This is Part 2 of a 2-part series on content marketing for authors. You can find the first part here: What is Content Marketing and How Does It Make Money For Authors?

Content marketing is an effective way to generate loyal readers and boost book sales. But the tools you use can make or break your content strategy. In this article, we’ll look at some of the best tools for creating and promoting content that will help you maximize your reach, engagement and conversion rates.

Recap: What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a way to connect with your audience by creating content that they find interesting and useful. It’s also a way to make sure they know about your author brand — and hopefully want to buy some of your books.

Building a strong content marketing strategy can help you gain new readers and keep existing ones happy. It’s also a great way to build trust with your audience and increase your brand awareness.

In short, if you want to sell more books, you need a strong online presence, and to build a strong online presence, it’s important to create content that your audience will find interesting and valuable. 

Know what you need before you start looking.

Before you start shopping for a tool, it’s important to know what your goals are and how exactly you plan to achieve them. If you don’t know what your goals are, then it will be difficult to find the right tools to suit your author brand. 

For example, if your goal is to increase book sales, then you should look for a content marketing solution with features like email templates and landing pages. If your goal is to get more engagement on social media and build a loyal audience of readers, then you might be looking for a tool that makes it easy to schedule posts across multiple platforms.

Do your research. There are tons of tools out there, so it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you and your brand. To help narrow down the field, start by looking at what other authors in similar genres are using. You can also check out reviews and read blog posts about user experiences with specific tools. 

Asking yourself these questions will help ensure that the right tools are being used at the right time:

• What can I do with this? (What features does this tool offer?)
• How will this benefit my author brand? (How much time/effort does each feature require?)
• How does this tool fit into my overall content strategy? (Is it a tool for creating content or distributing content?)
• Who is my target audience? (What features of this tool are most likely to resonate with them?)
• How will this benefit them? (How can I measure success?)

Find the tool that matches your budget

What budget do you have to work with? If your marketing budget is healthy, it’s likely that you can afford the more expensive tools on this list. However, if money is tight and allocating funds toward new software isn’t possible, there are plenty of free or freemium tools to choose from.

You may be able to get by with a free tool at first! But eventually it’s likely that investing in premium solutions will save time and money in the long run.

The Best Tools for Content Marketing

I divide content marketing tools into four broad categories: Writing Assistants – helping you with content creation; Social Media Tools – helping you to publish and engage with your audience over social media channels; Image Tools – helping create images for your content; Keyword Research Tools – helping you to find keywords that resonate with your target readership.

There are of course a few other ways in which content marketing tools can be categorised, and indeed, this article is by no means intended to be a definitive list of content marketing tools. For example I don’t touch on channels: website platforms or email marketing. What I am aiming to provide is a taster of some of the more popular content tools that I have come across. 

Writing Assistant Tools

A writing assistant is a tool that helps you write better content and usually includes one or more of the following formats:

• Spelling and grammar checker, which checks for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and basic syntactical issues. The best writing assistants will also include additional features such as contextual spelling suggestions (so it knows when to use “it’s” versus “its”) and prompt you with synonyms as needed. Some even offer more advanced features such as checking for voice consistency.
• A.I. writing assistant, using artificial intelligence to create content, the output of which can help you to formulate ideas, and produce the base content ready for you to inject your own thoughts.
• Plagiarism checker, which checks for plagiarism, by comparing your work against a database of millions of known “copyrighted” material. This is a useful tool if you are in any doubt about whether what you have produced has already been published elsewhere on the web.
• Writing editor, helping to get thoughts organised, and often providing a distraction-free environment to help you focus on the task of content creation. Writing editors are generally a content creation tool, where you can write, edit, format and publish your work in an easy-to-use interface.
• Content idea tools, providing a ready-made list of topics that are popular with your target audience, and allowing you to quickly create content around those topics. 
• Keyword research tools, providing search statistics for keywords targeting specific audiences.

Spelling, Grammar, and Plagiarism Tools

Grammarly – Freemium

ProWritingAid – Freemium

Plagiarism Detector – Free

Plagiarism Checker – Free

A.I. Writing Assistants

Copy.ai – Freemium

Jasper – Freemium

Also check: Awesome A.I. Writers collection

Writing Editor

ProWritingAid – Freemium

Effie – Paid

Wordtune – Freemium

SEO Tools

SEO tools are usually software programs that help you to do things like find keywords, monitor your rankings, or even track the progress of your competitors.

SEMRush – Paid

Jaaxy – Paid

Twinword – Paid

Nightwatch – Paid

Keyword Atlas – Paid

Also check: SEO Category

Image Tools

These tools can help you create images for social media, blog posts, email newsletters and more. They include features like image search, editing, as well as templates for creating infographics.

Unsplash – Free

Pixabay – Free

Flickr Commons – Free

Jasper AI Image Generator – My choice – Paid

Photosonic AI Art Generator – Freemium

Photopia Image Editor – Free

Also check: Images Category

Keyword Research Tools

These tools can help you find related keyword ideas, as well as data about how many times they’ve been searched and which words are more popular than others. They can also help you analyze the competition for a given search term and find out what keywords are most important to your industry.

Content Studio – my choice – Paid

HypeFury – my choice – Freemium

Hootsuite – Freemium

Napoleon Cat – Paid

Post Planner – Paid

Also check: Social Media Marketing Category

Conclusion

As a content marketer, it’s important to know what tools are available and how to use them. The right tools will help you create valuable content and track its performance, so you can make changes as needed. You should also know where your audience lives online so that you can share with them in the most effective way possible.

Experiment with these tools and see if they work for your content marketing strategy. Some tools are better for certain situations than others, so don’t be afraid to try different tools until you find one or more that work for your brand and working style. 

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash