As a 21st-century car dealership, it's important to understand that content marketing isn't going anywhere. It's the way of the future.
If you've ever caught yourself wondering why it's so important, consider that you've been touched by someone else's content marketing efforts every time you conduct a Google search.
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day.
Each of those searches represents an individual that is seeking out information. There's just one problem, not everything indexed by Google is gold. You and I both know that there is a ton of crap content out there that just needs to go away.
But how?
Since Google's mission is to make the world's information more accessible, they do that by rewarding high-quality content with higher rankings.
Simply put, if you don't produce content, you're not feeding Google anything to index. If your site doesn't rank, your digital dealership won't get found.
There's another problem, though. Content marketing isn't easy. It can be time-consuming, especially without a plan or the right tools to help you out.
Most people get stumped with content marketing because they find it difficult to come up with ideas. I've been there. There is nothing more draining of creativity than not knowing what to write about or not know where to find useful information.
What also sucks is creating content that you're not sure has the share factor.
If you're not in a position to hire writers or devote more time to your content marketing efforts, the only solution is to be able to get more done in less time.
The goal of this post is to bring you inside of some of my favorite online tools that will help you create high-quality content in half the time. Each tool will cover different aspects of the content creation journey.
Here's a quick summary of of the websites we're going to explore today. Don't have time to read the full post? Use one of the jump links below.
| Soovle.com |
| BuzzSumo |
| Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator |
| Google Docs Voice Typing |
| Grammarly |
When I first stumbled upon Soovle, I felt like I had struck oil! Soovle taps into the autosuggest search data from a variety of websites. Using the autosuggest data will help you understand more about what real users are searching for online.
To get started, enter keywords that are relevant to the topic you want to write about on your website. In this example, we're going to use Ford F-150.
As you begin to type, Soovle will present autosuggest searches from a variety of search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and YouTube.
Having clarity about the topics that real users find helpful or interesting is the golden ticket to content marketing. If your content isn't useful, it won't resonate, drive traffic, or generate leads.
You can click on any of the Soovle results to see the actual search results page from that search engine. In this example, I'm going to click on "Ford F-150 towing capacity."
Now you can see all of the different websites and content that is currently ranking for that search term. This simple step will help you curate data and information that you can cite in your content to add 3rd-party validation.
Early I mentioned that it's important to create content that consumers will find helpful or useful. But how is it possible to know? That's where BuzzSumo comes into the mix.
BuzzSumo is an awesome service that will help you find the most shared content and key influencers in a niche. The idea is that if content is shared or is going viral, that's a good indication of its helpfulness or usefulness within a particular audience.
Type in whatever you want to search in the search bar. Keeping with our example from earlier, I searched for "Ford F-150." Remember that you can search for keywords, authors, or even paste in the URL.
BuzzSumo gets to work find the top articles that have the most engagements. As you can see, several interesting blog posts are getting a ton of social interactions.
You can leverage this data to help shape your content ideas. For example, the article titled, "5 Unknown Facts About the Ford F-150" has had 26.6K Facebook engagements.
Click on the link from BuzzSumo to view the original article and see what information they've included.
Following step one and two will help you acquire and curate content much faster than if you tried to write it all from scratch. By tapping into search engine auto-suggest data and knowing what content has already gone viral, you will know for sure what content to publish on your website without wondering if consumers will enjoy it or not.
Moving on...
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Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator is pretty self-explanatory. After you have a topic idea and have gathered some sources to reference, it's important to have a headline that will compel searchers to click.
To get started, fill in the fields with nouns related to content that you'd like to publish.
Keep in mind that this is a resource to inspire creativity. I strongly recommend NOT copying the suggestions verbatim because you risk publishing content that is identical to someone else. As you can see from their disclaimer, the algorithm isn't perfect.
As you can see, some of the suggestion are awful, while others have some merit.
I learned this trick when I started writing my best-selling book, "Don't Wait, DOMINATE!"
Rather than staring at the cursor blinking on a blank page, start talking. It's so much easier to get your point across when speaking rather than writing.
If you have a Google account already, head over to docs.google.com. Create a new document by clicking on the blank template in the top-right of the page.
Once your blank document has loaded, hover you mouse over "Tools" in the menu and select "Voice Typing."
Your browser might prompt you to give Google Docs access to your microphone. Make sure it's enabled, or you won't be able to use this feature.
Start by clicking the microphone icon. From there, just start talking. Don't worry about formatting or grammar just yet. The idea of this is to get the words out of your brain and onto the page.
The next tool I'm going to show you will solve your grammar and formatting woes.
Simply put, I. LOVE. GRAMMARLY. I use it for every piece of content I write. From emails to magazine articles to this very blog post. I even have the Chrome Browser extension installed so that my social posts sound a little more intelligent. :)
Grammarly is more than a grammar checker. It also helps with sentence structure, readability, plagiarism and a slew of other helpful writing resources.
Keep in mind that Grammarly is not free. At a $11.66/mo the value cannot be beaten.
Once you're in, click "New" to create a document. Copy and paste your dictated content from Google Docs. Grammarly will get to work helping you format the text into sentences that make more sense.
You can also enable a variety of features to help you get your new content just right.
Content marketing isn't going anywhere. If anything, it will continue to be something that Google looks for more of. They want brands and businesses to be as relevant as possible. Creating high-quality content is the best way to do that.
Dig into each of the websites and tools mentioned in this post. Even if you only adopt half of what I've talked about here, your content marketing efforts will be much more streamlined.
Have questions? Feedback? Sound off in the comments below.