Content marketing is an essential part of every tasty marketing stew.  It’s that special ingredient that brings all the flavors together in pure harmony and makes the dish finger-lickin’ good.

In 2019, it’s hard to imagine a marketing plan that doesn’t focus on developing killer content—at least to some extent. 

Strategic content has been driving successful businesses forward for quite some time now. Regardless of the industry and the size of the business, investing in quality content always makes sense. 

Strategically developed content that nicely complements all phases of the sales funnel has proven to be an effective tool for building credibility, explaining the value of the offered services and products, building relationships with one’s target audience, generating more leads, and piling up sales.

However, even though quality content has the ability to completely transform a business and turn zeros into heroes, it’s still something that isn’t quite easy to achieve. 

The Value of Content for Affiliate Marketers

Speaking from experience, producing great content involves more than great writing. Sure, writing plays a crucial part in the process, but there’s so much more to it than that. 

At Traffic Mansion, we know that creating grade-A content boils down to communicating why someone should devote their attention to your brand, interact with it, and eventually buy what you are trying to sell. 

That takes some serious thought, especially if you’re not an experienced writer or someone who has a history of running a successful business.

For affiliate marketers, it is of utter importance to master the skills of writing and also learn how to diversify content and offer different, captivating formats.  Luckily, there are loads of great tools that could help you create better, more engaging content.

Here are some of the best ones that we have personally tested.

1. Blog Ideas Generator by HubSpot

There are many headline generators online, but this one is special.  Apart from helping you come up with powerful headlines for your stories, Blog Ideas Generator by HubSpot has the ability to help you uncover new content ideas that you can, later on, cover on your blog.

The tool is extremely easy to use.  All you have to do is type a keyword into the search bar, click on the submit option, and wait a couple of seconds for the software to retrieve the results. 

The Blog Ideas Generator will provide you with a dozen results, so all that it’s left to do is to scroll down and cherry-pick the headline idea that works best for you.

Another great thing about this tool is that all the generated headlines are already SEO-friendly. The keyword is there and the length is in sync with the standards.

Pro tip: Try not to be too general with the keywords.  If you type in something short and fail to provide some specificity to the phrase, the tool won’t help you.  To be fair, Blog Ideas Generator has its limits. Not all the ideas the tool offers are great. Some tend to repeat themselves. Despite these downfalls, however; you can still fish out some killer headlines from this software. Use this tool as a starting point for inspiration and then come up with even better headlines.

2. Hemingway Editor

A great and free tool that can help you become a better writer, The Hemingway Editor is a simple, yet highly effective word processor and proofreading assistant that’s designed to locate grammatical errors in your content and help you write in better style.  The Editor is mostly accessed online but users can download it on their computers as well if it suits them better. 

This program is extremely newbie-friendly.  Once you open the editor, you will see a blank space where you can add your text.  You can paste entire articles or just specific segments of your content in the editor and the app will immediately do its magic.

The Hemingway Editor doesn’t only identify issues; it also classifies them into different categories.  Every color represents a different level of issue. The red ones are reserved for critical errors, while the lighter colors are there for users who want to perfect their content by polishing the style and its readability score. 

The readability score is a great feature for web writers.  Your goal here is to make it easier for your readers to pick up on your messages and effortlessly consume your content.  The harder it is for them to go through your material, the harder it will be for you to provoke action from them. It’s as simple as that. 

3. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is a powerful research and monitoring tool. It’s used for:

• Mining content that is most shared on social media channels
• Locating influencers related to particular topics
• Getting alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name or domain
• Tracking competitors and giving analysis based on their content

This software allows users to find out which content is popular by using topic filters or focusing on a specific website.  BuzzSumo lets users take a peek behind the curtain and analyze the popularity of each topic in order to determine which ones are worth pursuing and which are better to be left alone for now.

This tool really does give marketers that extra edge they’re looking for to make better, data-informed decisions. It gives an additional set of eyes regarding what’s trending and what’s not and delivers it nicely, wrapped up with a bow, right at your doorstep via user-friendly reports. With just a simple look at the insights, users can easily identify the right strategy that will help them break through the digital clutter.

4. Ahrefs

Again with the Ahrefs.  If you have been reading our blog for a while, you might have noticed that we have mentioned this tool a couple of times in the past.  Of course, we did that for good reason. Ahrefs is a very powerful SEO/digital marketing toolset that marketers primarily use to analyze and improve almost every element of their digital strategy.  In the industry, Ahrefs is known as a toolset that gives users a chance to explore what their competitors are doing and what they need to do to replicate their success, or even rise above them. 

Within the Ahrefs toolset, users get access to six different tools:

• Organic Search Report
• Keyword Explorer
• Backlink Research
• Content Explorer
• Rank Tracker
• Web Monitoring

Every single one of these has its use.  All of them can be useful for increasing search traffic and can help you earn better positions in Google’s SERP.  However, when it comes to using Ahrefs for creating better content, the two most important tools are:

• Keyword Explorer
• Content Explorer

Of course, this doesn’t really mean that you should disregard all the other tools. They have their value, but these two are essential when it comes to creating grade-A, quality content. 

Let’s start with the Keyword Research tool.  This utility runs on a monster database of 3 billion keywords, which means that Ahrefs has the ability to offer thousands of great keyword suggestions to your entries.  The Keyword Research tool sorts the keywords by volume, difficulty, and other relevant keyword metrics that you can consult. With all that Ahrefs has to offer, locating low-hanging search traffic opportunities and making educated decisions about which words and phrases to target in your content is almost as easy as pie.

In addition to the Keyword Research tool, Ahrefs’ Content Explorer offers marketers all they need to produce top-quality content.  This specific utility shows which content has performed best in terms of social buzz, number of backlinks, and organic search traffic. It helps users analyze the best content on specific keywords and topics, which is great if you want to create content that dominates Google’s search for your most important keywords.

A lot of people use Ahrefs because no other SEO and marketing tool comes close in terms of index size and overall utility.  The data it offers is always fresh, relevant, and granular enough to help users make smart decisions regarding their business.  As if that isn’t enough, Ahrefs also invests heavily in user education. The company has a pretty active blog that shares A-Z guides on how to crush your digital marketing with the help of Ahrefs. 

5. Canva

If you don’t know how to use Photoshop and you still don’t have a budget to hire a designer, Canva has you covered.  This tool is a great solution for content creators who rely on graphics to spice up their content. 

Regardless of the niche and market in which you work, you need to think about creating visuals that will help you stand out and add an additional layer to your content.  The goal is to make your content visually appealing to the eye and more engaging. 

Canva makes it easy for people to create custom images that look great and help capture people’s attention.  It’s far simpler and faster to use compared to any alternative design software.

To get started with Canva, all you need to do is create an account and then open up the main menu.  There, you will see a window that allows you to create custom canvases (of any size) and add shapes, text, pictures, icons, etc.

It’s as simple as that.  Adding and editing elements to canvases is as easy as pie.

The built-in search engine lets you find any particular pictures or shapes you’re looking for.  You can add them to your canvas with one click.

Once you get familiar with the tool, you can create attractive pictures that will get your content noticed online.

Closing Words

Thank you for taking the time to read this article in its entirety.  We at Traffic Mansion hope it provided you great tool suggestions that you can use to elevate your content to the next level. Even though not all of the mentioned utilities on this list are free to use, speaking from experience—they’re certainly worth the money. 

If you’re already using some other tools that help you create better content and you feel that they deserve a mention, feel free to send us an email and we’ll try to add them in one of our future blog posts on a similar topic.