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10 Must Have Content Creation Tools

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Content creation can be a difficult task, but luckily there are many tools to help. Spanning from content curation to social media organization, the ten items described below are some of the best creation tools available.

 

1.  Twitter

If you are looking for inspiration to draw from or simply wondering about the latest news and possible headlines, Twitter can be an excellent place to seek information. More specifically, consider creating or following a Twitter list: lists can be incredibly helpful when it comes to content creation. A list of people surrounding a particular topic, event, or area can not only generate topic ideas, but also provide multiple points of view to consider covering.

 

2.  Audacity

Do you conduct interviews or often use audio clips in your writing? If you do, then you should consider using a tool like Audacity, an easy-to-use audio recording and editing device, to help you safeguard audio while allowing you to easily find, isolate, and transcribe specific portions of an interview to include in your piece.

 

3.  Stock Photos

Stock photos are an incredibly useful tool for any content creator who likes to take advantage of the enhanced marketing effectiveness offered by images, but without the time to create their own illustrations for every post. There are a number of stock photo providers offering their services, including HubSpots Free Stock Photos, Dreamstime’s Free Images & Premium Images, Free Digital Photos, and Free Photos Bank. Some websites may require a completion of a short registration form in order to access their libraries; however, all of the aforementioned resources offer a sizeable pool of free stock images to use.

 

4.  Word2CleanHTML

If you have ever tried to create blog posts anywhere other than inside of the tools provided by your specific platform – such as Microsoft Word or Evernote, for example – you are probably familiar with the sheer number of formatting errors and quirks that can occur when you attempt to copy and paste your content into a new blog post. From absurdly sized paragraph breaks (from too-large to nonexistent), to unexpected format changes seemingly caused by something as weird as deleting the first line in the paragraph and curiously missing font stylizing, drafting your blog posts can quickly become a frustrating nightmare. This is where Word2CleanHTML comes in: rather than pasting directly from your preferred application to your blog interface, first you copy your text into this handy tool, click a single button, and then cut/paste the subsequent HTML into your blog platform.

 

5.  Storify

Have you ever wanted to create content around a specific hashtag on Facebook or Twitter, but balked at spending time taking screenshots of comments and tweets, editing those screenshots, and manually adding each one to your post? Take a look at Storify, a nifty tool that gives the ability to find and embed relevant posts easily. Using Twitter as an example, although the tool also supports Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and Instagram, among other social media sites, you can simply search for whatever hashtag you are interested in writing about, and then choose which tweets interest you before organizing them and embedding the whole conversation in your post.

 

6.  Ubersuggest

Sometimes the hardest part of content creation is figuring out what to write about, and Ubersuggest can help. Rather than spending your time on Google looking for random topics and risking getting distracted, take your general topic idea and paste it into Ubersuggest. The tool will list different keywords, extracted from Google that are related to your area of interest. This is a really interesting tool not only because it can help you find a narrow topic to focus on, but also because it can introduce you to entire subtopics that you might not have encountered otherwise.

 

7.  Haiku Deck

It is not always enough to simply write content and add a photo or two to generate interest – sometimes you need to create a dynamic presentation that really pulls your information together and engage your readers. Haiku Deck is a surprisingly powerful tool that can help you create beautiful presentations every time, and it has plenty of free options to keep you occupied. You are given a selection of premade “decks” – image and layout combinations – to choose from (or, if you would prefer, you can create your own), add your information, and generate a unique and appealing presentation to share.

 

8.  Evernote

Taking notes might sound like an outdated concept, but Evernote makes keeping track of information incredibly easy and fun. You can store quotes from the web – Google, Facebook, and Twitter, for example – take photos or videos and organize them into a particular project, and easily keep your notes tied to source text. With applications for mobile as well as desktop environments, you can conduct your research whenever the inspiration strikes and keep all of your information synced across devices.

 

9.  Curata

Picking information that interests you and being able to view it in a format that works for you is incredibly important when you are trying to create unique and interesting content. Curata is a curation application that allows you to easily locate content that interests you, organize and contextualize the information you locate, and share the resulting content across multiple platforms. The Curata team also enables you to market and annotate the content you create, which is a useful feature to ensure that all of your readers see the stories that interest them.

 

10.  Content Hubs

You will not always have an idea about what topic you want to write about, or for which to create your presentations and other content. Sometimes you will know that you want to write content about something trending, but you are not sure what exactly will pique your interest. In these situations, frequenting a content hub can be extremely beneficial. Content hubs, such as Reddit or Digg, are websites where users can submit and comment upon stories of their choice, in a near-infinite number of categories. Reddit in particular has an immense crowd of users submitting interesting content from all over the world and in all sorts of languages (although the main language is English). If you take even a moment or two to browse the front page of the website, chances are good that you will leave with an idea about the latest breaking events in world news, politics, entertainment – even viral videos and memes. You can use content hubs to stumble upon major events and trends that might interest you, and use it to drive your inspiration and further research as you continue to create content.

 

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Cameron Mackey

Cameron is the Content Manager for the Vorongo Blog. He has spent three years in various content marketing roles. When he is not working with Vorongo he enjoys photography and hiking.

One response to “10 Must Have Content Creation Tools”

  1. Sonali says:
    March 12, 2015 at 7:00 am

    Hi Cameron,

    Thanks for sharing this useful info. I would like to add 2 more to your list:

    1. Portent.com - To use this content idea generator, you just need to enter a keyword (preferably a long-tail one) and voila! you’ll get some catchy potential titles for your next blog post/article.

    2. Buzzsumo.com - This content curating tool helps you search shared content through social networks, collect all data about the content at one place, find the top influential content curators in a specific niche and collect statistics about how their content is shared across different social media platforms into Excel spreadsheets.