Noah Kagan
Sequel Pro turns any business monkey into a pseudo developer. The real greatness of this tool is being able to pull information from a MySql database WITHOUT bugging your developers. Instead of writing queries you can look at any table and with content view browse your database like you do with Excel. I use this all the time to see the sources my visitors came from, revenue / profit from different ad spending and look at cohort analytics to see how members of Monthly1k.com are progressing by month.
-Chief Sumo Noah Kagan
This is a great service you never knew you needed until it was around. Instead of getting distracted with articles while at work or annoyed by too many ads, you can click the “read later” in your Booksmark Bar and it saves it to instapaper. You can then conveniently read the article at your own time on pretty much any device.
As an alternative to InstaPaper, Pocket lets you download a web page exactly as it looks and functions. If you want to read an article or watch a video but don’t have time, hit the Pocket button on your browser and the article will be cached and can be viewed later even without an internet connection.
Glympse is the best way to safely share your location while you're driving.
Here's exactly how it works:
If you read a lot of ebooks, Calibre is a life-saver. Whether downloading books from the library’s digital collection, Amazon, Google Play Books or wherever, you can throw them all into this ebook manager. From it, you can convert the ebook to different formats, send the book directly to any device you own (Kindle, Nexus 7, iPad, etc), and even retrieve RSS feeds for later viewing on your device.
Pro-tip: If you’re a student, put your class notes in Calibre and convert them to a format readable by your eReader.
Send to Kindle is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you send any web page you’re currently reading to your Kindle so that you can read it later. This is really useful for really long articles that you’d prefer to read distraction-free or from an e-ink display rather than your computer monitor.
Managing passwords becomes unwieldy when each site has different criteria for what a good password constitutes. Some have character minimums or maximums, capitalization rules, or symbol/number requirements.
Rather than trying to remember them all or using your browser’s less-than-secure “Remember this Password” feature, check out LastPass. Instead of remembering several passwords, you just have to remember a single password for LastPass.
Pro Tip: Use LastPass’ Secure Notes feature to save passwords that aren’t tied to a specific website like your Bitcoin wallet.
Synergy is awesome because it makes multi-platform development much more efficient. If you find yourself using Windows and Mac OS X frequently at the same time this is a life saver. It lets you share your mouse and keyboard between multiple machines without having to install any additional hardware.
Tips:
  • Configure Windows’ Hot Keys to the Mac OS X equivalent or vice versus to ease frustration of using two operating systems at the same time.
  • Take advantage of the ability to copy & paste between machines so that you don’t have to email or file sync, this is a huge time saver.
  • We’ve noticed that if two team members are using it on the same network you may experience some weird behavior, make sure you both use different port settings to avoid this.
Teamviewer lets you take control of another one of your computers over the internet. With it, you can take your laptop with you and still access all the files and programs that are on your desktop at home. This can really come in handy if you work on multiple computers and have your files spread out. Although you can use a VNC to set up remote computer access, TeamViewer makes it easy by removing firewall issues or dynamic IP address issues and letting you use a simple login and password.
Tips:
  • If anybody’s ever asked you for computer help over the phone, you know how difficult it can be to know what the other person is seeing. Have them install TeamViewer QuickSupport and you can view or take over their computer.
  • Retrieve and send files from other computers even if you’re at work and the computer that you need access to is at home.
HelloSign allows you to sign legally-binding documents with confidence!
MightyText lets you send & receive SMS and MMS from your computer or tablet, using your current Android phone number. Messages stay in sync with your phone's SMS inbox.
Trello is the fastest, easiest way to organize anything, from your day-to-day work, to a favorite side project, to your greatest life plans.
Stream is a Chrome extension that lets you manage your customers in Gmail.
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Saturday, March 28, 2015

How to Create (and Sell) Online Courses



HOW TO FIND YOUR ONLINE COURSE IDEA IN 15 MINUTES (OR LESS)

Why do people buy online courses? The short answer is because they’ve got a problem – and they want to solve it.
Maybe they’re looking to learn how to use a complicated piece of software. Maybe they don’t fit into their favorite jeans and want to lose weight. Maybe they’re stressed out and overwhelmed and want to take control of their calendar.
Whatever the case: people buy online courses because they have a problem in their life and they want to solve it.
You see, most people make the mistake and think people actually want to spend their time learning new things.
But…
No one wakes up and screams, “The FIRST thing I’m going to do today is buy an online course. I LOVE LEARNING!”
Maybe you do. Maybe I do. But most people don’t. And those are the people you want buying your online course.
Now, the question is...

WHAT SHOULD YOUR FIRST COURSE BE ABOUT?

Well…
Yesterday, in the PDF download (at the bottom of the page), I asked you to write three lists:
  • Your skills

  • What you help friends and colleagues with

  • What you believe you can do
Now, to turn that list into a profitable online course, you want to find overlap between at least two of these lists.
And that’s where I’d start.
Here’s why:
Even though you don’t need a “degree” to sell online courses, you do need some semblance of credibility.
If you have the skill, or a history of helping friends, that’s credibility. You may not have a certification, but no one can argue with the results you’re able to produce.
And if you have a belief you can do it, that’s good too. Because maybe you’ll act just like Joseph Michael Nicoletti – and you’ll learn it as you go.
“What if I came up short on my lists?”
That’s no problem.
You can start with this next exercise.

FIND THE PAIN – AND ELIMINATE IT

When you review that list, you’re likely already thinking about SOME courses you could make.
You may not know the specifics of that course yet. But you’re probably stewing with SOME ideas.
Now I want you to just pick one of them. Don’t pick it forever. Just pick it for now. And go through this little exercise I call “Find the pain – and eliminate it.”
I know this sounds morose, but bear with me.
Just because I’m asking you to find the pain right now doesn’t mean I want you to be negative in your marketing.
I just want you to understand your customer first… before you pick a course topic.
So, let’s do just that.
Let’s say on your list you picked the topic, “I want to help people with their relationships because my girl friends always ask me for advice.”
No problem!
Here’s what I want you to do…
Step 1: Find 3 or 4 best-selling books on the topic.
Step 2: Read the 5 star reviews and the 1 star reviews and look for “trigger phrases.”
A trigger phrase is an example of someone describing a problem in their life
A trigger phrase is also an example of someone bragging about a success in their life.
(If you’re confused, don’t worry. I’ve got an example).
Step 3: Start to compile a list of “Pain points” and “Solutions.”
That’s it.
Now let me show you this in action...
The topic is relationship advice for women.
When I searched that out on Amazon, I found 3 books. You could pick any books that have a decent number of reviews. I just happen to choose these 3 randomly…
“Ignore the guy, Get the guy”
“Why men love bitches”
“The soulmate experience”

NOW, GO THROUGH THESE BOOKS AND 
FIND THE TRIGGER PHRASES.

After going through the 5 star reviews of each book, I saw these examples of people describing problems in their life:
“I just went through a pretty rough patch with a man I thought cared about me where I was easily set aside when anything else interesting came up. ”
“I wish I would have read this for the ex before the last. I did everything wrong!! He must think I’m a total wimp and he’s now got an even bigger ego.”
“My relationship unexpectedly fell apart, and I found myself very distraught and alone…”
If you’re looking to help people with relationship problems, finding these problems helps you understand where your ideal customer is coming from. It helps you see the pain they’re going through so you can hopefully solve it.
That’s when you plot it on a little chart like this:
Now that you’ve found the pain people experience… your goal is to figure out what a potential solution might “look” like.
So, I want you to imagine a friend came to you with this exact problem. What would you tell them?
If a friend told you, “My man always sets me aside,” you’d tell your friend, “Well, don’t let him do that. Make him put you first.”
If a friend told you, “I’m distraught and I’m alone,” what would you say? “You just got out of a relationship. You should be single and happy about it!”
Right?
Do that for each pain. Just like this…
In reality, I’m just saying the opposite.
We’re taking someone’s pain, and turning it into a positive.

NOW DO YOU SEE HOW THIS IS TAKING SHAPE INTO A POSSIBLE ONLINE COURSE?

You start with pain. You know the solution. And that’s where your course comes in. You can help people go from pain to solution.
And bam.
You’ve got your first online course idea.
“What if I can’t find any books?”
That might be evidence that there isn’t demand for the type of online course you want to create.
But if you can’t find books, I’d also check for blog posts about the topic. If there’s a blog post and it looks like the blog posts are getting traffic, then you can do the same thing with blog posts.

NOW ONCE YOU HAVE THAT IDEA…

The next step is this: once you have an idea, you want to be sure you can actually sell this thing.
And that’s why I would spend time researching your competition. If you can’t find at least 10 people who are selling a course about what you want to sell a course about…
…then I’d probably find a new course.
(Note: If a course doesn’t exist yet, in a new, emerging popular market, it might be okay to go after it. As long as the pain is there. Because people will pay to alleviate that pain).
Anyway…
When thinking about your potential course, remember this:

#1 BEST-SELLING ONLINE COURSES 
PROMISE A SPECIFIC SOLUTION

If you want to succeed at selling online courses, you want to be INSANELY SPECIFIC.
Going back with the relationship example, notice how my solution never said something like “HAPPY RELATIONSHIPS WOO!”
Instead, I was talking to a SPECIFIC pain. And promised a solution on how to FIX that SPECIFIC pain.
You see, when most people start creating – and selling – online courses, they make general courses about things like branding, health, yoga, and other big terms.
The problem with that is that people won’t buy it. Sure, you might cover how to solve their problems inside the course, but remember, you’re asking people to pay you and if you want them to pay you right now, it’s best to talk to a specific pain with a specific solution.

NOW THE QUESTION IS: 
WHAT SHOULD I INCLUDE IN THIS COURSE?”

I’ll cover that (and more) in tomorrow’s training material.
For now…

HERE’S YOUR CHANCE TO 
GET MY ADVICE ON CREATING ONLINE COURSES…

Still with me?
Good.
Now:
Here’s what I want you to do. In the comments below, I want you to write three things:
Pain: Describe the pain you want to talk to.
Solution: Describe what the solution looks like
My Course Idea: I want to create a course about…
And that’s it.
Then, I’ll do my best to provide feedback to everyone who leaves a comment today.
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WebToolsGuy.com » Marketing Tools Explained, Reviewed And Even Installed If You Need Help!

WebToolsGuy.com » Marketing Tools Explained, Reviewed And Even Installed If You Need Help!:



'via Blog this'
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The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Expert Roundup Post That Gets 1000s of Shares

The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Expert Roundup Post That Gets 1000s of Shares:



'via Blog this'
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How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You're Not a Big Shot)

How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You're Not a Big Shot):



'via Blog this'
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37+ Tips on How to Build a Content Marketing Machine



Back when I started my career in SEO, content marketing didn’t exist—at least not in the way it exists now.
We used strategies to boost traction and traffic to websites through the creation of great content—it was content marketing before the term even existed. And it worked.
I’ve carried the lessons with me ever since. And I’d love to share them all with you—everything I’ve used to successfully help hundreds of companies benefit from content marketing over the past five years.
Here are 37+ tips and resources you can use to build a fine-tuned content marketing machine from the ground up.
build a content machine

The Key Concepts of Content Marketing

In 2009, I founded a company called Single Grain. It started as a part-time consulting gig but very quickly grew into a powerhouse digital marketing agency. In the early years, we were successful because we were able to help businesses of all sizes–including a few Fortune 500 companies—gain more traction online by implementing what we referred to then as link-building strategies.
Here’s how it worked:
  1. Search for a particular term or phrase that our clients wanted to rank for
  2. Find old pieces of content that showed up
  3. Create better (original) content that our clients could take and publish on their own sites in order to start ranking for the term or phrase
What we found in implementing this strategy over and over again for clients was that well-written, relevant content always gave us the best results. In addition, we found that great content did wonders for building brand reputation, establishing authority, and increasing sales.
Sound familiar?
This is essentially the same tactic that companies and agencies still use to this day in order to gain traction online, only now everyone refers to it as content marketing.
Today, content marketing is an essential part of building and growing a business. It’s one of the best ways to increase traffic, build a community of loyal customers, and move the needle.

How to Build a Content Marketing Machine: 37+ Tips and Resources

The 6 Best Articles for Learning the Basics

The best way to really dive into the world of content marketing is to start reading.
There are a ton of valuable resources online from influencers, experts, and other business owners who all started right where you are now. It’s up to you to take advantage of the free value they offer.
Here are six of my favorite “content marketing 101” articles that you can start with:
beginners guide
1. The Beginner’s Guide To Content Marketing – This KISSmetrics post by Joseph Putman provides readers with a fantastic overview on what content marketing is, why it exists, and how to get the most out of your efforts. The nice thing about this article is that it’s not super lengthy, so only have to spend a few minutes on it before diving into some of the meatier posts I’ve included below.
2. The Complete Guide To Building a Blog Audience - If you have zero experience blogging before, either for yourself personally or for your business, this QuickSprout guide from Neil Patel & Aaron Agius is a great resource to explore. In it, you’ll learn things like how to build your community, the differences between paid and organic search, how to incorporate social media into your blogging efforts, and more.
3. The Ideal Length of Everything Online, Backed by Research - You might be surprised to learn that a lot of research has been done on the ideal length of online content. In this widely popular and overwhelmingly valuable guide by Buffer’s own Kevan Lee, you’ll learn how long your tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and subject lines should be in order to be effective.
4. 31 Infographics For Everything Content Marketing - You could spend a lifetime reading through all the articles that exist online about content marketing. But who has time for that? As you probably already know, you can digest information in infographics and visuals a lot easier and faster than you can information in a really meaty and lengthy blog post. If you can’t spend as much time reading up on content marketing as you’d like, skim through this Uberflip resource from Hayley Mullen. It’s a collection of the best infographics on content marketing.
5. How to Build an Audience that Builds Your Business - When you’re ready to start really diving deeper into higher level content marketing topics, check out this resource from the Copyblogger team. It’s a collection of fantastic content marketing guides that will educate you on subjects such as how to do research, how to develop a working strategy, and how to actually promote your content once you’ve created it and published it on your site.
6. The Power of Storytelling: How We Got 300% More People To Read Our Content – When it comes to content marketing, stories rule. You don’t have to take my word for it though. Instead, read through this fantastic case study by Groove CEO Alex Turnbull. In it, he illustrates the importance of storytelling by shedding light on how he used storytelling to grow his blog audience by 300%.

7 Tips for Building Your Team

How To Build a Content Marketing Team
When it comes to content marketing, your ability to be successful ultimately depends on the team you build.
When I decided to start offering content marketing services at Single Grain, I knew that it meant I would have to hire people who knew more about it than I did. I needed people who were experts—people who were passionate and motivated to continue learning. I felt it was the only way we would be able to actually help the businesses that were reaching out to us for help.
Are you ready to build your content marketing team? If so, follow these tips:
7. Hire someone who knows SEO better than you. SEO plays a big role in content marketing. You need to hire someone who has experience and knowledge in the field who can help you make sure you’re writing about the right things and taking advantage of the right opportunities.
8. Find a solid writer who has marketing experience. This tip is important. You must hire someone—freelance or full-time—who has strong writing abilities. Google doesn’t like lazy or bad copy, and neither do your prospective customers.
9. Make sure you have a data person on your team. There’s a lot of data that can be measured, analyzed, and evaluated in relation to content marketing. You need to have someone on your team who can cut through the noise and find the information that’s going to help you keep making the right moves.
10. Bring a graphic designer on board. You can try to do design work on your own for a while with convenient and easy-to-use tools like Pablo, but ultimately you need to hire someone who has an eye for what works and what doesn’t. In content marketing, visuals are king. Hire someone who can help youcreate original, compelling visual content that you can use in your blog posts and on social media.
11. Hire a community manager who participates everywhere. In order to build a community of loyal readers, prospects, and customers, you need to hire someone to help you participate on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Find someone with community management experience that you can put in charge of reaching out to and engaging with people online.
12. Put someone in charge of partnership marketing. One of the best ways to grow your blog fast is by working with other partners on content projects. To do this, you need to put someone in charge of partnership marketing—someone who can help you build relationships with other like-minded businesses that would be willing to partner up on blog posts, webinars, infographics, and other types of content.
13. Find an experienced front-end developer. Finally, you need to hire a developer who can help you build squeeze pages, bigger content resources like this Email Marketing Best Practices Guide from Jimmy Daly at Vero, and other front-end marketing projects.

7 Tips to Keep Your Budget In Check

If you don’t have a clear plan in place, it’s pretty easy to spend a lot of money on your content marketing efforts in little to no time at all. When you’re just getting started, it’s important not to let things get out of hand in terms of the money you spend.
To keep your budget in check and make sure you’re putting the right dollars in the right places, use these tips:
14. Take advantage of free trials. You might be hesitant to search for and try content marketing tools and apps because of your limited budget, but keep in mind that a lot of the tools available to you offer free trials.
chartbeat trial
Take advantage of them and do your best to actually use them. Figure out which tools would be worth your money, and which ones you can pick up at a later time.
15. Do some things yourself first before hiring or outsourcing. In the previous section I talked about the importance of building your team, but it’s really only something you should do once you’re absolutely sure that it’s something worth investing in. Until then, save money by doing some of the work on your own first when possible. It is possible (to an extent) to “fake it until you make it.” There are a lot of helpful, actionable, and easy-to-understand resources out there that you can use to give content marketing a spin on your own first before giving the reins to someone else.
16. Be willing to spend (a little) money on Facebook. It’s important that you take the time to authentically and consistently participate with your community of followers, prospects, and customers on Facebook, but if you really want to build your blogging audience and get the most ROI out of the site, you need to be willing to spend some money creating paid campaigns that help you promote your content. Start with a small daily budget and adjust going forward based on results.
17. Work with college students and interns. Most college students are eager to gain additional experience that they can add to their resume. If your business is relatively new or you’re simply strapped for cash, consider hiring and working with college students or creating internships for content marketing positions. It’ll save you money and give you the opportunity to work with some of the brightest up-and-coming minds in the industry.
18. Build organic relationships as much as possible. Another great way to save money is by building organic relationships with influencers as much as possible (as opposed to putting a lot of money into building and launching expensive advertising and promotion campaigns). Get started by reading this article on the subject from KISSmetrics.
19. Remember that your budget allocation can change month-to-month.Don’t be afraid to make changes to your budget month-by-month. You’ll learn things along the way that will help you make more informed decisions about where and how to spend your content marketing budget.
20. Don’t be cheap. You want to make sure that you don’t let your spending get out of control, but that doesn’t give you a free pass to be cheap. At the end of the day, you’re going to have to spend some money if you want to use content marketing as another way to connect with prospects, build brand awareness, and ultimately grow your business. The trick is to constantly be testing and evaluating ideas in order to determine what tactics are actually worth the money.

6 Content Marketing Tools

Picking the right content marketing tools is almost as important as picking the right team members. The problem is, there are are a TON of tools out there and they aren’t all created equally. So how do you know which ones should you take the time to test out?
Here are six tools that we use on a regular basis to streamline our content marketing efforts at When I Work:
21. Buzzsumo - This is probably my favorite tool to use for ideation and outreach. Buzzsumo makes it incredibly easy to analyze which content performs best for any topic or competitor. You can also use it to see who has shared a specific piece of content and how likely they are to actually engage with people on Twitter. To see what else it can do, check out these use cases.
Buzzsumo
22. Google Analytics – This tool is a must-have if you’ve made the decision to invest in content marketing. It’s really the only way to get a complete and accurate picture on how the content you publish is performing and be able to make informed decisions about what to publish next.
23. Mailchimp - Email marketing is an important piece of building your community and getting your content in front of new faces. With Mailchimp you can launch an rss email campaign that sends your new posts out to subscribers as soon as you hit publish.
24. CoSchedule – This is my preferred tool for creating content calendars. It’s a great tool because it allows you to work right in WordPress—so you don’t have to leave your blog when it comes time to decide when and how often you want to share the blog content you create.
CoSchedule
25. Zemanta - This is the main tool I use for paid content promotion and syndication. Zemanta distributes content across a wide variety of platforms and sites, which helps increase your brand exposure and brings new readers to your site.
26. Content Marketer - This tool that I created (shameless plug) can be used to automate your content promotion efforts. It streamlines the process of finding contact information of influencers that you’ve mentioned in your blog posts, saving you a lot of time and headaches.
Content Marketer

7 Tips for Creating a Content Process

Once you have your team, tools, and budget in place, the next thing you’ll want to do is start creating repeatable processes for all your content marketing campaigns and projects. This is an important step, especially when it comes time to start scaling your efforts.
Content Marketing Processes
Here are seven tips that will help you be successful:
27. Standardize your ideation process. Ideation is one of the most important steps you need to take when creating content for your website or blog. If your idea is bad, your content will be bad. Build a standardized the process for coming up with your next ideas by including repeatable steps, tools, and tips. Need help getting started? Read what Alex Turnbull at Groove does to come up with great blog ideas week after week.
28. Create a repeatable process for content creation. It’s also important that you take the time to standardize the actual content creation phase itself. In order to be as intentional and purposeful with your content as possible, you have to give yourself time to think and plan. A step-by-step process will make it possible. If you need help getting started, check out this guest blog post from Jennifer Bourn on the CoSchedule blog.
29. Create editorial and social media publishing calendars. When it comes to content marketing and social media marketing, you never want to feel like you’re flying by the seat of your pants. Everything you do needs to be formulaic. That means you can’t just publish blog posts and social media updates when it’s convenient to you. You can add a lot more strategy and thought to your efforts by creating editorial and social media publishing calendars.
blogpost ideas
Not sure where to start? Read through this comprehensive guide from Buffer’s own Kevan Lee.
30. Create an outline for how you want engagement to happen. Similarly, you should also create a process for engaging with people on your blog and on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It makes scaling a lot easier and it makes it possible for you to easily hand the responsibilities over to someone else once you’re ready to hire more people to help you.
31. Put a step-by-step content promotion plan together. Unless you have a clear strategy in place for how you intend to promote each piece of content you create on your blog, you’re not going to see the level of engagement or traffic that you want to see. Putting together a repeatable promotion process can ensure that you’re getting the most out of every piece of content that you publish on your blog. If you need help creating a plan, read through this post I wrote on the subject.
32. Create outreach templates. A big part of the promotion plan you put together should involve manually reaching out to influencers and other people through email who can help you promote your content. Creating and using outreach templates can save you a lot of time and energy during this phase. You can find a ton of great outreach/promotion templates throughout this KISSmetrics post written by Aaron Agius.
33. Design a process for measuring and evaluating success. Finally, you should have a clear process in place that details how to measure and evaluate the overall success of every piece of content you publish. Not sure where to start? Read this post on the SumAll blog written by marketing expert Brian Honigman. In it, he outlines seven metrics you can look for and evaluate in order to measure your content marketing efforts.

7 Tips for Evaluating Success & Scaling Your Efforts

At the end of the day, you can implement every tip and tool that I’ve outlined up to this point in the post and it will mean nothing unless you are willing and able to measure, evaluate, and scale your efforts. A lot of people are intimidated by numbers, analytics, charts, and growth in general, but you don’t have to be.
Here are seven tips to help you evaluate and scale:
34. Set KPIs and goals ahead of time. You can’t measure what you don’t track, and you can’t evaluate whether or not goals have been met if you never take the time to set up clear goals or KPIs in the first place. Think about what you want to get out of the time, energy, and money you put into content marketing for your business (ex. more traffic, more conversions, more social engagement). Decide how you’re going to determine what can be called a success and what can’t.
35. Become obsessed with data or hire someone who can be for you. For content marketing to work for your business, you have to be obsessed with data. It’s the only way you’ll be able to benefit from your efforts and ultimately scale. If you’re just not a numbers guy (or girl), hire someone who is and put them in charge of collecting, interpreting, and reporting to you on relevant data.
36. Don’t be afraid to give up on something that isn’t working. In marketing and in business, you have to be comfortable with giving something up that isn’t working. You can’t take things so personal that you end up making the wrong decisions or keeping an idea alive for too long. You have to try to be as objective as possible. If you put a lot of time and energy into something and the needle never moved, don’t be afraid to drop it and move on to something else. It’s OK if your idea didn’t work—that’s what testing new tactics and ideas is all about.
37. Don’t fall into the “vanity metrics only” trap. It can be tempting to hold vanity metrics such as “likes,” “pageviews,” or “shares” above everything else when you’re participating on social media or regularly publishing content on your blog, but try not to ignore other “less sexy” data when it comes time to deciding whether to call something a success or not. Try to get the whole picture and think about the goals you originally set before you started working on your project. For more on this subject, read through this post from Lars Lofgren at KISSmetrics.
38. As you scale, don’t forget about quality. It’s so important that you don’t sacrifice quality for the sake of scaling as you continue to build your content marketing machine. I can’t stress this enough! Your followers, prospects, and customers want only the very best content from you, and that’s exactly what they deserve from you. Give them content that helps them, that keeps them talking about you, and that keeps them coming back for more.
39. Use tools to streamline your efforts. I touched on this a bit above, but it’s worth mentioning again. There are a ton of excellent, time-saving tools out there that can be used when it comes time to scale your efforts. They won’t all be right for you and your goals, but you won’t know until you try them for yourself.
40. Be open to trying new things. Things change fast in the world of content marketing. What worked yesterday might not work today. What works tomorrow might not work a year from now. In order to stay ahead of the game, you have to be open to trying new things. If you read about a new tactic that worked for someone else, decide if you want to try it for yourself. If something that worked well for you in the past but it doesn’t seem to be working well for you anymore, start hunting for new strategies and tactics to try. Talk to business partners, read blog posts, participate in forums like Inbound.org, and find something that you can test.

Over to you

What other tips, tools, or resources would you add to this list? I’d love to get your thoughts. Leave a comment for me below, or reach out to me directly on Twitter—I’m @SujanPatel.
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