23 Tools to Help Manage Content

To ensure your customers have a rich experience with great content, you’ll need more than just a content management system. You’ll need a basket of tools to research, generate, market, and track your content.

Here is a list of tools to help you with content. There are content search-engine-optimization-tools, editorial resources, content marketing aids, and tools to protect your content from plagiarism. Most of these tools are free.

Content Tools

Yahoo! Style Guide. Yahoo! Style Guide covers grammar and punctuation plus a multitude of topics with a web-specific focus: writing and editing for an online audience, techniques for streamlining copy, basic web codes, Internet law, search engine optimization, and more. Price: Free.

Yahoo! Style Guide.

Associated Press Stylebook. The AP Stylebook is the writing style guide for journalists. It provides fundamental guidelines for spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style. It is the definitive resource for professional journalists. Price: $26/year.

Quora. Quora connects people with what they want to know about. Find great content ideas from common questions people are asking. Price: Free.

Übersuggest. Get keyword ideas with Übersuggest, the free keyword suggestion tool that makes use of Google Suggest and other suggest services. Use the keywords to get inspiration for your content, or to optimize your pay-per-click campaigns. Price: Free.

Google Keyword Tool. If you want your content to attract searches, you need to use strong keywords in your titles and text. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a great way to get keyword ideas and find the best text for your audience. Identify what words or phrases will drive the most traffic to your site. Price: Free.

Trapit. Explore any subject and Trapit gives you the most relevant spam-free content from around the web. Trapit learns from your thumbs up or down, improving your results over time. Price: Free.

Google Trends. Google Trends give you popular search terms. Compare trends for multiple search terms. Take advantage of trends in your keyword campaigns and content. Price: Free.

Google Trends.

Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results — web, news — based on your queries. Aggregate content on a subject, developing story or industry. Google Alerts can ensure your own content is timely. Price: Free.

Trello. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. If you are working with others or just need to visualize your own project, Trello is a great tool to track your content development. Price: Free.

GatherContent. GatherContent is another tool to better manage your web content projects. Organize your content with drag and drop. Track changes and see revisions. Structure specific rules and guidelines for your content. Get content you need from your team. Export content to your CMS. Price: $24/month for 5 active projects.

GatherContent.

InboundWriter. InboundWriter helps you identify popular topics and performs automated keyword research, extracting key chatter, articles, influencers and content across hundreds of web sources. Follow content optimization best practices through an easy to use tool and helpful tips for word choices, content structure and other criteria. It will even rate your effectiveness as you write with real-time content scoring. Price: Free up to 4 documents per month; $40/month up to 15 documents.

IWriter.com. If you are unable to write your own copy, IWriter.com provides freelance articles from 150 to 1,000 words in length. Request articles to be written on any topic. Pay only when you approve an article. Price: Articles start at $1.25.

Storify. Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. Look through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, and more to gather material. Embed the story to enrich your own content. Price: Free.

Scoop.it. Scoop.it is another publishing-by-curation platform. Scoop.it identifies great content that matches your audience’s interest. Easily edit and publish, then embed it on your site. Price: Basic plan is free; Business plan is $79/month for branding and performance metrics.

Scoop.it.

Jing. Enhance your content with video. With Jing, create images and videos of what you see on your computer screen, then share them instantly. Select any window or region that you would like to record, and Jing will capture everything that happens in that area. From simple mouse movements to a fully narrated tutorial, Jing records everything you see, and do. Price: Free.

PitchEngine. PitchEngine is a PR platform to pitch your content stories and get out the word about your business. Reach your customers directly with real-time updates and promotions. Create content from your phone, computer, or tablet and publish to your customers on any device. Price: Unlimited pitches for free; $39/month for SEO and enhanced analytics.

dlvr.it. dlvr.it is another content distribution platform. The platform’s Promoted Stories automates syndication to social media, blogs, RSS feed subscribers, and even news sites. Price: $9.95 to $29.95 per story depending on the level of distribution needed.

dlvr.it.

Zemanta. Zemanta indexes your content and recommends it to bloggers when semantically relevant. Zemanta offers a channel for content marketers to reach over 140,000 active bloggers. Price: Free.

SharedCount. Shared Count provides social analytics. It tracks your shares, likes tweets, Diggs, Pins, and more. Get social stats on the success of your content. Price: Free.

Linkstant. Linkstant lets you know immediately about new links to your content. Contact linking sites to correct link destination or anchor text, just moments after they’ve created the link. Linkstant allows you to see if your content is going hot on social media sites. Price: Free.

Linkstant.

Google Analytics. Find your site’s top content and hidden gems with the Content reports in Google Analytics. You’ll find out how often people visit each page of your site, how long they stay, and how often they convert. With Content Experiments, you can develop several versions of a page and show different versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of each page version and determines the most effective version. Price: Free for users with less than 10 million hits per month.

Copyscape. Copyscape provides a plagiarism checker for finding copies of your content online, as well as free plagiarism warning banners to warn others against stealing your content. It also provides advanced tools, such as copy-paste originality checks. Price: Plagiarism checker is free; Premium is $.05 per search.

Tynt. Tynt guards your content from plagiarism. It inserts the page URL when your content is pasted into emails and social sites. Your traffic increases and SEO improves as more URLs become fixed links. Price: Free.

Tynt.