Content Production Tools

Useful tools and resources to help you speed up your content planning and content production.

Content Production Tools And Resources

Useful tools and resources to help you speed up your content planning and content production.

An efficient content production process requires efficient tools.

The tools and resources listed below will help you save time with content planning and speed up your content production.

Use them together with these content research tools and resources to help organize your files, notes, and other production scheduling processes.

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Content Planning & Scheduling

The tools and resources listed below will help to speed up your content planning and content production scheduling.

Bookmarks

Your web browser’s Bookmarking tool is a great way to organize and access links to useful documentation, regularly-used tools and services, and other valuable content production resources quickly and easily.

Before adding bookmarks to your web browser, we recommend spending a little bit of time planning the structure of your bookmarking folders. This will save you a lot of time locating these later as your bookmarking list grows.

Content Production Tools - Bookmark Organization — Use your web browser’s Bookmarks tool to organize bookmarking folders, and save links to useful documentation, tools, and online resources.

You can use your web browser’s bookmarks to create a ‘master’ set of bookmarks linking to all the documentation and other useful tools and resources your content team will need to work efficiently.

To do this, first, organize all the different folders you will need in your own web browser’s bookmarking tool…

Chrome Browser - Bookmarks — Organize your bookmark folders.

Next, add all the important links to the documentation, tools, and resources your team will need.

Google Chrome Browser - Bookmarks — Bookmark all the tools and resources you need to speed up content production.

Next, export your Bookmark files and share this export file with your team members. Ask them to import these into their own web browsers, so everyone in your team has access to the same resources.

Chrome Browser - Import and Export Bookmarks — Share bookmarks containing links to documentation and useful resources with your content team.

See these guides to using bookmarks in different web browsers and devices:

Spreadsheets

Who doesn’t love using spreadsheets?

Spreadsheets are excellent tools for creating and tracking content production processes and designing and testing workflow prototypes.

Here is a simple way to create a content production workflow using spreadsheets:

Create columns for each workflow process you want to track
Arrange columns in sequential order
Add new projects to rows (one per row).
Use color coding to highlight the status of your projects. For example:
- Yellow = Work-in-progress
- Green = Completed (published)
- Red = Needs attention

Let’s take a look at some popular spreadsheet applications.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a full-featured spreadsheet tool from Google.

Google Sheets can be accessed online via a desktop or mobile device. Additionally, Google Sheets can be stored on a Google Drive account and shared with different users, allowing for collaboration.

Excel

Microsoft Excel is part of the Microsoft Office suite and is available only as a subscription service.

WPS Spreadsheet

WPS Spreadsheet is another free spreadsheet application.

WPS Spreadsheet:

Is compatible with office suites like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc, and OpenOffice Calc.
Works with common file formats like .xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlt, and .csv.
Lets you edit spreadsheet files on mobile devices, computers, or web pages.
Offers many spreadsheet templates for a wide range of applications.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a SaaS collaboration and work management tool that lets you effectively manage your team’s work, projects, and processes through team collaboration, workflow automation, and content production management tools.

Smartsheet lets you assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, and share documents using a tabular user interface.

More info: Smartsheet

Airtable

If you like using spreadsheets to manage projects, you may want to look into Airtable.

Airtable is a cloud collaboration service best described as a “hybrid” between a spreadsheet and a database (i.e. it has database features applied to a spreadsheet).

As this article on Airtable explains…

“A basic rule of thumb is that a database is more suited to organize a large amount of information. Spreadsheets are the best fit for running calculations. Airtable gives you the best of both worlds: a relational database that’s as easy to work with as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.”

Airtable is an ideal tool for creating spreadsheet-like editorial calendars and content inventories but with the power of relational databases.

For example, you can create spreadsheet-like sortable tables for:

An editorial calendar
Storing the names and email addresses of outsourced service providers, freelancers, etc.
Posts that need reviewing or updating
Posts that need a “search and replace” (e.g. replace old pricing or a rebranded product name), etc.

Airtable is also a low-code tool, so you don’t need to learn database scripting languages like SQL to use it.

More info: Airtable

Calendar

The next content production tool to consider is a calendar.

Calendar applications are essential tools for creating an editorial calendar that will help you meet publishing deadlines.

You can create an editorial/content calendar using a spreadsheet, a calendar application, or using an integrated workflow tool.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a smart calendar tool from Google.

Google Calendar lets you:

Schedule events and share calendars across your team.
View and edit your schedule from your laptop, tablet, or phone (you can sync with your phone’s built-in calendar or use optimized mobile apps).
Set event reminders.
Create group calendars.
Publish calendars on the web.
Migrate calendars from other applications (e.g. Outlook) and file types.

More info: Google Calendar

Work & Collaboration Tools

If your organization requires managing a range of projects, tasks, and activities across different people, teams, or departments, you may need to consider upgrading your content production tools and switching to integrated workflow and communication/collaboration software.

Here are some popular work and collaboration tools you can use across your team or organization to improve workflow and productivity.

Slack

Slack is a tool that allows individuals across teams, departments, and organizations to communicate and collaborate online via channels, messaging, team meetings (called Huddles), and more.

Slack also lets you easily upload and share files like documents, videos, artwork, etc., from your computer and shared drives.

Slack - thread with file attachment — Slack lets you share files like documents, videos, artwork, etc. with your team.

Slack provides its own documentation, including webinars and resources for new users.

More info: Slack

Zoom

Zoom is a cloud-based communications tool that allows people to meet online using their desktop or phone, and communicate via video and audio conferencing, chats, screen sharing, file sharing, whiteboard tools, and more.

Learn how to get the most out of this tool from the Zoom Learning Center.

More info: Zoom

For other work and collaboration tools, see the References section at the end of this lesson.

Market Muse

MarketMuse is a cloud-based content planning tool used by content creators, content marketers, publishers, marketing agencies, and eCommerce companies.

The tool includes components that can greatly aid your content production, such as MarketMuse Inventory, which automates your content inventory and content auditing processes by collecting and organizing your pages, analyzing them, and making them more easily accessible.

MarketMuse’s AI-driven content briefs help writers produce quality SEO-optimized content with instructions on how to structure the article, what topics to address, what questions to answer, what content to link internally and externally, and more.

Users can access content briefs without logging into the platform using a special link and writers can work directly from within the brief and get scored against suggestions as they go.

More info: MarketMuse

Swimlane Diagrams

A swimlane diagram is a type of flowchart that you can use to outline who does what in your content production process.

You can use various tools to create swim lane diagrams (e.g. Lucid Chart) or create a basic swimlane diagram in Word or PowerPoint.

See this article if you need help on how to create swim lane diagrams.

Here are some sites where you can download swimlane diagram templates:

Text Tools

Here are some useful text-based tools and resources:

Text Editors

For text editors, see the Content Research Tools section.

Text Expander

TextExpander is a time-saving tool that increases your productivity and efficiency by allowing you to quickly store, share, and retrieve information using Snippets.

Snippets are longer repetitive texts paired with an abbreviation that you type in its place. Essentially, you can think of TextExpander as a “copy and paste” tool on steroids.

Instead of searching through and copying text from old emails, notes, or a repository where you keep content that you use repeatedly, you can simply type an abbreviation as a shortcode into your content and it will then insert a full-blown content snippet that you have previously created and saved.

TextExpander - Snippets — Use TextExpander’s Snippets to save time adding content in repetitive tasks.

Snippets also allow you to create content templates with “fill in the blank” fields and different snippet groups.

Some of the more common uses for this tool are writing out customer support responses, creating follow-up emails, recruitment messages, and many daily work tasks.

More info: TextExpander

Beeftext

Similar to the previous tool, if you’re tired of typing the same phrases repeatedly, Beeftext is a tool that lets you set up shortcuts (keywords) for commonly used pieces of text (snippets).

When you type a keyword, Beeftext automatically replaces it with the associated snippet. This works in any application where you can copy and paste text. It’s especially useful for things like email signatures, frequent phrases, or even emojis.

Beeftext is free and open-source, meaning it doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t have ads or malware. While it listens to your keystrokes to function, it doesn’t store or send your typing data anywhere. It only checks for updates once a day.

Setting up Beeftext is simple. You create combos with keywords and their corresponding snippets. It’s like creating your own typing shortcuts. Just be careful with keyword choices to avoid accidental replacements.

So, if you’re a content manager dealing with repetitive writing tasks, Beeftext could save you time and make your work smoother. You won’t need to type out the same things over and over again.

More info: Beeftext

Content Workflow Management

Project management software lets you plan, schedule, organize, and track your content production projects, and communicate with your team.

Notion

Notion AI revolutionizes workspaces by integrating tasks, documents, and collaboration, departing from traditional tools like Google Docs and Dropbox. It offers customizable, all-in-one workspaces, allowing users to tailor their environment with modular building blocks.

Notion AI - Demo of AI Assistant — Notion’s AI Assistant lets you seamlessly incorporating AI into everyday tasks.

Notion lets you store important project documents, track team progress, and manage multiple departments in one central workspace.

Teams benefit from streamlined project management, enhanced communication, and aligned workflows.

Notion AI’s unique features include:

Versatility: Solving diverse team challenges with tailored solutions, from engineering to design.
AI Integration: Seamlessly incorporating AI into everyday tasks, such as writing assistance and generating insights.
Security: Ensuring data privacy and compliance with global regulations like GDPR and ISO 27001. Notion AI prioritizes data security, only using customer data with explicit consent and for improving AI features in partnership with trusted entities.
Template Library: Offering AI-powered templates for various tasks, including writing, recruiting outreach, and video script generation.

Notion Templates — Use Notion’s vast template library and AI tools to save time performing everyday tasks.

Notion AI integrates with existing workflows and includes a flexible text editor. It’s capabilities are continually expanding, going beyond an AI-powered note-taking software and into the future of all-in-one workspace innovation.

More details: Notion AI

Trello

Trello lets you plan, organize, and track your projects visually.

You can manage multiple tasks for any type of project, workflow, or task tracking using Kanban-style boards with lists and cards that simulate the use of “sticky” notes and can include checklists, deadlines, attachments, conversations, etc.

From there, you can incorporate task assignments, calendars, timelines, productivity metrics, and more.

More info: Trello

Jira

Jira lets you plan, schedule, organize, and track your projects and communicate with your team.

Team members can track projects at any stage, move projects around boards easily using drag and drop, and access various reports.

Jobs created in Jira allow for workflow customization, team communication, adding notes, attaching files, creating subtasks, and more.

Jira also integrates with applications like Slack.

More info: Jira

Asana

Asana acts as a communication hub and lets you assign respective tasks to relevant team members for specific projects.

With Asana, teams can integrate and share tasks, files, plans, and goals, and manage their work from a single app, providing visibility to all members involved.

Additionally, projects can be split up into actionable tasks and assigned to multiple collaborators, and team members can view tasks through a choice of various views (e.g. board, calendar, list view, timeline, workload, and portfolio views).

Asana provides a traditional checklist format for project management with customizable collaboration tools and project-level reporting dashboards. It also supports third-party apps (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Dropbox, etc.), the implementation of data from other applications, an Android and iOS app, and a mobile site that can be accessed on any device.

Asana provides useful templates for content-related activities, including:

Content planning calendars
Content calendars
Blog calendars
Content strategy calendars
Video production calendars
Marketing calendars
Social media content calendars

More info: Asana

Monday

Monday is a productivity suite and work management software that lets you centralize work processes, tools, and files and customize dashboards and workflows to fit your organization’s needs using customizable “no code” building blocks.

These building blocks include items, columns, views, automation, integrations, and widgets. You adapt each building block to build applications and tools that fit your needs.

The software allows you to manage production projects and other workflows with cross-team collaboration tools, easy-to-use automation, and real-time notifications.

More info: Monday

Brightpod

Brightpod is a web-based project management tool that:

Provides a unified system for campaigns, content, and website projects.
Lets you build guidelines and checklists, and organize, manage and track all your SEO, social media, blog strategy, and content marketing projects from one place to save time.
Helps you organize, manage, and track your team’s work from a central location.
Allows your team to accurately view the progress of their projects and helps to address issues of collaboration such as email spam, multiple file versions, lost files, task accountability issues, lack of clarity & work transparency.
Lets you see everyone’s tasks, content publish dates, and events on the shared calendar, see what is coming up next, and manage deliverables when growing your projects and clients.
Helps you work smarter, automate, and simplify communication.

Brightpod sits somewhere between being a simple project tool and a more complex project management software and includes features like Kanban and list tasks, recurring tasks, time tracking and estimates, activity logs, milestones, messages, calendar, reports and analytics, workflows, automatic email reminders, project cloning, and more.

More info: Brightpod

Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform SaaS that provides tools to help you improve your site’s optimization and achieve better conversion rates.

Optimizely’s Content Management lets you create, tailor and scale content for an enterprise CMS, run multiple shops, inventory, and an online/offline catalog, use AI to test and optimize new features, and more.

More info: Optimizely

GatherContent

GatherContent allows everyone involved in content creation to work together to plan, organize, and produce content in one cloud platform.

GatherContent lets you organize content into shared projects and folders to create a single source of truth for content. It allows content teams to collaborate on content creation, search, filter, or sort content, perform tasks in bulk, assign work to contributors, identify bottlenecks in the workflow, and more.

GatherContent workflow — GatherContent creates a single source of truth for content production.

More info: GatherContent

Content Creation Tools

Use the tools below to help you create content for your website faster:

AI Content Writing Tools

We have created a free video course on using AI to generate content and an entire article where we discuss and demonstrate the tools below here: Generate Website Content Using AI

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt.

It can be used for a variety of purposes, including generating content for websites and social media, creating chatbot responses, and more.

We have created a free video course showing you how to generate quality content quickly using ChatGPT.
You can learn more about the process here: Generate Website Content Using AI
Check out this article generated entirely using ChatGPT: 5 Tips For Streamlining Your Content Management Process

More info: ChatGPT

Designrr

Designrr is an all-in-one solution for effortlessly creating and designing captivating eBooks and reports. With the power of ChatGPT and the revolutionary Wordgenie, Designrr has transformed the eBook creation process.

Some of this tool’s powerful features include:

AI-Powered Writing Assistance: Wordgenie is an A.I. writing assistant module tailored for non-fiction content, powered by ChatGPT. It helps you create powerful titles, develop cohesive outlines, discover fresh angles for your content, and generate impressive written content in minutes.
Streamlined eBook Creation: Overcome the hurdles of writing and designing your ebook. One-click export generates beautiful eBooks in various formats, including Flipbooks and PDFs, ready for publishing.
Comprehensive Editing Tools: With the built-in image editor, there’s no need for tools like Photoshop. The image editor allows you to crop, resize, and color images. The draft editor provides a distraction-free interface for content creation, offering flexibility and efficiency.
Engaging Design Options: Create animated Flipbooks easily shareable on mobile devices. The built-in design editor with drag-and-drop functionality allows you to customize and reorganize your eBook effortlessly.
Save Time and Money: Designrr includes over 100 free eBook templates, saving you from outsourcing costs and the hassle of searching for designers, and providing a seamless process from content import to eBook generation.
Commercial License: A free commercial license is included that lets you create and sell unlimited eBooks without additional fees or royalties and access to a 35,000-member strong community for support and advice.

More info: Designrr

Content At Scale

Content At Scale is an innovative AI copywriting software platform utilizing three advanced AI engines, natural language processing (NLP), and semantic search analysis. It crafts entire blog posts, including titles, meta descriptions, headings, URL slugs, and paragraphs with extras, all within an astounding 5 minutes.

Key Features:

Speedy Content Generation: Creates long-form content in just 5 minutes.
Comprehensive Editor: Utilize the content editor for easy viewing and editing. Content At Scale generates titles, URL slugs, meta descriptions, and provides a checklist of optimized NLP terms for SEO enhancement.
Simple Input: Requires only a keyword to generate content.
Additional Elements: Offers Tweet boxes, TOCs, Takeaways, CTAs, plagiarism scans, whitelabeling, and low-cost options.
Three AI Copywriting Engines: Ensures diversity and creativity.
Content Quality Assurance: Run the content through a tool like Grammarly and you should see an impressive score.

AI Writing Tools:

Generative AI Suite: Ideal for paraphrasing, short-form content, undetectable rewrites, and simple writing.
Content Producer: Tailor and plan fully optimized, brand-specific long-form content.
RankWell®: Gain unparalleled SEO insights for ranking and scaling content efficiently.

Content At Scale also offers seamless integration with WordPress. Connect Content At Scale directly to your WordPress website to enable automatic content publication.

Creating content with Content At Scale is easy. Enter a keyword, hit “Write Post Now” to let the AI handle the research, and receive a complete, original, and research-backed piece within minutes.

Here’s a walkthrough video of the tool:

Content At Scale also guarantees plagiarism-free content with tools like:

AI Checker: Trained on diverse content types to assess AI probabilities.
AI Detector: Identifies content authenticity within seconds.
AI Humanizer: Craft human-like content, undetectable by AI detection tools.

Content At Scale offers a subscription-based pricing model and a Done-For-You service, combining AI generation with human editing for superior quality.

More info: Content At Scale

Quillbot

Quillbot is a natural language processing tool that will help you rewrite and paraphrase sentences and paragraphs.

The tool uses advanced algorithms to understand the context and meaning of the text and then suggests alternative ways of expressing the same ideas.

Use Quillbot to improve your writing style, generate new content ideas, and avoid plagiarism.

For example, here is an article outline generated by Quillbot:

Quillbot - Article Outline — An article outline generated by Quillbot.

After generating the outline, you can then use the tool’s features to flesh out the content sections.

Quillbot is available online as a website and can also be accessed through a browser extension.

More info: Quillbot

Spin Rewriter

Spin Rewriter is a software tool that analyzes and rewrites articles to create unique, high-quality content.

It uses a proprietary technology called ENL Semantic Spinning to thoroughly understand the meaning of the original article and generate new, readable versions using a hand-curated database of synonyms.

With Spin Rewriter, you can rewrite your articles at the paragraph, sentence, phrase, and single-word levels. The software also allows you to fully automate the process with a single click.

Here is a live video demo of the tool in action:

Spin Rewriter has received high praise from its users and is considered the best article-spinning tool on the market. It is compatible with a variety of SEO software and supports multiple spintax formats. All of your articles are encrypted in the software’s database for added security.

Spin Rewriter can also be easily integrated into other SEO software products for even more powerful performance.

More info: Spin Rewriter

Copy.ai

Copy.ai is an AI-powered writing tool that can help you write faster and better by cutting down your writing time by up to 80%.

With Copy.ai, you can write high-quality blog posts, social media posts, and emails with ease.

The process is simple: start by entering your post’s title and keyword, and then the AI writing tool generates an outline and main talking points to help guide your writing.

Then, it generates a full-length draft of your post in seconds, which you can edit and polish using the tool’s editor to rewrite paragraphs and sentences.

With Copy.ai, you can write high-converting social media posts and emails by providing a brief description of your post or brand, and the AI content generator will give you multiple options to choose from, which you can then edit to make your own.

Finally, just copy and paste the work into your CMS for publishing.

More info: Copy.ai

For additional tools that will help you write compelling content, see this lesson: Content Editing Tools

Infographics

Here are useful resources for sourcing infographics for your content:

Pinterest – Log in and search for “infographic”.
Kissmetric
Cool Infographics
Daily Infographic
GovLoop

For infographic creation tools, see Media Creation Tools or visit this great compilation of over 100 infographic tools and resources.

Text-To-Speech

Use text-to-speech software to create a wide range of audio-based content.

PlayHT

PlayHT is a cutting-edge AI-powered text-to-voice generator that offers high-quality text-to-speech synthesis and audio accessibility solutions using ultra realistic AI voices available in almost every language.

PlayHT’s next-generation AI speech technology captures the nuances and emotions embedded in text, resulting in truly impressive and human-like speech.

You can generate realistic Text-to-Speech (TTS) audio using the online AI Voice Generator and synthetic voices, instantly convert text into natural-sounding speech and download as MP3 and WAV audio files.

PlayHT’s key features include:

AI Voice Generator Products – Quality AI voice over generation with PlayHT’s AI text-to-speech technology.
Ultra realistic AI voices – Next generation AI speech technology that is truly human-like.
Premium AI Voices – 800+ AI Voices in 140+ languages with great customizability and control.
Voice Cloning – Create high-fidelity voice clones that are extremely accurate to their real human voices.
Text to voice editor – Powerful text to Audio Online Editor with great control of voice style.
Pronunciations and Phonetic – Create custom pronunciations of acronyms and niche terms that can be saved to a pronunciation library.
Audio Widgets – Plug-and-play, and fully customizable audio widgets for websites to increase accessibility, time on page metrics and user engagement.
AI Podcasts – Create and publish audio content to iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts
Team Access – Scale content creation by inviting and collaborating with your team
Female AI Voice Generator Online – Generate ultra realistic female voices for audio books, videos, and more.
Male AI Voice Generator Online – Create realistic male AI voices online using the text to speech technology to generate quality male AI voices.

PlayHT’s AI Voice Generator excels in a wide range of applications, including:

Videos: use the Ultra Realistic editor to easily transcribe and sync audio to your videos and create engaging multimedia experiences for users.
Elearning and Training: Use realistic AI voices to bring educational content to life and empower learning and development teams, training course providers, and educators.
IVR System: Create humanlike AI voice responses for interactive voice response systems, ensuring a natural and engaging customer experience.
Audio Articles and Accessibility: Attract new audiences and improve accessibility by offering audio versions of articles, blog posts, and written content.
YouTube and TikTok Videos: Narrate your YouTube and TikTok videos with AI-generated voices to add a professional touch to your content.
Character and Celebrity Voice Generation: Create stunning voices for game characters, animations, and cartoons, or capture the essence of any celebrity’s voice to generate identical speech.

This time-saving and cost-effective solution is ideal for businesses, content creators, educators, podcast and audiobook productions, and more.

More info: PlayHT

Speechelo

Speechelo provides realistic and expressive AI voice sounds and is very easy to use. Simply create the voiceover, download the mp3, and import it into your video editor (it works with all video creation software).

You can create engaging voiceovers for sales videos, training videos, educational videos, explainer videos, product review videos, webinars, video ads, audio presentations, narrated web pages, recorded announcements, review draft articles, and a whole lot more!

Speechelo’s text-to-speech engine provides inflection controls with different voice tones for reading text (normal reading, joyful, and serious), settings for breath control, pauses, changing speed & pitch, over 30 human-sounding male and female voices, support for 23 languages, and more.

This is a cloud-based tool that lets you convert any text into a 100% human-sounding voiceover in English and other languages.

More info: Speechelo

If you need help creating audio-based content using text-to-speech, see this excellent Text-to-Speech Course (narrated entirely using AI voices).

Royalty-Free Media

If you need royalty-free images, music, or videos for your content, check out the resources below:

Images

Find free and royalty-free images – A comprehensive list of sites where you can find free and royalty-free images (photos, illustrations, vector images, clipart, etc). Some of the sites also provide free access to stock videos and video clips.

Music

BenSound – Royalty free music for content creators. You can download copyright safe music for use in videos (YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) and use it freely in return for attribution, or subscribe to one of the site’s paid plans.

Videos

Pexels – Videos (and images) can be downloaded and used for free. No attribution required.

Content Creation Services

There are different types of content creation services available.

Freelancers

If you don’t have an in-house content creation team, you can hire freelancers to help you with your content creation.

For resources on finding freelancers and outsourced talent, see this section: Outsourcing.

PLR

Private Label Rights (PLR) content is content written by external service providers, which is then resold to customers.

With PLR content, all the content planning, research, and writing are done by a 3rd-party. You just buy the finished product and use it or resell it as your own.

While PLR content can help you save time and money writing web content, the content is not original (as the same content is resold many times to other customers) and most are not very high quality (often requiring extensive rewriting).

The main value of using PLR content is to save time creating information products to use as lead generation magnets, additional bonuses for subscribing to your service or buying your main product, and as individual or bundled digital products to sell online.

For more information on using PLR content and PLR resources, see this tutorial: Using Private Label Rights Content

WordPress

WordPress is, effectively, a content management system designed for optimal content production.

WordPress Content Editor

If you use WordPress as a CMS, most of your content production will take place in the content editor area.

WordPress Block Editor - Content Area — The WordPress Editor is where you add most of the content for your web pages and posts.

If you use the WordPress block editor, for example, you can quickly build content-rich web pages using all kinds of different “blocks”.

WordPress Content Editor - Blocks — Add content to WordPress using blocks.

For step-by-step tutorials on using the WordPress content editor, go here:

Also, see the WordPress User Manual for hundreds of step-by-step tutorials on all aspects of using a WordPress website.

WordPress Plugins

See the WordPress plugins section for plugins that can help you with different aspects of content production.

Video Courses For Beginners – Content Production

The video courses below cover basic areas of content production and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

How To Create Engaging Presentations

Learn how to create beautiful and engaging presentations that will help you sell more products and services online.

More info: How To Create Engaging Presentations

Digital Branding

Learn simple and inexpensive ways to boost your brand and identity online and make your business stand out from your competition.

More info: Digital Branding

Digital Product Creation

Learn how to create, launch, and sell high-quality digital products like downloadable reports, e-books, videos, and audio content quickly and cost-effectively.

More info: Digital Product Creation

Using Graphic Creation Tools

Learn how to access and use free image creation and editing tools, basic and advanced image editing techniques using tools like Photoshop and free alternatives, creating images for web content, presentations, infographics, social media, and so much more.

More info: Using Graphic Creation Tools

Podcasting

Learn how to get started with podcasting and how to promote your podcasts to grow your business.

More info: Podcasting

Using Webinars

Learn about the benefits of using webinars in your business, how to create high-quality and engaging webinars, and how to sell your products and services using webinars.

More info: Using Webinars

Text-To-Speech

In this practical step-by-step video course, you will learn how to use text-to-speech and the latest AI voice technologies to create professional and realistic-sounding voice narrations from text files for a wide range of commercial uses and business applications.

More info: Text-To-Speech

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For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

Efficient content production tools help to make your content production process more efficient.

The tools and resources listed in this section will help you save time with content planning and speed up your content production.

Action Steps

Use the tools listed above with these content research tools and resources as these will help you maximize your content production efficiency.

Resources

Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.

References

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Meeting

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Content Promotion Tools

Use these content promotion tools and resources to help your content reach a wider target audience.

Content Promotion Tools And Resources

Use these content promotion tools and resources to help your content reach a wider target audience.

After creating content, your aim should be to promote it effectively through all the distribution channels specified in your content marketing strategy.

The tools and resources in this section will help you reach the widest possible audience of targeted users with your content.

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Search Engine Pinging Tools & Services

Before you start publishing content online, make sure that your website is configured and optimized for search engines. This includes adding your sitemap to search engines as explained in the Search Engine Optimization Tools section.

Platforms like WordPress have built-in pinging features where every post you make is automatically notified (i.e. pinged) to various online resources. WordPress SEO plugins can also enhance this function.

If your site does not run on WordPress, then consider using a service like the one below to notify search engines when new content is published on your website.

Pingler

You can use Pingler to notify search engines about your newly-published posts or pages.

Simply enter your post title and post URL, select one or more categories, and click the “Ping!” button.

Pingler - Ping your URL for Free — Enter a few details and ping your URL for free!

Pingler will then automatically notify many Ping services about your post.

Pingler - Ping submission report — Pingler automatically submits your URL to around 100 services and displays a submission report.

Pingler allows you to ping around 100 search engine crawlers for free. It also offers a premium service that automatically scans your site for newly added content and pings around 1,000 services.

More info: Pingler

Email Marketing Tools & Services

Ideally, your business should include email marketing in your content marketing mix.

The services below can help you automate the process of capturing visitor details from your website or blog and adding them to your email list or email newsletter.

Aweber

Aweber is one of the world’s most reliable and popular email delivery services and offers a professional and affordable list building, autoresponder, and email marketing automation solution with many extensive features like:

Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber, you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types if users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base, and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email, and live text chat.

In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:

Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS feed into emails that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you publish something new on your website or blog.
Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.

More info: Aweber

To test drive Aweber for free, enter your details into the form below, or click here to sign up for an account:

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing and automation platform providing an all-in-one marketing solution for businesses.

Mailchimp provides intelligent marketing and automation tools to target your customers and track your results, like pre-built customer journey workflows, predictive segmentation, AI-powered content tools, data-driven recommendations, and 300+ integrations, in addition to a reporting dashboard, website building, and hosting,

More info: Mailchimp

Email Tools

You need email addresses to promote your content using an email service.

You can search through websites manually to find contact information and email addresses, or use the tools below.

Hunter

Hunter is an email-finding tool that lets you find professional email addresses from websites and provides a list of the people working in a company with their names and email addresses.

Hunter - Domain Search tool — Hunter’s domain search tool finds names and professional email addresses from websites in seconds.

Hunter searches for emails from domains using filters and email patterns with verifiable public sources and lets you save and export emails to your CRM.

Hunter also has a Chrome extension, so you can find and add email addresses to your list using your Chrome web browser

More info: Hunter

PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster is an email extractor tool that lets you build a list of qualified leads and automate outreach campaigns.

The video below provides an overview of this tool:

More info: PhantomBuster

Verifalia

Verifalia is a service that validates email addresses, cleans email lists in real time, and helps to reduce your bounce rate by keeping your mailing lists free of invalid, risky, and mistaken email addresses.

More info: Verifalia

ContactOut

ContactOut is a tool that lets you find email addresses and phone numbers, build lead-generation lists, and send out personalized emails to a large list of contacts.

The software also has a search engine that allows you to search for leads by name, company, title, or location. You can also filter your results by company size, industry, or other criteria.

This is a useful tool for recruiting new team members or doing email outreach campaigns.

More info: ContactOut

Write Better Emails

How To Craft The Perfect Email - Free Guide — How To Craft The Perfect Email – Free Guide

A FREE, 7-day email course on how to write welcome emails and autoresponder series, plus fill-in-the-blank email templates that will help make sending emails easier.

Download this free guide here: Write Better Emails

Social Media Marketing Tools & Services

Effective social media marketing requires capable tools that can help you promote your content and manage, track, and analyze your content performance results across various social media platforms.

For tools and resources that can help you promote your content effectively on social media, see this section: Social Media Management Tools And Resources

Video Marketing Tools & Services

Use the tools and services below to promote and track your video promotions and video content performance.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4’s enhanced web data stream measurement feature is enabled by default and captures core user interactions like file downloads, outbound linking, and video tracking.

You can track how videos are performing on your website on Google Analytics by going to Behavior > Events > Top Events.

From there, click on Video to see how many users clicked on “play” and what percentage of your videos they’ve watched (e.g. 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%).

Google Analytics - Video Statistics — Use Google Analytics to gain a better understanding of your video marketing results.

There are also WordPress plugins you can use like the one below for video analytics and reports.

Video Analytics – MonsterInsights

MonaterInsights - Analytics — MonsterInsights – Analytics

Monster Insights automatically tracks YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML 5 video events, so you can measure who watches your videos, and for how long.

The video below provides more details on how to set up tracking for your video performance on Google Analytics:

More info: Monster Insights

YouTube Studio

YouTube Studio provides metrics on how your YouTube video campaigns are performing.

Log in and click on the Analytics tab to access performance data, including views, estimated minutes watched, average view duration, traffic sources, devices, playback locations, audience demographics, audience retention, and more.

Additionally, you can access video engagement reports with data metrics on subscribers, likes and dislikes, favorites, comments, sharing, annotations, etc.

For more information on using YouTube Analytics, watch the video below or go here: YouTube Analytics Help Guide.

More info: YouTube Studio

Meta Creator Studio

If you promote videos on Facebook, you can view video performance data in Meta Creator Studio.

The Insights tab in Creator Studio gives you a variety of metrics on the performance of your video content, such as:

1-Minute Video Views: The number of times your videos were played for at least 1 minute.
Minutes Viewed: The total number of minutes your videos were played including time spent replaying the video.
3-Second Video Views: The number of times your videos were played for at least 3 seconds, or for nearly their total length if they’re shorter than 3 seconds, within the selected time range.
Video Engagement: The number of people who reacted, commented, or shared one of your videos.

Note: Videos tracked in Creator Studio for Facebook don’t show insights into specific videos. Instead, these are aggregated based on the Page or Pages you select to review.

You can, however, see performance insights for specific videos by scrolling down to the Top Videos tab. This will display a list of your top videos, with information like the Page it was posted on, date added, minutes viewed, 1-minute views, 3-second views, and engagement.

For an even closer look at the performance details for a specific video, click on the video title or image.

More info: Meta Creator Studio Help

Wistia

Wistia is a video hosting solution with lead capture tools and analytics.

With Wistia, you can include call-to-action forms and buttons and use its advanced in-depth analytics to analyze user demographics, track engagement with viewers, and see which actions users take after watching your video (e.g. make purchases).

Wistia integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to see how your video campaigns are performing. It also includes CRM integrations, engagement statistics, and heat maps.

More info: Wistia

SproutVideo

SproutVideo is a video hosting service that offers excellent editing, encoding, privacy, and API customizations.

SproutVideo’s video engagement metrics and deep analytics let you track how users react and interact with your content using heatmaps, see what users did before and after watching your video, and use calls-to-action, lead capture methods, and email marketing integration to improve your results.

More info: SproutVideo

Conviva

Conviva’s Streaming Insights Platform delivers real-time measurement of premium streaming video, measuring video consumption and engagement across many social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, etc.), and bringing census-level streaming TV metrics with audience intelligence from social media platforms.

Conviva - Data Colletion Table — Conviva’s sensors can provide you with information on all the above metrics and data.

Conviva’s tools provide actionable insights with a comprehensive, real-time, cross-device collection of all your streaming data across your entire streaming audience.

More info: Conviva

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For more video tools and resources, go here: Content Marketing With Videos

Podcast Marketing Tools & Services

If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, use tools like the ones below to track the performance and success of your podcasts:

Podtrac

Podtrac is a podcast analytics tool that gives you accurate audience data and detailed demographics using their “Unique Monthly Audience” metric.

More info: Podtrac

Anchor

Anchor is Spotify’s free podcasting and hosting platform.

This podcast analytics tool is an all-in-one solution that helps you create engaging podcasts and host unlimited episodes at no cost and enables you to distribute your podcast to all major platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts with just one click.

More info: Anchor

Additional Podcast Tracking Tools

Check out these additional podcast tools and services for promoting and tracking your podcasts:

Chartable – Track your full funnel and grow your show to find the most effective audio channels for growth. Use podcast analytics to track all your data in one place, stay on top of your chart ranks & reviews, and track podcast charts and podcast reviews from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, across over 150 countries. Also, get ranks across all stores and countries, recent reviews, and more delivered to your inbox daily or weekly, plus notifications about your podcasts.
Podbean – Get comprehensive statistics with all the insights you need to track how your podcast performs.
Backtracks – Backtracks Podcast Analytics collects podcast listener metrics and listener data. It can tell you if a podcast download results in a play, so you can learn what’s working and what’s not in your podcast content and ads.
Transistor – Get stats on downloads, listens, and streams from all listening apps.
Blubrry – IAB v2.1 Certified Compliant statistics and insights to help you analyze your listeners and grow your show, for any podcast, on any hosting platform.
Fireside – Get accurate, real-time download stats and analytics. Every unique download is tracked and counted accurately.
Simplecast – Industry-leading publishing, distribution, analytics, and sharing tools for podcasters.
Castbox – Measure your subscribers, streams, and downloads with robust podcasting analytic tools.

Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing

If your content marketing strategy includes podcasting, this FREE guide will help you master easy email marketing strategies to turn listeners into subscribers, build your brand, and grow your podcast.

Download the free guide here: Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing

***

For more podcasting tools and resources, go here: Content Marketing With Podcasts.

Self-Publishing eBooks & Online Courses

If your content marketing strategy includes creating eBooks, guides, or online courses, you may want to promote these using the tools and self-publishing platforms listed below.

RebranderPro

RebranderPRO is an online tool that lets you turn PDF reports and guides into rebrandable reports that you can share with resellers and affiliates.

The tool also provides tracking and analytics to measure the performance of your shared content (e.g. downloads and clicks).

Practical applications of using RebranderPRO include:

Creating retail price lists or product catalogs that your resellers, distributors, or affiliates can rebrand with their business details, website URLs, or merchant/affiliate IDS and distribute to their clients.
Promoting lead generation reports and guides with an affiliate program. Your affiliates can then rebrand these with their affiliate ID, distribute them on their website, and share these with their audiences.

More info: RebranderPRO

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

KDP is a free service from Amazon that lets you self-publish eBooks and promote these to a global audience.

KDP gives you control of your book and lets you edit the content and pricing as often as you like after publication.

Additionally, KDP’s promotional features help you create more exposure for your books, books can be read on all devices, and the KDP lending library pays royalties on popular and widely read/shared publications.

For more information and to set up a free account on the Amazon Kindle platform, go here: KDP

See the resources below for more information on promoting eBooks, guides, and reports, and a step-by-step tutorial on formatting and uploading your eBook to Amazon’s KDP:

Self-Publishing Marketplaces

If you plan to create and sell eBooks or Guides, then consider adding these to digital marketplaces like the ones shown below:

ClickBank.com – ClickBank is an e-commerce platform and affiliate marketplace where product owners and affiliates can connect with each other. Add your eBook or Guide and let affiliates promote it for you.
JVZoo.com – JVZoo is an e-commerce and affiliate platform that allows you to sell and promote unlimited products from one account.
Lulu.com – Lulu lets you print and publish books directly using print-on-demand technologies.

If you plan to create and sell eCourses, video courses, etc., then consider adding these to digital marketplaces like the ones shown below:

Skillshare – Skillshare is an online learning community offering thousands of courses and classes on all kinds of topics.
Udemy – Udemy is a marketplace where course creators can publish and sell courses online.
See the resources below for more information on creating and promoting online courses and using learning management systems (LMS):
- How To Create eBooks And Online Courses

QR Code Marketing

If you plan to use QR Codes in your content marketing, the tools below will help you track their performance.

Beaconstac

Beaconstac is a service that lets you generate dynamic QR codes and track your QR code marketing performance.

You can use Beaconstac’s Free QR code generator to create custom QR codes for your business.

Beaconstac - Free QR Code Generator — Generate dynamic QR codes using Beaconstac’s Free QR code generator.

With Beaconstac’s QR Code generator and tracking analytics engine you can view the following performance data in the tool’s dashboard:

Number of Scans
Unique Visitors
Campaign Performance – top 5 best performing (and top 5 under-performing) QR Code campaigns.
Reports – Overview of scans by location, time, or device, plus aggregate and individual scan details.
Campaign Distribution – lets you track the type of QR Code campaign that delivers the best results (e.g. webpage vs PDF vs coupon.)

Note: To use the above tracking features you will need to upgrade to the premium service.

More info: Beaconstac

For more information, tools, and resources on promoting your content with QR codes, go here: Using QR Codes.

Content Marketing Management Tools & Services

Here are some comprehensive tools and services to help you manage and track the performance of your content marketing campaigns.

Hubspot

HubSpot is an “all-in-one” marketing software with an integrated CRM platform that provides tools for blogging, social media, email marketing, SEO, landing pages, marketing automation, and web analytics.

HubSpot’s software is comprised of marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations “hubs” that work seamlessly together to help you grow your business.

HubSpot's Hubs — HubSpot integrates various different Hubs to help grow your business.

The video below provides an overview of HubSpot:

More info: Hubspot

CoSchedule

CoSchedule lets you organize and run all of your marketing from one place.

CoSchedule provides a marketing suite of products to help you coordinate your team, projects, and processes, manage marketing requests, etc., content marketing training, and tools to help you analyze and improve your headlines, email subjects, and social messages.

CoSchedule also offers a free content marketing calendar, which you can use to run your editorial calendar.

CoSchedule Calendar — Use CoSchedule’s free content calendar to schedule your content production.

CoSchedule also integrates with:

Applications – e.g. WordPress, Evernote, Google Docs, Office 365, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive,
Social networks – e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram
Email services – e.g. MailChimp, Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact.

More info: CoSchedule

Contentsquare

Contentsquare helps you analyze user behavior to understand what is and isn’t working on your web pages, assess page elements in terms of impact, performance, and usability to identify areas for subsequent updates, and conduct a customer journey analysis.

More info: Contentsquare

StoryChief

StoryChief is an all-in-one content marketing platform that provides centralized and unified content workflow, collaboration, planning, publishing, analytics, and reporting tools, integrated content calendar, and many other features.

With 1,000+ integrations, StoryChief allows content teams to publish content to any CMS or intranet and is a widely used tool for multi-channel marketing campaigns, managing social media marketing activities, content data, SEO, and a whole lot more.

Watch the video below for an overview of this tool:

More info: StoryChief

Video Courses For Beginners – Content Promotion

The video courses below cover many basic areas of content promotion and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Digital Branding

Learn simple and inexpensive ways to boost your brand and identity online and make your business stand out from your competition.

More info: Digital Branding

How To Increase Conversions

Learn ways to increase your conversions by improving your processes and how to set up sales funnels that will help you sift through serious buyers, filter out non-serious buyers, and create a long-term, high-converting customer list.

More info: How To Increase Conversions

How To Build A Subscriber List

This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.

More info: How To Build A Subscriber List

Online Advertising

Learn how to generate more traffic, new leads, and more sales and subscribers for your business using online advertising.

More info: Online Advertising

Lead Generation

Learn effective methods to generate more leads for your business online.

More info: Lead Generation

Social Media Marketing

Learn how to market and promote your business online using popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

More info: Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing

Learn how to grow your business using content marketing.

More info: Content Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Learn how to generate an income with affiliate marketing.

More info: Affiliate Marketing

Email Marketing

Learn how to profit from email marketing by connecting with more prospects, leads, and customers using email.

More info: Email Marketing

Video Marketing

Learn useful strategies and practical methods that will help you improve your sales and conversions using video marketing.

More info: Video Marketing

YouTube Marketing

Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.

More info: YouTube Marketing

Facebook Marketing

Learn how to drive more traffic to your website and how to promote your business better online using Facebook.

More info: Facebook Marketing

Twitter Marketing

Learn how to market and promote your business online using Twitter.

More info: Twitter Marketing

QR Code Marketing

Learn how to promote your business better using QR codes.

More info: QR Code Marketing

How To Use Aweber

Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.

More info: How To Use Aweber

News Release Traffic Formula – Get More Leads & Customers

Learn how to use news releases effectively to boost your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your website, and generate new leads for your business.

More info: News Release Traffic Formula – Get More Leads & Customers

***

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

There are many tools and services you can use to promote your content online and get your business in front of as many targeted users as possible.

Action Steps

Make sure you complete the course sections on content promotion and content tracking.

Review the above lesson and choose tools and services that will make promoting your content easier to manage and track.

Resources

Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
Link Tracking And Management Tool – Manage and track all of your promotional links from a central location.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.

Also, see the sections below for additional tools and resources that will help you promote your content more effectively:

References

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Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Email Marketing Newsletter

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Content Research Tools

Useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you save time in areas like content planning and content production.

Content Research Tools And Resources

Useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you save time in areas like content planning and content production.

The World Wide Web is a huge library of content research.

In this section, you will find many useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you in areas like content planning and content production, including:

Researching new content topics and ideas
Finding new content opportunities
Exploring current trends
Gathering data and stats to back up your arguments
Identifying profitable keywords and niches
Researching content for distribution in channels like blogging, social media, email marketing, etc.

***

Contents

AI-Powered Content Research

You can use AI technologies for content research and content planning, such as generating content ideas, creating article outlines, etc.

We explore various AI tools that you can use to research and plan your content in this section: AI Content Writing Tools

Additionally:

We have created a free video course showing you how to generate quality content quickly using a free AI tool
You can learn more about the process of researching and planning content using AI tools here: Generate Website Content Using AI
Check out this article conceived and generated entirely using AI: 5 Tips For Streamlining Your Content Management Process

Google

One of the easiest ways to begin researching content is to Google it.

Start with a topic or keyword related to your business, niche, or industry and enter it into the Google search bar to begin exploring content ideas.

Additionally, as you type, you’ll notice that Google displays an autocomplete list of search terms below the search field where you have entered your keywords.

You can use the Google Autocomplete tool (formerly called Google Suggest) to explore additional content related to your search, build a list of keywords or topic ideas, etc. (Tip: learn how to manage Google’s Autocomplete predictions).

After you hit enter on any search term, Google displays even more content ideas you can explore.

For example, you have the People also ask tool, which you can use to research content ideas on ways to solve problems your customers may be experiencing…

Google search results: People also ask tool — Google’s ‘People also ask’ tool is great for exploring content ideas on ways to solve problems.

Google also displays the Related searches tool with topic-related content ideas you can research…

Google's Related searches tool — Use Google’s Related searches tool to explore topic-related ideas.

Add additional search terms you can click on for even more content-related research…

Google additional search terms — Explore even more content ideas using these additional search terms.

Don’t forget other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. You might find different answers and additional suggestions there to expand your content research.

Content Research Tools - Microsoft Bing search page — Use other search engines like Microsoft Bing to expand your content research.

Not only can you do a ton of content research using only Google search but there are also other free content research tools that Google offers.

Let’s explore some of these.

Google Chrome Browser Extensions

Chrome browser extensions are small software programs that you can install to add new features or modify existing functionality in the Google Chrome web browser.

These extensions can not only enhance your experience as a user, increase productivity, and provide additional security and privacy measures, but there are many useful extensions that can be used for content research, content planning, content creation, etc.

To access Chrome browser extensions, follow these steps:

1. Open the Google Chrome browser on your computer.

2. Click on the three-dot icon located in the upper right corner of the browser window to open the main menu.

3. Select “More Tools” from the dropdown menu, and

4. Click on “Extensions” from the submenu.

Google Chrome Browser - Extensions — How to access the Extensions menu in Google’s Chrome Web Browser.

5. This will open the Extensions screen where you can view and manage any extensions you have added to your web browser. Click on the Hamburger menu icon in the top-left corner of the screen to access the Main menu.

Google Chrome Web Browser - Extensions screen. — Google Chrome Web Browser – Extensions screen.

Click on the link at the bottom of the menu.

Google Chrome Web Browser - Extensions menu. — Click on the link at the bottom of the menu to visit the Chrome Web Store.

This will take you to the Chrome Web Store, where you can browse and download a variety of Chrome browser extensions.

Chrome Web Store - Main screen — Browse hundreds of extensions in the Chrome Web Store.

Use the search bar to search for specific extensions, or browse through the various categories available.

Chrome Web Store - Search bar — Search for extensions using the search bar.

When you find an extension you want to install, click on the extension to select it.

Chrome Web Store - Selecting an extension. — Click to select an extension.

Click on the “Add to Chrome” button to install the extension.

Chrome Extension - AIPRM for ChatGPT — Click Add to Chrome to install the extension.

A pop-up window will appear, asking you to confirm the installation. Click on “Add Extension” to confirm.

The extension will then be installed in your Chrome browser and will be visible in your toolbar or in the extensions menu.

To manage your installed extensions, you can access the extensions menu by clicking on the three-dot icon and selecting More Tools > Extensions.

From there, you can enable or disable extensions, remove them, or adjust their settings as needed.

You can also Pin or Unpin extensions from your toolbar by right-clicking on the Extensions icon in the toolbar and selecting your preferred option.

Chrome Extensions screen. — View your extension in the Extensions screen and pin or unpin it from your browser toolbar.

Tip: Use the “Related” tab to find additional extensions related to the functionality you’re searching for.

Chrome Web Store - Related extensions — Find related extensions for your Chrome web browser using the Related tab.

Google Trends

Google Trends is another free service from Google that shows you trends in search activity all over the world, with access to maps, charts, and other tools.

You can use Google Trends to compare search volume activity for related topics or similar keywords over a given period of time across different regions or languages, gauge public reaction to real-time events and news stories, monitor trends across different areas of interest (social, political, business, entertainment, sports, etc), optimize SEO for video or local search, glean insights about products and service demand, forecast and predict trends, etc.

Google Trends is also a great tool for identifying the seasonality of topics in your niche or industry. You can use this information to plan your editorial calendar with content promoting those topics during their peak season.

For an excellent article on how to use Google Trends, go here.

You can also download key datasets from Google Trends at the Google Trends Datastore.

More info: Google Trends

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and track what other people are publishing about you and your business online.

More info: Google Alerts

Google Lens

Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google and available as an app for Android phones that uses artificial intelligence to identify text and objects in images and in a live view from a phone’s camera.

Google Lens lets you do “real world” content research faster using your mobile phone’s camera.

When you point the phone’s camera at an object with the app installed, it tries to identify the object by reading barcodes, QR codes, labels, and text, and shows you relevant search results, web pages, and information.

For example, here is a photo taken of a tea bag label with Google Lens installed on an Android phone…

Image of a green tea bag label selected with Google Lens — Point your phone’s camera at an object and tap the Google Lens button…

Google Lens immediately identified the object and returned relevant search results…

Google Lens search results — Google Lens brings you search results and lets you do various things with the information.

When you point your phone’s camera at an object, Google Lens gives you the following options:

Translate – take a photo of words to translate
Text – take a photo of words to copy
Search – Search for information related to the object
Homework – Take a photo of a homework question
Shopping – Take a photo of products or barcodes
Places – Identify landmarks, buildings, etc.
Dining – Take a photo of food or a menu

You can scan and translate text from a physical document like a book, paper, business card, whiteboard, or with writing on it, then copy that text to your phone’s clipboard, and paste it into anything – a Google Doc, email, note app, Slack chat, etc.

You can also use Google Lens to identify plants and animals, and get information about landmarks, restaurants, and storefronts (e.g. historical facts, ratings, hours of operation), as well as find information about similar clothes, furniture, home decor, or other objects that you come across.

Google lens is an excellent content research tool. You can copy text from objects and send it to your computer, interact with text from images, search for online images that match real-world objects, save contact information, create calendar events, find answers to questions, and a whole lot more.

See this article for more ways to use Google Lens or scan the QR code below with your Android phone to download the app to your phone from the Google Play store:

Google Lens QR Code — Scan this QR Code to install Google Lens on your Android phone.

More info: Google Lens

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another useful tool from Google that lets you expand your content research by searching for information across academic literature from journal websites, university repositories, Google Books, etc.

The Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

The video below provides more information on using Google Scholar:

More info: Google Scholar

Looker Studio

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a free tool that gives you powerful insights into your website’s performance from various data sources like Google Search, Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube, social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, databases, etc.

For tutorials on using Looker Studio, go here:

More info: Looker Studio

We recommend using Looker Studio with the free Search Intent Keyword Classifier dashboard template designed for search intent-based content creation developed by Lazarina Stoy.

To learn more, go here or watch the video below:

To download the template, go here: Search Intent Keyword Classifier Template

For a tutorial on using the template, go here: Supercharge Your Keyword Research Process By Incorporating Search Intent Classification

Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics helps investors and entrepreneurs find new and upcoming trends before they become popular.

The tool uses a special algorithm to analyze millions of searches, conversations and mentions across the internet to identify under-the-radar industries, products, and categories.

More info: Exploding Topics

Infographiqs

Infographiqs is a search engine for infographics.

Simply type in a search term into the search engine field, and its extensive database returns relevant and accurate results on where to find infographics matching your search term.

From there. click on an entry from the results to visit the site with the infographic.

Use this site to find and review infographics you can cite and add to your content.

More info: Infographiqs.com

Buzzsumo

Buzz Sumo provides access to comprehensive and data-driven content research.

Use BuzzSumo to:

Find the best performing content that will help you get more likes, links, and shares
Identify influencers that can help your brand or campaign, and
Track comments and trends on social media so you can respond faster and capitalize on opportunities.

We also cover Buzz Sumo in the Search Optimization Tools section.

More info: Buzz Sumo

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine based on natural language processing and a large library of algorithms.

According to the website:

Wolfram Alpha represents a fundamentally new paradigm for getting knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods. Bringing broad, deep, expert-level knowledge to everyone… anytime, anywhere.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to make all the world’s knowledge computable by computing expert-level answers using Stephen Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.

Its mission is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

In terms of helping you with content research, Wolfram Alpha’s website is divided into several categories, like Mathematics, Science & Technology, Society & Culture, and Everyday Life. Each of these areas contains many subcategories.

So, for example, go to Everyday Life > Personal Finance and you will find ways to compute useful answers to thousands of personal finance questions, from computing interest rates to analyzing and projecting returns on stocks and other investments, converting world currencies, and more.

Wolfram Alpha - Examples for Personal Finance answers — Wolfram Alpha lets you find answers by computing whatever can be computed about anything.

The website builds on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Visit the site: Wolfram Alpha

Content Curation

Content curation tools offer a strategic approach to content creation by not only streamlining the process but also inspiring creativity by sourcing, organizing, and presenting relevant content from diverse platforms.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it offers a robust content curation tool designed for individuals and businesses, enhancing your ability to research and publish top-tier content.

For Individuals:

Effortlessly publish topic pages featuring curated content in minutes.
Automatically distribute curated content within your network to bolster your professional brand.

For Businesses:

Curate, share, and read content within private hubs.
Publish curated content on websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media platforms.
Aggregate curated content seamlessly across multiple WordPress blogs.

Key features of this tool include:

1. Discover, Select & Editorialize, Distribute

A powerful content engine that monitors global sources to curate relevant third-party content.

2. Boost Credibility and Brand Awareness

Establish thought leadership and strengthen influencer connections.
Access diverse sources ranging from mainstream media to niche publications.

3. Create and Share Curated Content Pages

Publish topic pages swiftly.
Share curated content with your networks to build your professional brand.
Automatically feed social channels with curated content.
Embed content pages on your website.
Leverage curated content in templated newsletters.

4. Monitor and Share Knowledge Privately

Facilitate team collaboration with easy content discovery, curation, and sharing.
Automate content monitoring.
Share curated content privately within your team.
Generate internal email newsletters effortlessly.
Create private curated content hubs for your team.
Seamless integration with SSO, intranet, and enterprise social networks.

5. Publish Curated Content for a Targeted Audience

Store, share, categorize, and disseminate curated content.
Aggregate curated content on one or multiple websites.
Publish content on one or multiple WordPress blogs.
Share your team’s content on multiple social media platforms.
Generate customized newsletters for Mailchimp or any emailing solutions.

Scoop.it empowers users to streamline content curation, fostering brand credibility, thought leadership, and effective collaboration within teams.

More info: Scoop.it

Curata

Curata is a content curation tool that lets you streamline your curation experience.

Curata’s Content Curation Software (CCS) scours the web using keywords, news sources, authors, bookmarked or shared content, etc., and returns relevant published content that you can then curate, add your own summary and brand voice to, embed royalty-free imagery, schedule, and share.

Key features of this tool include:

1. Find

Automatically receive the most relevant content from hundreds of thousands of sources.
Dynamic adaptation to your content preferences.
Enable crowdsourcing across your organization.

2. Discover Fresh Content

Curata’s engine employs natural language processing to adapt to your preferences.
Fine-tune content flow by refining sources and focusing on preferred platforms like social media.

3. Curate on the Fly

Instantly curate content while browsing with a convenient browser plugin.
Empower your team through crowd-sourced curation and content suggestions.

4. Quality over Quantity

Curata’s engine programmatically filters out outdated, multilingual, or duplicative content.
With Curata, transform curation into a seamless three-step process: Find, Curate, Share.

More info: Curata

Pocket

Pocket is a content curation tool that allows users to save, organize, and manage articles, videos, and web pages from the internet for later consumption.

Its main function is to provide a convenient way to store content that users find interesting but may not have time to read or view immediately. Users can save content directly from their browser or through apps like X (Twitter), Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, making it accessible from any device with an internet connection.

Once saved, content can be tagged for easy sorting and retrieval, although Pocket does not offer organizational tools such as collections, unlike some other curation tools like Feedly.

It also curates guides to the best of the web, featuring top-saved stories from its user base, which showcases popular and trending content across various topics.

Overall, Pocket serves as a personal content library where users can accumulate a personalized mix of content tailored to their interests and preferences, which they can access and read at their convenience.

Feed Readers

Feed Readers save you time visiting all of the different sites you like to keep up with when searching for new content posted on these sites, by allowing you to view all of the content on your desktop or phone from a single source.

Feedly

Feedly is a content aggregation and curation tool designed to help users streamline their process of accessing, organizing, and sharing content across various topics. It functions primarily as a news aggregator, allowing users to subscribe to multiple online sources and organize articles into collections based on topics of interest.

This tool is particularly useful for social media content curation, as it enables users to create feeds tailored to specific content themes, making it easier to share relevant content across social media platforms.

Feedly employs AI to enhance its curation capabilities, suggesting content based on the user’s preferences and previous interactions. This AI component helps in discovering and following favorite sources and topics more efficiently, thereby keeping the user’s feed fresh with highly relevant content.

Additionally, Feedly integrates with various other tools and platforms, enabling a smoother workflow for gathering, reading, and distributing content.

Feedspot

As the video below states…“things move fast on the web and it’s hard to keep up with your favorite sites by visiting each of them separately. Feedspot lets you subscribe to websites so new content comes to you when it’s posted.”

Like most feed readers, Feedspot lets you add feeds from different sites to its service, as well as feeds from blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, news sites, and RSS feeds. You then view the aggregated content from the tool’s content reader.

Watch the video below for an overview of Feedspot:

More info: Feedspot

Reports, Case Studies & White Papers

Get valuable insights into the latest trends, research reports, case studies, and white papers by performing a Google search for:

Reports: [your industry] + [research report].
Case Studies: [your industry] + [case study].
White papers: [your industry] + [white paper].

You can also link to tweets, papers, or reports from industry professionals and subject experts.

Subject Matter Experts (SME)

“A subject matter expert is a professional who’s cultivated a deep well of knowledge. They may be knowledgeable about a niche topic, a skill, a process, or a particular set of technologies, machinery, or materials.”

ConstantContent

As part of your content research, you can find and follow influential people, interview subject experts, or reach out to social media influencers in your industry.

Following influential people can provide you with timely news, quotes, and more.

Interviewing subject matter experts is a great way to create content like videos, podcasts, and blog transcripts. Before interviewing a subject matter expert, make sure you’ve prepared your interview questions.

Social media influencers can ask your target audience questions about specific pain points and frustrations that your content can then address.

You can find subject experts and social media influencers on websites, social media platforms, forums, networking events, and many other places.

Let’s explore some of these places…

LinkedIn is an excellent resource for finding subject matter experts and doing content research.

For example, LinkedIn lets you explore trending topics, news, and popular questions in your industry or niche.

Use LinkedIn’s content suggestions feature to research and discover new content ideas from areas like Trending Articles (shows suggested content based on current trends across LinkedIn), and Company News (shows content suggestions based on your organization’s mentions in the news).

More info: LinkedIn

Twitter

Twitter is another great place to find and follow influential people and reach out to SMEs.

To get the most out of Twitter as a content research tool, make sure to read Twitter’s Getting Started Guide.

More info: Twitter

Hashtagify

Hashtagify is an advanced Twitter hashtag tracking tool that lets you find hashtags to enhance your social media strategy through hashtag marketing, reach your audience, get custom suggestions, and analyze influencers’ and competitors’ strategies.

You can search real-time data and gain insights about Twitter hashtags (popularity ranking, related hashtags, trends, etc.), track hashtags, follow and analyze Twitter users and trending hashtags, monitor relevant content, and find influencers.

The tool also provides data in easy-to-read dashboards and charts, so you can audit performance, monitor aggregated analytics, and build custom reports.

Visit the site: Hashtagify

Twitter Polls

Twitter Polls is a feature of Twitter that lets you create polls to research opinions and gain insights from other Twitter users.

You can use Twitter polls to get customer feedback about upcoming events, new content, new product launches, rebranding, new releases, etc., curate industry-relevant discussions, and test how your audience feels about a certain topic before creating your content.

More info: Twitter Polls

Forums

Forums are a great place to research information, especially if you are creating content designed to solve problems or looking for ideas to develop new products or services.

Often, you can find answers on forums that you cannot find by searching on Google. Forums allow you to engage with people, so if you type in your topic and find that an answer doesn’t exist, you can always ask the question.

Here are some popular forums and forum-like sites:

Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer social media and research website where users answer each other’s questions about all kinds of topics.

Quora has over 300 million monthly active users and over 400,000 topics to explore, so it’s a great site to research topics and questions people are asking and use the information to develop new content ideas relevant to your industry.

More info: Quora

Reddit is another commonly used platform where you can find answers that will help you with your content research.

Reddit is a social networking site where over 300 million monthly active users (known as Redditors) share, interact with, and consume the latest news and trending topics. If you are unfamiliar with using the platform, see this Beginner’s Guide To Using Reddit before engaging with the community.

More info: Reddit

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers.

It’s the leading community for developers and a great place to research content related to programming, web development, and emerging technologies.

More info: Stack Overflow

In addition to the above, you can join various social media groups and participate in communities of like-minded people across many different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

Content Idea Generation Tools

Below are some tools you can use to help you generate new ideas for content.

Infinite Content Creation Course

We provide a comprehensive 120-lesson FREE content creation email course right here on ContentManagementCourse.com, so make sure to sign up below to learn how to never run out of content ideas for your blog, website, or newsletter:

Keyword Magic Tool

Keyword Magic Tool lets you find and explore millions of keywords for content ideas and SEO.

Note: You will need to set up an account with SemRush to use this tool.

Simply enter a target keyword related to your product or service into the tool and the Keyword Magic Tool will return a list of related keywords and metrics like average search volume, keyword difficulty, and additional features included on the SERP page for your keyword.

For example, suppose you are looking for content ideas to write about air fryers.

Go to Keyword Magic Tool and search for the phrase “air fryer” …

Keyword Magic Tool - Search Results — Keyword Magic Tool provides detailed keyword search results.

Next, select the “Questions” option in the toolbar to filter the results to questions, and you’ll see a list of the most frequently searched question-based results related to your search that contain your seed keyword.

Keyword Magic Tool - Question-Based Search Results — Keyword Magic Tool returns a list of question-based search results.

In the above example, “how to clean air fryer” is searched 9,900 times per month. This indicates that users searching for this phrase may have a problem cleaning their air fryers or are beginning their buyer’s journey into buying one and are looking for help or solutions.

You could use this information to educate or engage your audience and provide them with advice or a solution. For example, you can create a guide on air fryer maintenance, or an article or video on cleaning air fryers and promote air fryer cleaning equipment or products, etc.

More info: Keyword Magic Tool

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic.com is a free tool that you can use to research new topic ideas for content marketing, SEO, etc.

Simply enter 1-2 words to describe a topic, band, or product, and click on the Search button.

The tool then explores autocomplete data from search engines like Google and returns ‘mindmap’-like visualization charts with useful search phrases related to questions people are asking around your keyword (e.g. where, what, how, why, etc.), searches based on your keyword+prepositions (e.g. near, for, with, to, etc.), and even comparisons (great for creating review articles).

AnswerThePublic - Visualization data chart — Use AnswerThePublic’s visualization charts to explore ideas for new content.

The tool also provides a downloadable list of results segmented alphabetically.

AnswerThePublic - Alphabetical search results. — Generate lots of great content ideas quickly with AnswerThePublic’s free tool.

Use this tool to generate and brainstorm useful new content topic ideas, and even to help you develop new products and services based on what consumers are searching for.

More info: AnswerThePublic.com

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword research and SEO tool that lets you generate content and keyword ideas, track your rank daily, do a competitor analysis, conduct a site audit, and more.

Ubersuggest results screen. — Get useful search results for content ideas.

Ubersuggest’s domain tool lets you reverse engineer your competitors’ SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing strategy, so you can get insight into strategies that are working for others in your market.

The tool’s Top SEO Pages report is an SEO analyzer that lets you see which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular organic keyword phrases and getting attention on sites like Facebook.

Use the free keyword research tool to research hundreds of suggestions for keyword ideas, from head terms to long-tail phrases, with analytic results for volume, competition, and seasonal trends for each keyword. You can also generate a list of keywords that let you see what is working for your competitors and what people are typing into Google.

Additional features include results for top-performing content pieces for your searched keywords with social shares and check for backlinks in your niche.

Ubersuggest keyword and content ideas. — Ubersuggest provides keyword and content ideas based on your search.

Additionally, Ubersuggest integrates with an AI content writing tool, allowing you to create AI-generated content from your keyword searches.

Ubersuggest AI content writer — Generate SEO-optimized content from your search results using an integrated AI content writer.

More info: Ubersuggest

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a browser addon (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) that lets you perform SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing while browsing the web.

It adds the following functionality to your browser:

Free version:

ChatGPT Prompt Templates
Instagram Hashtag Generator (no volume data)
Pinterest Insights and Trend widgets (no volume data)

The paid version includes everything in the free version plus accurate monthly search volume, CPC, competition & 12-month trend data.

Additional features of the paid version include:

Related keywords on Google & Bing, People Also Search For (PASF) keywords on Google.
Trend chart in Google & YouTube.
YouTube insights & YouTube Tags.
Monthly estimated traffic & the top 10,000 keywords that any URL ranks for
URL Analysis to get the list of keywords in the content of the page, and the density of those keywords.
Historical volume data in the trend charts for Google & YouTube (from 2004).
Support for 15+ websites, including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Google Search Console, Google Analytics.
Import keywords for accurate monthly search volume, CPC, and competition analysis.

More info: Keywords Everywhere

For more tools to help generate ideas and topics for your content, go here: Content Idea Generation Tools.

Organizing Your Content Research

Having a huge library of content research tools and resources at your disposal is great, provided you can access these quickly and efficiently.

Here are some tools and resources that will help you save time accessing your content research tools.

Web Browser – Bookmarks

You can speed up your content research simply by organizing and storing access to the URLs of the sites, platforms, services, and tools you regularly use in your web browser’s bookmarks…

We recommend planning your bookmarking folders first so that when you come across content you want to save to research later, you have an organized way to retrieve it.

Example of bookmarking content. — Planning your bookmarking folders will make it easier to find stored bookmarks later.

Additionally, you can edit the bookmark name to suit your own needs.

Edit bookmark example. — You can edit your bookmarks if it helps to improve your content research process.

See these guides to using bookmarks in different web browsers and devices:

We cover using bookmarks in more detail in this section.

Content Organization Tools

You can also use content organization tools or apps to build up a collection of research notes, copy and paste snippets, ideas for blog posts or web pages, etc.

One Note

Microsoft OneNote is a digital notebook that lets you store and organize all of your notes into sections and pages and share these across all of your devices.

You can also highlight important and “to-do” notes, draw and annotate your notes using a stylus or your finger, record audio notes, insert online videos, add files, save content with one click, and share notebooks with your coworkers.

Simplenote

Simplenote is a free cross-platform note-taking tool that lets you organize your thoughts and content ideas, add tags to find notes quickly with instant searching, share to-do lists, post instructions, and publish your notes online.

Your notes automatically stay updated across all your devices, in real-time, and get backed up with every change you make.

MyInfo

MyInfo is another tool you can use to collect, store, and organize your content ideas, research notes, lists, links, to-dos, etc.

MyInfo - comiplation of screens from the application — Some screens from the MyInfo application.

The tool lets you collect and organize information in a number of ways, including assigning tags and attributes, using entry forms or typing free text, creating notes from templates or from scratch, and using search filters.

Text Editors

Built-in Plain Text Editor

A plain text editor lets you create draft content without distractions — A plain text editor lets you save content research notes and create draft content without distractions.

Your computer’s built-in plain text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Apple) is a great tool to jot down and save your content ideas, rough notes, snippets, swipe files, research, quotes, link or image URLs, write an outline of topics, and organize your content research.

It also lets you quickly create content drafts without distractions (like formatting or styling text) so you can focus entirely on what you want to say and get your ideas or points across.

NoteTab – Text And HTML Editor

NoteTab Pro - Text And HTML Editor — NoteTab Pro – Text And HTML Editor

While using a plain text editor is great, sometimes you may want to have multiple text files open while you work.

For example, let’s say that you are editing multiple articles or snippets of content on multiple text files and decide that you need to perform a search and replace operation across some or all of these files.

Being able to do one search and replace across all files would be a huge time saver. With your computer’s built-in plain text editor software, however, you can’t do this unless you merge the content of all your files together.

NoteTab is a powerful text and HTML editor tool that lets you edit multiple text files simultaneously, strip HTML from code, and a whole lot more. You can even use it to perform search and replace operations across multiple text files at once.

It’s a great content editing tool that will improve your productivity and help speed things up, especially when working with text or HTML snippets.

NoteTab Features

NoteTab is available in three versions: NoteTab Pro, NoteTab Standard, and the freeware NoteTab Light.

We recommend downloading and using the PRO version.

NoteTab Pro offers great features like:

Multiple-level undo/redo
Fast and flexible search & replace tools
Easy-to-use wildcards for searching (like * and ?)
An integrated two-pane outliner
Real-time word count (NoteTab or Microsoft Word method)
Text statistics for SEO (HTML code automatically ignored)
Support for HTML5 and CSS3
Support for Twitter’s Bootstrap toolkit
Syntax highlighting for HTML, XML, and CSS files
A multilingual spell checker and thesaurus
Customizable menu shortcuts and toolbars

The table of features below shows the differences between the three versions.

NoteTab - Feature Comparison — NoteTab – Feature Comparison

If you need to get more done in less time, NoteTab is fast, handy, reliable, and packed with time-saving productivity tools not found in other text editors.

More Info: NoteTab Pro

To learn how to copy and paste text from images into a text editor, see the Content Management Tips & Tricks section.

Swipe File Folders

Electronic folders are great tools for keeping your content research files organized.

By creating a hierarchy of nested folders mirroring your content structure, you can build an effective archive for your content research notes and files. This also lets you quickly locate archived files in the future should you ever need to retrieve these later.

Additional Content Research Tools

Content Idea Generation Tools – Resources for generating new content ideas.

Additional Sites For Content Research

The sites below provide additional useful resources for your content research.

Statistics & Data

Visit sites like the ones listed below for statistical data and information to validate your articles when getting your point across and adding credibility to your content:

Statista -Statista is one of the leading sites for market and consumer data.
Marketing Trends (HubSpot) – The latest marketing trends.
Top U.S. Market Research and Data Analytics Companies – Top market research and data analytics companies in the U.S.
Marketing Statistics (CoSchedule)- Marketing strategy trend report.
Gartner – Technology data
IQVIA – Healthcare data
NCBI – The National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information site, which provides access to biomedical and genomic information to advance science and health.
JSTOR – JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

Idea Sharing Sites

These sites attract subject experts and independent authors willing to share their ideas on a wide range of topics:

Ted Talks – TED talks are short, online video talks and presentations designed to inform and educate global audiences by presenting “Ideas Worth Spreading.” TED Talks provide access to new knowledge and innovative research from experts across a wide range of fields, including science, technology, business, art, design, and more.
Towards Data Science – a site where independent authors publish work and share concepts, ideas, and codes on data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and programming.
Start it up – This site is aimed at the “creator economy” and focuses on all things that help people “get smarter at building their thing” through newsletters, podcasts, self-published books, online courses, social media channels like YouTube, TikTok, Clubhouse, etc.
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange – This is a “question and answer” site designed to provide detailed answers to every question about English language and usage. There are no “chit chats” or discussions on this site. Simply ask your question and you’ll get an answer.
Substack – Substack is a site where independent writers and podcasters publish directly to their audience and get paid through subscriptions.
Codeburst.io – If your content targets developers, coders, or programmers, this site provides an abundance of tutorials and ideas for technical content writers.

Video Courses For Beginners – Content Research

The video courses below cover basic areas of content research and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Keyword Research Tools

Learn how to do keyword research using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.

More info: Keyword Research Tools

Google Tools

Learn how to use Google Tools like Google Analytics & Gmail.

More info: Google Tools

Using Password Managers

Password Managers provide an easy and secure way to keep track of all your passwords. This video course shows you how to use powerful and FREE password management tools.

More info: Using Password Managers

***

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

The World Wide Web is a huge library of content research. All you need are the right tools to perform your research effectively. This section provides a list of time-saving content research tools and resources.

Action Steps

Use the content research tools, sites, and resources listed on this page to save time researching content ideas and to help you and your team with your content planning and content production.

Resources

Subject Matter Expert Interview Template (CoSchedule) – If you plan to interview subject matter experts, this question and note-taking template can help you during your interview.
Search Intent Keyword Classifier – Download this free search intent template for content creation using Looker Studio (formerly Google DataStudio) from Lazarina Stoy.

References

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Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Images: Laptop

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Content Editing Tools

Useful time-saving content editing tools and resources to keep the quality of all edited content consistent and error-free.

Content Editing Tools And Resources

These useful content editing tools and resources will help you save time and keep the quality of all edited content consistent and error-free.

Depending on the kind of content you publish, you may need to edit your content regularly to keep the information relevant and up-to-date.

The tools and resources in this section will save you time editing content and hopefully provide your team with content editing guidelines to help maintain consistency and quality in all published content.

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Spell Checking And Grammar

Whether your team is publishing articles and blog posts or creating digital information products like ebooks, reports, or any other kind of written documentation, it’s important to make sure that your content is free of grammatical errors and misspellings.

Here are some tools that can help to improve your content:

Grammarly

Grammarly is a FREE grammar checking tool that helps to improve your content writing by correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes while also catching contextual errors, improving your vocabulary, and suggesting style improvements.

Grammarly analyzes your work, spell-checks it, and offers suggestions on how to improve sentence structure.

The software’s online grammar-checking algorithms have been developed and are regularly maintained by linguistic technology experts.

You can use this software to check your articles, blog posts, reports, e-books, or any kind of written documentation.

How To Use Grammarly

You can install Grammarly on your web browser, on a word-processing application like Microsoft Word, or on your desktop.

Once installed, the tool lets you check your content anywhere online, including Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress.

Check your content for errors — Use Grammarly to check your content for errors.

If you are writing a post, for example, you can run your post or article through Grammarly before publishing to make sure that your content has no errors.

Check your posts for errors before publishing.

If you don’t see the symbols when checking your content, make sure that you have enabled Grammarly for your site.

Note: To use some of the software’s features you need to make sure that you’re logged into your account.

If you can see your Grammarly dashboard, you’re logged in.

To check your content for errors inside applications like Microsoft Word, make sure that the tool is enabled.

Use Grammarly with MS Word — You can use Grammarly with MS Word.

Grammarly will begin scanning your document for errors. Depending on the size of your document, allow a few minutes for the scan to complete.

Grammarly scans your documents for errors.

After the scan is complete, the tool’s menu bar will display the number and types of errors found in your document.

A screen opens up next to your content where you can view the critical errors and advanced issues the tool has found after scanning your content.

Grammarly displays the number of issues found in your content.

To view and correct issues, click on the error counter and Grammarly will scroll through your content until it finds an issue. You can fix critical issues with the free version of the tool (repairing advanced issues requires upgrading to the premium version).

Grammarly not only catches all of your spelling and grammatical errors, it will also point out errors in your punctuation (e.g. wrong use of commas, double spacing between words, duplicated words, etc.).

Grammarly scans your text for common and complex grammatical mistakes, spanning everything from subject-verb agreement to article use to modifier placement, missing articles, weak adjectives, repeated words, etc.

Work through your content to fix all mistakes in your sentence structure and style.

As you scroll through each error, Grammarly shows you what’s wrong and gives you the option to automatically fix errors with just one click.

To correct mistakes, just click on the suggestion.

You can also ignore the suggestions and keep scrolling through to the next item or scroll back to view previous items.

Ignore suggestions to continue checking for issues

The premium version of Grammarly takes your content checking to a whole new level, allowing you to repair advanced content issues, view suggested vocabulary enhancements, detect instances of plagiarism, etc.

As you can see, Grammarly is a powerful and essential tool for content writing.

Once you begin using it to improve your content, you will not want to publish articles or blog posts again without first scanning for grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors.

More info: Grammarly – Free Grammar Checker

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is an AI-powered writing assistant software that provides more than just grammar checking, helping writers to identify and improve style issues such as repetitiveness, sentence length and variation, readability, overused words, redundancies, and transitions.

With over 20 different writing reports and 3,000 explanations and videos written by experts, ProWritingAid offers easy-to-follow suggestions and advice to help you improve your writing like a pro.

The software delivers thousands of grammar and style improvements in real-time as you write, with a team of copy editors hand-coding thousands of rules to cover the most vital style improvements.

In-app suggestions, explanations, videos, and quizzes help you build your writing skills while you edit, and the Word Explorer and contextual thesaurus helps you find the perfect words.

ProWritingAid easily integrates with popular writing platforms such as MS Word/Outlook, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Final Draft, and even offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari to check writing on almost every website.

Whether you’re an individual writer or an organization, ProWritingAid gives you and your team the ability to customize the software to your specific needs and create style guides and dictionaries, ensuring consistency across your writing and editing.

More info: ProWritingAid

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is a free tool that checks your writing for technical errors and readability. It is designed to be like a spellchecking tool, but for style. It helps make your writing bold and clear to make sure that your readers focus on your message, not your prose.

The Hemingway Editor highlights in yellow and red where your writing is too dense. Use the tool’s recommendations to remove needless words or split a sentence into two.

The software’s features help you to:

Improve your content’s readability
Write first drafts free from distractions
Strengthen your writing with powerful and more vivid-sounding verbs instead of using weak adverb constructs (e.g. instead of saying that someone is “walking slowly” you can say that they “tip-toed” or they “crept.”)
Eliminate complicated words and replace these with simpler words (e.g. replace words like “utilize” with “use”)
Change sentences from passive to active voice,
Format your content with text-formatting tools (e.g. bold, italicize, bulletize, numberize, turn highlighted text into links, change paragraphs into different heading sizes, etc.)

The desktop version of Hemingway gives you access to updates whenever a new version is released.

More info: Hemingway Editor

Content Style And Formatting

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel and create your own content styles and formatting guides from scratch. You can simply adopt an existing style or format as your own.

Style Guides

Wikipedia Manual of Style (MoS)

Content Editing Tools - Wikipedia Manual of Style — Wikipedia Manual of Style

Wikipedia uses this style manual for all of its English articles.

If you are looking for a style guide, this is a very useful resource and covers everything from article titles, sections, and headings, to capitalization, formatting content, grammar, and usage, etc.

More info: Wikipedia Manual of Style

The Associated Press Stylebook

This is another excellent style guide used as a writing and editing reference in newsrooms, classrooms, and corporate offices worldwide.

Its specialized chapters cover guidance for writing about people with disabilities, sports, business, data journalism, digital security, health and science, news values, polls and surveys, inclusive storytelling, religion, social media, and more.

More info: The Associated Press Stylebook

Chicago Manual Of Style

The Chicago Manual Of Style (CMOS) has evolved over more than one hundred years from a style sheet created by the University of Chicago Press to a pamphlet circulated throughout the University, to a book containing a compilation of typographical rules, to its modern version… an authoritative reference work for authors, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers, with more than a thousand pages in print and more than two thousand hyperlinked paragraphs online.

The CMOS is regarded by many as the industry leader in style matters and provides up-to-date recommendations for the digital age on electronic workflow and best practices in electronic manuscript preparation and editing.

More info: The Chicago Manual Of Style

Yahoo! Style Guide

The Yahoo! Style Guide is a style guide focused on writing content for the web.

This is a useful guide for freelance and content writers and includes useful advice on optimizing your content for search engines.

More info: The Yahoo! Style Guide

Formatting Tools

Here are some useful tools that can help take the guesswork out of formatting your content:

TitleCase.com

TitleCase is a free online tool that lets you convert post and article titles into different cases.

You can select a case from the Convertors menu…

Or simply type or paste in your post title and click on the Convert button.

TitleCase.com - Enter Text field — TitleCase.com – Enter Text field.

TitleCase converts your title into different cases and displays the results. Browse through the different options and copy and paste them into your content.

TitleCase.com - Results — TitleCase.com converts your sentences into different cases.

More info: TitleCase

Word Counters

Knowing the word count of your content can be important. For example, you may need to create a piece of content (e.g. an article, essay, whitepaper, eBook, etc.) with a minimum or a maximum number of words.

There are many online word counters you can use to get statistics about your content like the number of words, number of characters, check grammar, etc.

Here’s a great tool you can use to get text statistics:

WordCounter

WordCounter is an online editor that can do more than just counting words and characters. It can help you to improve word choice and writing style, and, optionally, help you to detect grammar mistakes and plagiarism.

To check word count, place your cursor into the text box above and start typing. The tool will display the number of characters and words and increase or decrease these as you type, delete, and edit them.

You can also copy and paste text from another program into the online editor. The Auto-Save feature makes sure you won’t lose any changes while editing, even if you leave the site and come back later.

WordCounter helps to ensure that your word count reaches a specific requirement or stays within a certain limit.

In addition, WordCounter shows you the top 10 keywords and keyword density of the article you’re writing. This lets you know which keywords you use, how often, and in which percentages, preventing you from overusing certain words or word combinations and checking for the best distribution of keywords in your writing.

The “Details Overview” lets you see the average speaking and reading time for your text, while “Reading Level” is an indicator of the education level that your readers would need to understand the words in your content.

More info: WordCounter

Google Docs

Google Docs is a great tool for editing content collaboratively.

With Google Docs, you can share your drafts with other team members and have them edit the content directly or add suggestions that you can then accept or reject.

Additionally, Google Docs provides tools that let you see your content’s word count and the number of characters.

Google Docs - Word Count Tool — Use Google Docs’s Word count feature to calculate your text statistics.

More info: Google Docs

Media Conversion Tools

For tools that let you convert content into different media formats (e.g. videos into GIFs), see this section: Media Editing Tools

Video Courses For Beginners – Content Editing

The video courses below cover basic areas of content editing and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Text-To-Speech

More info: Text-To-Speech

WordPress Gutenberg

Learn how to use the WordPress Gutenberg editor with this video course.

More info: WordPress Gutenberg

How To Use CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to control how web pages and page elements display on your screen. This video course shows you how to use CSS.

More info: How To Use CSS

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For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

Editing content can be time-consuming. The right tools and resources can help your team save time editing content and ensure that the quality of all published content remains consistent and error-free.

Action Steps

Help your team become familiar with these content editing tools and resources and make sure to implement standard guidelines for consistency in your content documentation.

Resources

Avoiding Widows and Orphans – ‘Widows’ and ‘orphans’ are terms used to describe unwanted stray words in typography. This tutorial explains ways to fix and deal with these issues.
Keyboard Shortcuts – See this section for ALT code keyboard shortcuts for adding international characters and symbols to content.
Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.

References

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Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Woman with Macbook

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Media Editing Tools

Use these tools to convert your media files into different formats and file types, resize your files, and more!

Media Editing Tools And Resources

Use these tools to convert your media files into different formats and file types, resize your files, and more!

Best content SEO practices usually require uploading images and media files to your site optimized for faster page loading speeds.

This may involve editing media files, cropping or resizing files, or converting media files into other formats.

This section provides a list of online tools you can use to convert or resize your media files.

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Contents

Media Conversion Tools

Use these tools to help you convert your media files into different formats.

CloudConvert

CloudConvert is an online file converter that supports almost all audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet, and presentation formats.

You can convert almost any file type from one format into another (200+ formats), optimize files, create and extract archives, merge PDF files, and even create and save website screenshots without downloading any extra software.

Cloud Convert - File Conversion Menu — Convert files online without downloading any additional software.

CloudConvert is also a secure online conversion tool. Only you have access to your files.

Additionally, you can set the quality of your conversions and adjust many other options.

Converting files from one format into another is as simple and easy as selecting a format to convert from into a format to convert to.

Cloud Convert - File Converter — Search and select the format and file type to convert files from and to other formats and file types.

For example, let’s say you want to convert an image file saved as a GIF into another format (e.g. a video or audio file).

CloudConvert lets you convert files from and to GIF files into many different formats.

Cloud Convert - GIF conversion options — Cloud Convert lets you convert an extensive number of files from and to GIF

You can also select files to convert from various sources. For example, you can upload the file from your computer, paste in a URL, upload it from an external storage service, etc.

Cloud Convert - Select File dropdown menu. — Cloud Convert provides various uploading options for adding your files to its conversion tools.

Upload your file and select the format to convert it to. In this case, we’ll convert our GIF file into an MP4 video.

Cloud Convert - GIF Converter — Let’s convert a GIF image into an MP4 video format.

After choosing the format to convert your file into, click the Convert button.

Cloud Convert - GIF to MP4 Converter — Click Convert to begin processing your conversion.

CloudConvert will begin to process your file.

Cloud Convert - File processing — Cloud Convert processes most file conversions very quickly.

Once your file has been converted, a window pops up showing you the resulting file. Click the Download button in the popup window to save it to your hard drive.

Cloud Convert - Converted file. — Our file is now converted and ready for download.

You can also convert multiple files and click the Download button to save these to your hard drive.

Cloud Convert - convert bulk files — You can convert bulk files too!

You can use CloudConvert for free for up to 25 conversions per day. If you need to process more files than this on a regular basis, you can choose conversion packages or subscriptions to suit your needs.

More info: CloudConvert

Convertio

Convertio is a browser-based online conversion tool that supports over 300+ media file formats and lets you convert your media files into any format and on any platform without the need to download or install any additional software.

To convert your files, simply drop your files on the file loader, choose an output format and click the “Convert” button.

Most conversion types also support advanced options (e.g. video converters let you choose quality, aspect ratio, codec, and other settings, and rotate and flip).

The conversion process takes about 1-2 minutes to complete. All conversions take place in the cloud and uploaded files are instantly deleted for security and privacy.

You can convert files up to 100 MB for free. If you plan to convert a large number of files on a regular basis or need to convert larger-sized files, Convertio offers paid plans with unlimited daily conversion minutes, unlimited maximum conversion time per file, and ad-free pages.

More info: Convertio

Media Resizing Tools

Use the tools below to resize large media files into smaller, and faster-loading files for your content.

Ezgif

Ezgif is an online GIF maker and image editor that lets you edit, shorten, merge, resize, crop, and optimize GIFs, and create high-quality animated GIFs free of watermarks or attribution.

Ezgif includes various online tools, such as:

Video tools: GIF to MP4 converter, online video cutter, video reverser, video crop tool, and video rotator.
File converters: PDF to GIF, PNG to JPG, WebP to JPG, HEIC to JPG, AVIF to JPG.
Other image tools: Image to Data URI, Cursor converter (.ani). TIFF converter, MNG tools, FLIF tools

You can automatically convert files and create GIFs by uploading a sequence of GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, and other types of images, a ZIP archive containing images, and even mix different formats and sizes.

To resize a GIF file, go to Ezgif.com/resize and upload an image from your computer (and click on the ‘Choose file’ button to upload the image) or paste the image URL into the field…

EZGif.com - Animated GIF Resizer. — Upload your GIF file in the Animated GIF resizer tool.

After selecting your GIF image, click on the Upload button.

Enter the dimensions you would like to resize your image to and click on the Resize image! button…

Once the image has been resized, click on the Save icon button…

Save the resized image to your computer.

Your resized image will be saved as a smaller sized-file.

Resized GIF file. — Your resized GIF file should be smaller than the original.

See the tool’s help section for tips on how to optimize animated GIFs, merge multiple animated gifs, make a GIF with transparent background, add background images or colors to transparent GIFs, make animated PNG images, and more.

More info: Ezgif

GifGifs

GifGifs is another online resizing tool that offers you many excellent free GIF tools, such as:

GIF resizer – Resize animated GIFs.
GIF optimizer – Reduce the file size of your animations.
PNG optimizer – Reduce the file size of your PNG images.
JPEG optimizer – Reduce the file size of your JPG images.
GIF crop – Crop and slice your animated GIFs.
GIF reverser – Reverse your animated GIFs.
Rotate GIF – Rotate and flip GIF images.
Add text to GIF – Add text to images.
GIF splitter – Extract frames from your animated GIFs.

More info: GifGifs.com

Adobe Express

Adobe Express offers a range of cutting-edge generative AI media-editing tools that let you create images from text prompts, text effects, etc., in addition to useful tools like its Video Resizer, which reduces the video file’s dimensions (use this tool if you are struggling to edit a large MP4 video).

More info: Adobe Express

In addition to the tools mentioned above, there are several image editing tools available that can help you edit images for the web, and many are available for free.

Online Image Optimization Tools

Here are some other popular online image editing tools for web optimization:

Compress Now – Offers online image compression with various formats supported.
JPEG Optimizer – Provides optimization specifically for JPEG images, ensuring reduced file sizes without significant quality loss.
TinyPNG – Specializes in compressing PNG and JPEG images while maintaining their exceptional quality.
Optimizilla – Online tool for compressing PNG and JPEG images with a user-friendly interface.
JPEG.io – Supports compression for popular formats like PNG, JPG/JPEG, and GIF with impressive results.
ImageRecycle – Offers compression for JPEG, PNG, GIF, and PDF images, providing significant reductions in file size.
Compressor.io – Allows for efficient compression of images, reducing file sizes while maintaining quality.
Ezgif – Apart from GIF creation, it also provides image optimization services, making it versatile for web optimization needs.
Dynamic Drive Optimizer – Provides optimization tools for various image formats, aiding in reducing file sizes for web use.
Smush – Smush is the leading free image optimization plugin for WordPress. If your website runs on WordPress, Smush can automatically optimize, resize, and compress images, as well as convert images to WebP format for faster loading web pages.

Online Image Resizing And Cropping Tools

Here are some popular free image editing tools that offer features like batch processing, resizing, and cropping images for the web:

Adobe Express – Offers a free image resizer tool for resizing photos online quickly.
PicResize – A free online tool for cropping, resizing, and editing images since 2005, providing various options for image manipulation.
Pixlr – Provides a free online AI photo editor with resizing and cropping capabilities, along with other advanced editing features and editing tools, Pixlr is great for users looking for more customization options.
Canva – Offers a free online photo editor with easy-to-use resizing and cropping tools, as well as a wide range of effects and filters.
BeFunky – Provides a free online image resizer for easily changing the dimensions of images without sacrificing quality. This tool is great for adding fun effects and filters to your images, making them more visually appealing.
PicMonkey: This tool is great for editing photos with its easy-to-use features like touch-up tools, filters, and overlays. You can create images using effects, graphics, templates, and more, and even save images to the platforms cloud storage to re-edit later for free, but a subscription is required to download or share images images.
Fotor: Fotor offers a free online photo editor with everything you need to enhance and edit photos. With Fotor, you can create collages, add text, and apply effects to your images to make them stand out on the web.
LunaPic: LunaPic offers completely free online photo editing with no signup, login or install needed. With LunaPic, you can animate your images, add borders, and apply artistic effects to make your photos pop.
GIMP: A free and open-source alternative to Photoshop, GIMP offers powerful editing tools for advanced users.

Video Courses For Beginners – Media

The video courses below cover basic areas of media production and editing and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Using Graphic Creation Tools

More info: Using Graphic Creation Tools

How To Create Engaging Presentations

Learn how to create beautiful and engaging presentations that will help you sell more products and services online.

More info: How To Create Engaging Presentations

How To Use CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to control how web pages and page elements display on your screen. This video course shows you how to use CSS.

More info: How To Use CSS

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For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

If you need to edit media files, crop or resize files, or convert media files into other formats, this section provides a list of online tools you can use to convert or resize your media files.

Action Steps

We recommend bookmarking the sites containing tools that you find useful and sharing these bookmarks with your team.

Resources

Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.
Image Management Guide – A comprehensive guide on effective web image management, from image formats to image tools, and image security and SEO optimization.

References

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Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Whale in Clouds

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Video Creation And Editing Tools

Create and edit product, sales, promotional, and training videos with these video tools and resources.

Video Tools

Create and edit product, sales, promotional, and training videos with these video tools and resources.

This section covers media creation tools referred to in various lessons throughout this course.

Use the tools and resources on this page to create and edit media like:

Screencast videos
Product videos
Explainer videos
Sales videos
Promotional videos
‘How-to’ training & tutorial videos
And more

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Video Creation Tools

Use the tools and resources below to create videos to suit a wide range of purposes.

Screen Recordings

Screen recordings are great for video tutorials and video-based training content. Use the video tools below to create screen recordings.

Camtasia

Camtasia is the leading screen capture video recording and editing software tool on the market.

You can create professional screen capture videos, record on-screen activity, customize and edit content, add interactive elements, import media, and create high-quality videos in a range of formats and sizes.

Camtasia Studio - Professional Screen Capture Videos — Create professional screen capture videos with Camtasia Studio.

More info: Camtasia Studio

AI Video Creation

AI video creation tools provide a time-saving, cost-efficient, and affordable alternative to traditional video creation.

Use the AI video tools below to create your marketing videos inexpensively:

Synthesia

Synthesia is an AI video creation platform that allows you to easily create professional videos in 120 languages without requiring any video editing experience.

This web-based platform is affordable and intuitive, making it easy to turn plain text into engaging training, how-to, or product marketing videos.

With Synthesia, you can save up to 80% of your time and budget when creating videos. You can localize your videos for a global audience by choosing from over 120 languages and accents. The app is accessible in your browser and it’s an affordable option suitable for beginners.

Synthesia offers a time and cost-efficient alternative to complex and expensive traditional video creation processes that allows you to create professional videos 10 times faster than ever before, without any prior knowledge of video editing.

With Synthesia, you can use digital twins of real actors known as Synthesia AI avatars to get professional actors without studio time. You can also turn text into professional voiceovers without the need for a microphone, thanks to Synthesia’s digital clones of real voices, known as Synthesia AI voices.

The video below provides an example of Synthesia’s AI technology in action:

Creating and updating videos is quick and easy with Synthesia. You can edit or update your video at any time, without needing any prior video editing skills. You also have access to over 60 fully customizable video templates, a built-in screen recorder and media library, and closed captions are included.

With over 100 diverse AI avatars to choose from, you can get an exclusive AI avatar for your brand or create your own custom AI avatar. Synthesia ensures consistent audio quality at scale and offers a range of features, including PowerPoint to Video, Text to Video, AI Video Generator, and Online Video Maker. Over 40,000 training, support, and marketing teams trust Synthesia for their video creation needs.

With Synthesia, you can easily create professional videos from plain text in just minutes. You can edit or update your video at any time and localize it in over 120 languages and accents. Synthesia is 10x faster than traditional video creation processes, and you don’t need any prior knowledge of video editing. Share, embed, or download your video as an MP4 with this powerful AI video generator.

More info: Synthesia

Promotional Videos

Use the tools below to create professional animated marketing videos, cartoon videos, and “whiteboard” hand-drawn sketch videos.

Toonly

Toonly is a simple, inexpensive, and powerful drag-and-drop explainer video creation software tool that lets you create professional cartoon explainer videos quickly and easily without requiring video creation skills, animators, illustrators, etc.

Toonly was developed by the creators of Doodly, another powerful video creation tool that lets you create doodle videos.

Toonly is available for PC and Mac users. After installing and launching the software, simply login…

And you will come to the main dashboard (‘My Videos’) section, where you can create a new video or edit an existing video…

Toonly has an intuitive interface. You don’t have to be a video designer to start creating videos, as the software provides a growing library of built-in scenes, backgrounds, animated characters, text, objects (including the ability to upload your own images), royalty-free music backgrounds, and more. You can also add voiceovers directly into your videos…

Toonly video creation screen — Build your explainer videos using Toonly’s simple video creation interface and drag-and-drop tools.

To create your video storyline, just drag and drop text or images (called objects) into a ‘scene’, adjust timelines, specify settings for your objects, preview and save, then create the next scene…

Toonly editing screen — You can build an animated explainer video with multiple scenes.

Toonly provides many different scenes, scene transitions, characters, props, objects, etc. to build your video storylines. All characters are custom drawn by the software’s own graphic design team, and you can import your own images into the program to add to your videos.

Animated characters come with dropdown menus allowing you to select the activity you want them to engage in during your scene. You can even make characters engage in multiple actions within a scene (for example, they can walk into a room, shake hands with another person, talk on a cellphone, then sit down and start working on their laptop, while other characters and objects are also performing their own actions…

Toonly Animation Settings menu - Character animation actions. — Animate your video characters with different actions.

Toonly also provides keyboard shortcuts to help make creating and editing videos faster…

Toonly is well supported. As a user, you get access to video tutorials where you can learn how to use all the features of the software, a Facebook group where you can post questions and engage in discussions with other users, FAQ and customer support sections, a feature request page, and more…

Toonly tutorials screen. — Toonly provides access to tutorials and support.

The software is also regularly updated with new features and new elements…

Toonly updates screen. — Toonly is regularly updated.

Toonly is an ideal and inexpensive video creation tool that can be used in any niche, industry, or profession. It suits users such as:

Small Business Owners & Service Providers
E-Commerce Store Owners & Digital Marketers
Information Technology Companies
Human Resources Departments
Trainers & Presenters
B2b Sales
Non-Profits
Etc.

Here is a cartoon explainer video we created from scratch using Toonly in just a few hours…

WPMasterclasses.com Promo Video

If you are looking for a powerful and inexpensive video creation tool that lets you create professional-quality engaging animated cartoon explainer videos quickly and easily without requiring any video design skills, then consider using Toonly.

Visit the site for more information about the software, pricing, FAQs, etc.: Toonly – Cartoon Explainer Video Creation Software

Create Cartoon Explainer Videos Easily With Toonly

Explaindio

Explaindio is an all-in-one video editor that lets you easily create HD videos with animation, hand-drawn whiteboard (doodle-sketch) videos, combine text overlays, animated slides, images with videos, and more.

Explaindio includes features like:

Simultaneous multiple animations
Full multi-timeline editing
Full 3D animations
Import external 3D elements
3D models and animation customization
180+ pre-made text animation elements
140+ pre-made videos, images, and doodle objects animations
Keyframe animation
And more.

The demo video below shows what you can do with Explaindio …

Visit the Explaindio website

If you are looking for a powerful video creation software tool that can help you create 2D & 3D animated marketing, explainer, and training videos, doodle sketch videos, and motion videos, then Explaindio is a tool that can do this for you in minutes.

More info: Explaindio Video Creator

Viddyoze

Viddyoze lets you easily create stunning live-action video intros and logo stings with no video editing or production skills, and eye-catching professionally branded video intros and logo stings that command attention.

The video demo below shows the software in action.

Viddyoze video animation showreel

Viddyoze Live Action’s video animation engine uses groundbreaking point-and-click automated technology that combines high-quality live video action effects, professional actors and models, and custom 3D digital animation to create beautifully branded eye-catching videos.

Viddyoze screen grabs — Add your own images and logos to create stunning live-action effects.

No video production experience is needed to use this tool. Just choose your live-action template, upload your logo and customize text and colors, and click a button to create an HD-quality video. Your video will be fully rendered and ready to use in minutes.

Point-and-click video creation process. — Create amazing live video intros using point-and-click.

The video below provides a tour of Viddyoze’s video creation process.

Viddyoze video creation demo

Viddyoze Features

Watermarks: Add watermarks to videos that only you can remove.
Audio: Every Viddyoze Live Action template includes a custom-created audio track to match the video footage.
Cloud Service: Viddyoze Live Action is entirely cloud-based, so there is no software to download and no video animation equipment to purchase. You can create your videos anywhere using your smartphone.
Designer Template Library: Viddyoze includes dozens of professional video templates suitable for a wide variety of niches and office-based businesses, like restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, beauty salons, tech firms, creative and professional services, etc.
Full Training: The member’s area includes full training, including user-friendly set-up videos showing you how to get the most from the system.
Easy Customization: Choose the color palette to match your logo and add text to your videos. The software will do the rest.
100% compatibility: Viddyoze Live Action renders all videos in MP4 format, allowing you to use these with other video editors and web platforms.
Support: Viddyoze provides access to a dedicated support team 24/7 and is supported by a full-time team of designers, videographers, and developers.
Unlimited usage rights: Use the animations as many times in as many videos as you like.
Licensing options: Viddyoze offers personal and commercial licensing. Choose the commercial license if you want to create videos for other businesses.

If you’re looking for a way to create video intros that will help your business stand out from the crowd, grow more sales and get more clients, then definitely check out Viddyoze’s live-action video intro-maker.

More info: Viddyoze

Doodly

Doodly is a simple and user-friendly drag-and-drop doodle video creator that lets you create both whiteboard and blackboard videos with ease.

Check out the Doodly video demo below:

Visit the Doodly website

You can use hundreds of built-in characters, props, images, fonts, and sounds, or upload your own images, fonts, and sounds, then export and share your videos in multiple formats and quality levels.

More info: Doodly

Klippyo

Klippyo is a time-saving cloud-based video creation tool that lets you create highly engaging videos optimized for social media marketing.

With Klippyo, you can edit videos directly from your phone and create amazing video content without relying on video templates.

Klippyo was developed by the same team that created the Viddyoze live-action video animation tool, which lets you create animations such as logo stingers, video intros, and outros with the click of a mouse, in consultation with Derral Eves, a successful video producer and YouTuber with over half a million subscribers and clients including Red Bull, Google, Amazon, and Adobe and whose advice has helped thousands of fans build successful YouTube channels that attract millions of views.

Viddyoze is an ideal complement to Klippyo. Both integrate seamlessly, so you can add visually stunning video animations directly into your Klippyo projects.

Check out Klippyo’s video promo below to see just some of its amazing features …

Visit the Klippyo website

This software includes all the features you need to create videos that will deliver you more engagement, better conversions, and more channel subscribers, as well as commercial rights to all the videos you create using Klippyo’s Studio version.

Klippyo lets you create engaging videos optimized for social media. — Create engaging videos optimized for social media with Klippyo.

With Klippyo, you can easily shoot, edit, and post engaging, exciting, and dynamic videos directly from your phone in formats that are correctly optimized for social media, such as:

Square videos
Social video memes
Emojis and Stickers
Intros and Outros
Captions
Quotes
Filters
And more!

Klippyo offers a professional video editing suite with direct social media integration and a huge library of video objects and elements like stock video clips that lets you create classic videos, square videos, vertical videos, captioned videos, meme videos, compilation videos, banner ad videos, and videos with multiple aspect ratios from a single app, without the need to record a single frame of footage.

Social media and video marketing research show that videos that use features like the ones built into Klippyo can increase viewer engagement by 100% or more, reduce video ad costs by 35%, and get viewers watching your video all the way to the end.

Klippyo lets you create every type of video you want!

Klippyo is 100% web-based, so you can log in from anywhere, work from your mobile device, tablet, Mac or Windows laptop, or PC, shoot your video with your camera, upload your footage or import a pre-existing video into the Klippyo editor, then easily add professional intros, outros, filters, emojis, and interactive captions to your videos, as well as audio tracks and visual elements from its vast built-in library (300,000 stock video clips), and publish your finished video to multiple social media accounts like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. right from inside the app.

Klippyo offers a 30-day risk-free, full money-back guarantee, and 24/7 customer support.

More info: Klippyo

Moovly

Moovly is a that lets you create your own videos ads, product videos, marketing videos, explainer videos, and company videos in-house without a big budget or design skills.

Moovly provides many customizable video templates where you can adjust anything you want to match your company brand style, including text, colors, images, footage, and music… even create your own templates!

Moovly Templates — Customize templates to create all kinds of videos for your business.

You can also easily automate the production of videos using Moovly’s automated video technology to offer your team or customers customizable video templates, create personalized videos and product videos generated automatically from your CRM, email client, or marketing automation tool, and connect to RSS feeds and news streams like Twitter to create videos when new tweets are sent.

More info: Moovly

Vyond

Vyond is a video creation software tool that lets you create engaging videos with characters to fit any context, customizable templates, and whiteboard animations.

You can also create MP4s or animated GIFs for social media, host your videos wherever you like, or import them into other platforms.

Here is an example of a video created using Vyond:

More info: Vyond

Animoto

Animoto is a free drag-and-drop video maker that lets you easily create promo videos, slideshow videos, social media videos, tutorial videos…even birthday, graduation, and wedding videos with no design skills required.

Animoto provides a huge library of time-saving templates, stock images and videos, music, fonts, video editing and voice-over tools, and more.

The free plan lets you use all of the tool’s standard features to create unlimited videos, while paid plans allow you to create videos without Animoto’s branding, access millions of stock images and videos, and more!

More info: Animoto

Lumen5

Lumen5 is a video content creation tool that combines powerful artificial intelligence (A.I.) with a simple drag-and-drop interface to help you create professional video content in minutes. It offers customizable templates to help you communicate effectively and consistently, while also staying on brand, on budget, and on time.

One of the standout features of Lumen5 is its ability to turn written content, such as blog posts or whitepapers, into videos using A.I. and machine learning. Simply enter a link to your blog post, and Lumen5 will automatically fetch content from the link and begin transforming it into a video. The A.I. will summarize the content and match each scene with relevant stock footage, while also algorithmically determining the timing of each scene based on average reading speed.

Once the video has been generated, you can access a variety of tools to make your own edits and enhance the video with your finishing touch. You can switch up colors, add watermarks, or reformat into different aspect ratios in seconds. Lumen5 also offers features for adding talking head content, callouts, cutaways, and captions to enhance the video further.

The transcript-based editing feature of Lumen5 makes it easy for anyone to create amazing content in minutes. Simply select words in the transcript and match visuals directly to the timing of the audio.

With Lumen5, you can create professional video content without the need for expensive equipment, technical knowledge, or time-consuming editing.

More info: Lumen5

Motion Objects

One of the challenges of promoting your business using video marketing is that your videos have to engage viewers and stand out from the crowd of ‘me too’ video graphics and templates.

Adding engaging animated objects to videos can help boost your conversions.

Motion Objects saves you time and money hiring a high-end professional video production team or graphic designers to create custom video graphics.

The copy and paste animated objects are designed to work with all video creation tools, including:

Motion Objects works with all video creation tools.

The videos below show you how easy it is to add animated objects from Motion Objects to your sales videos.

Here is a quick demo video showing you how to add animated objects in EasySketchPro…

Adding animated objects to EasySketchPro

Here is a quick demo video showing you how to add animated objects in Explaindio…

Adding animated objects to Explaindio

The entire collection includes over 100 animated objects grouped into the following modules:

Module 1: Online Business – Animated Objects
Module 2: Online Business – Static Objects
Module 3: Offline Business – Animated Objects
Module 4: Offline Business – Static Objects
Module 5: Health & Fitness – Animated Objects
Module 6: Health & Fitness – Static Objects
Module 7: Relationships – Animated Objects
Module 8: Relationships – Static Objects
Module 9: Home & Kitchen – Animated Objects
Module 10: Home & Kitchen – Static Objects
Module 11: General – Animated Objects
Module 12: General – Static Objects

(Motion Objects animated video objects sample)

All objects work on Mac and Windows environments and come in 4 different formats: 3 animated (MOV, SWF, GIF), plus 1 static PNG. These graphics can be used anywhere, even uploaded straight to WordPress and inserted directly into your pages and posts. Video training is also provided on how to edit the templates.

The graphics collection comes with personal rights, allowing you to use these images in all of your own video projects. A developer’s license is also available if you plan to use the images in client videos.

More info: Motion Objects

WordPress Video Tools

If your site runs on WordPress, see this section for video-related plugins: WordPress Media Plugins.

Additionally, see the resources below for a step-by-step tutorial on how to add videos to WordPress and more WordPress video plugins:

Video Courses For Beginners – Media

The video courses below are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Video Marketing

Learn useful strategies and practical methods that will help you improve your sales and conversions using video marketing.

More info: Video Marketing

YouTube Marketing

Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.

More info: YouTube Marketing

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

***

See the sections below for additional video-related tools and resources:

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Video Software

Image Creation And Editing Tools

Create and edit images, logos, infographics, charts, graphs, flowcharts, and covers for your eBooks, guides, and reports with these image tools.

Image Tools

Create and edit images, logos, infographics, charts, graphs, flowcharts, and covers for your eBooks, guides, and reports with these image tools and resources.

This section covers media creation tools referred to in various lessons throughout this course.

Use the tools and resources on this page to create and edit media like:

Images, illustrations, photographs, and screenshots
Logos
Covers (eBooks, Reports, etc.)
Infographics
Flowcharts, charts & graphs

***

Image Creation Tools

Use the image tools below to help you create professional images and screenshots.

Screen Capture Software

Screen capture software is useful for creating tutorials, training documentation, explaining product features, etc.

There are various images tools available that you can use to capture screenshots and add them to your content.

Snagit

Snagit is a powerful and feature-rich screen capture and recording software tool that lets you quickly and easily capture images of your screen and camera, create screencast videos, add additional context, and share your images, GIFs, and videos across different platforms.

You can capture your entire desktop, a region, a window, a scrolling screen, or a full-page, scrolling panoramic screenshot, mark up your screenshots with text, arrows, and callouts, trim your video screencasts, use pre-made layouts and templates to create visual instructions, tutorials, guides, and training materials…even capture text from images.

With Snagit’s screen recorder tool, you can:

Record yourself working through different steps or grab individual frames from your recorded videos, then save your video files as an mp4 or animated GIF.
Include audio in your videos from a microphone or your computer’s system audio.
Record your screen or camera (or record them both at the same time with picture-in-picture).
Turn short MP4 recordings into animated GIFs.
Trim video clips and remove unwanted sections from your screen recordings (e.g. cut sections from the beginning, middle, or end of your videos).
Create videos from images, talk, and draw over a series of screenshots to create quick “how-to” videos or GIFs.
Automatically make objects in your screen captures movable. Rearrange buttons, delete text, or edit other elements in your screenshots (e.g. delete or move a captured cursor icon).
Sync your image captures to cloud services.

You can also share or save your images and videos to Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook,
Google Drive, TechSmith’s Camtasia, Gmail, Dropbox, Slack, YouTube, Twitter, and many other applications.

Snagit is a paid tool, but it offers a fully functional 15-day free trial version,

More info: Snagit

Screenrec

Screenrec is a free alternative to SnagIt. It’s a full-featured cloud-based screen capture, screen recorder, webcam, and voice-recording tool that lets you capture screenshots and record your desktop in one click and share these instantly with no watermarking or time limits.

More info: Screenrec

Image Editing

Use the tools below to edit your images.

Photoshop

Photoshop is the world’s leading image editing software tool.

Photoshop lets you do virtually anything with images…from simple image editing and photo touchups to highly sophisticated advanced image editing tasks like removing backgrounds from photos, composite image creation, adding overlays, text effects…even creating website mockups!

More info: Photoshop

GIMP

If you don’t want to invest in a program like Photoshop but would still like to be able to create your own images, then you may want to look at a free software program alternative like GIMP.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free graphic editing software that requires no Photoshop skills and can be used to create and edit images, Facebook covers, video graphics, flyers, infographics, business cards, YouTube channel art, banners, headers, and more.

More info: GIMP

Colorcinch

Colorcinch (formerly Cartoonize) is an easy-to-use, fully-featured, web-based image editing program and photo editing software that lets you edit photos and create realistic paintings, artwork, memes, cartoons, sketches, etc.

You can use the tool to import and edit existing images and enhance it with all kinds of cool effects…

Cartoonizer demo — Enhance and add effects to images quickly and easily.

Creates memes for social media, and more!

Meme: Give your plants all the love you have in your heart...and if that's not enough, try watering them! — My gardening philosophy…immortalized in a meme with Colorcinch!

Colorcinch provides loads of great features and essential built-in tools for quick and easy image editing including cropping, resizing, exposure and color adjustments, vignette, sharpen and clarity enhancements, a full-fledged text editor, masking, layering, blending, and more!

Colorcinch tools — Colorcinch is packed with useful image editing tools and features!

You can also create and organize project elements with layers, export images for high-quality print (up to 400 DPI), and access the software from your internet browser or install it as a standalone app.

The free version (called Basic) requires no registration and provides access to a number of essential effects and features.

The paid version (called Plus) provides access to all premium effects and features, all graphics and icons, higher resolution export options, and much more.

More info: Colorcinch

Logo Makers

Logo makers are ideal for testing out content ideas (e.g. creating example companies to show how your products or services work), presentations, etc.

See our section on logo makers if you are looking for tools that can help you generate professional logo designs quickly, easily, and inexpensively.

eBook Cover Creators

You can create eBooks as PDF documents and use realistic 3D images to create attractive-looking covers to promote your publications.

You don’t need to hire an expensive designer to create your eBook cover. You can use Photoshop with action scripts like the one below to create stunning eBook covers quickly and easily.

CoverActionPRO

CoverActionPRO is a Photoshop plug-in that lets you create high-quality, realistic ebook covers and product shots.

Essentially, you create a flat book cover image and then use an ebook or product shot template in Photoshop to create your eBook cover.

For example, you can use your cover image with “hardcover” eBook templates…

eBook Covers — CoverActionPRO hardcover eBook templates.

“Softcover” (i.e. paperback) eBook templates…

Create binders and notebooks (great for “special reports”)…

Even product shots, software boxes, CDs, and more …

The video below provides a demo and preview of this tool:

CoverActionPro demo and preview. Note: CoverActionPro requires Photoshop

For more information about this ebook cover creator software, go here: CoverActionPRO

For more eBook cover creation tools and tutorials, go here:

Infographic Creation Tools

Use the tools below to create infographics.

Venngage

Venngage is a very popular tool used to create infographics. It offers a handy image search feature that makes finding and adding images to your infographics really easy, and thousands of infographic templates created by a team of professional graphic designers.

While this software is primarily aimed at helping users create infographics, it can also be used to create diagrams, reports, and more.

Venngage offers a free plan and paid subscriptions, which include features like font uploading, the ability to export in Powerpoint, and interactive PDF options.

More info: Venngage

Adobe Express

Adobe Express lets you create infographics for free very quickly and customize them with images, icons, fonts, and graphics.

With Adobe Express, you can design a unique infographic by choosing a template, customizing it with your branding, logo, text, colors, and more, then resizing it to share via email, social platforms, and print media.

Use the tools and templates from Adobe Express to make step-by-step guides, statistical graphics and charts, timelines, recipes, polls, lists, comparisons, and more.

Adobe Express Templates — Adobe Express – Infographic templates.

You can also use the libraries of icons and design assets to find shapes, lines, and graphics to display data, upload chart images, crop them or remove the background to add them to your infographics and turn any new or existing project into shareable templates.

The free infographic maker is easy to use and offers many features including thousands of templates, photo editing and effects, animation, and 2GB of storage.

More info: Adobe Express

For more infographic creation tools, visit these sites:

Biteable

More info: Biteable

Canva

More info: Canva

DesignCap

More info: DesignCap

Infogram

More info: Infogram

Mural

More info: Mural

Piktochart

More info: Piktochart

Snappa

More info: Snappa

Visme

More info: Visme

For additional infographic tools, resources and tutorials, go here: Content Marketing With Infographics

Flowchart, Chart & Graph Tools

The tools below will help you create flowcharts, charts, and graphs for your content.

Google Drawings

Google Drawings is a diagramming software and collaborative virtual board tool inside Google Drive that allows you to create content by drawing, pasting images, linking videos and websites, and inserting text, shapes, tables, and other content.

Google Drawings is included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google.

To access the tool, go to Google Drive, click New > More and select Google Drawings…

Google Drawings - Create New File — Create new Google Drawings files in Google Drive.

You can use this free tool to create flow charts, diagrams, infographics, concept maps, mind maps, collaborative visual storyboards, original art and custom graphics for presentations, design wireframes, annotate screenshots, and even create hotspots on images that you can embed into your content, or download and share as a PDF file.

Here’s a great video tutorial on how to use Google Drawings:

Google Drawings is a powerful but underutilized tool worth exploring, especially as it’s free!

More info: Google Drawings

Google Charts

Google Charts is another excellent free tool from Google that lets you create interactive graphical charts from information that you supply.

Use Google Charts to create all kinds of charts, from simple line charts and pie charts to complex hierarchical tree maps, plus graphs, infographics, and more. Add the charts to your content and display these on your website, embed them into presentations, lead generation reports, etc.

Google Charts also provides a chart gallery with many ready-to-use interactive charts and chart types.

Here’s a great short video showing you how to add animated Google Charts to a spreadsheet.

The most common way to use Google Charts is by embedding simple JavaScript into your web pages.

For help embedding scripts into web pages, see the Google Chart Quick Start.
If you use WordPress, check out this tutorial: How To Add Code And Scripts To Pages In WordPress

More info: Google Charts

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft PowerPoint also lets you create and add simple charts and graphs to your content.

Microsoft PowerPoint - Insert Charts — Create charts and graphs using Microsoft PowerPoint.

For tutorials on creating charts in PowerPoint, go here or watch the short video below:

Microsoft Office also provides many different chart types and templates you can use to create charts and graphs in PowerPoint.

Note: You can make a chart in PowerPoint or Excel. Microsoft recommends creating your chart in Excel and then copying it into your presentation if you have lots of data to chart or if your data changes regularly and you want your chart to always reflect the latest numbers (if so, when you copy and paste the chart, keep it linked to the original Excel file).

More info: Using Charts And Graphs In Microsoft PowerPoint

yED Graph Editor

yED Graph Editor is a freeware tool that lets you create flowcharts and generate high-quality diagrams quickly and easily.

You can download yEd as a desktop application that runs on all major platforms or use yEd Live, the browser version of the desktop application, which requires no installer.

yEd features automatic layout algorithms that let you organize complex flowcharts with a press of a button.

yEd Live is the browser version of the powerful yEd desktop application. No more installer is needed to quickly and effectively create high-quality diagrams.

This feature is shown in the video below:

Here is a 5-minute tutorial on creating a flowchart using yED:

More info: yED Graph Editor

Here are some additional flowcharting tools you may want to look at:

Cacoo

More info: Cacoo

ConceptDraw Diagram

More info: ConceptDraw Diagram

Edraw Max

More info: Edraw Max

Gliffy

More info: Gliffy

Lucidchart

Lucidchart – Create flowcharts with collaboration and data import features

More info: Lucidchart

Microsoft Visio

More info: Microsoft Visio

Microsoft Powerpoint

More info: Microsoft Powerpoint

Miro

More info: Miro

Video Courses For Beginners – Media

The video courses below cover basic areas of media production and editing and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Using Graphic Creation Tools

More info: Using Graphic Creation Tools

How To Create Engaging Presentations

Learn how to create beautiful and engaging presentations that will help you sell more products and services online.

More info: How To Create Engaging Presentations

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

***

See the sections below for additional image-related tools and resources:

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Photoshop

Link Tracking Management Tool

Trackerly is a powerful link redirection and tracking tool that lets you manage thousands of links on multiple domains from a single location.

Link Tracking Management Tool

Trackerly is a powerful link redirection and tracking tool that lets you manage thousands of links on multiple domains from a single location.

Consider the following scenarios:

Let’s say that you run an accounting firm and refer your website visitors to a page on the Tax Office website containing useful information about business deductions.

Let’s say that, after a couple of years, you have added dozens or even hundreds of links pointing to this page, and one day the Tax Office decides to move the information to another section of its website or even to a different website altogether.

You would now have many links on your website pointing to an error page or the wrong page.

Here’s another example…

Suppose you own a dog training site and decide to generate extra revenue by promoting dog training products from other companies as an affiliate.

Note: If you don’t know what ‘affiliate marketing’ is, it’s where you promote someone else’s products or services using a special link that tracks your referrals. If someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will earn a commission from the sale.

We have written a number of tutorials about affiliate marketing and WordPress here: Monetize WordPress With Affiliate Marketing

Back to our example, let’s say that one of the products you decide to promote as an affiliate is a dog training whistle from the XYZ Dog Company…

Dog Training Whistle from XYZ Dog Company — Let’s promote this dog training whistle from the XYZ Dog Company!

Let’s say that the product page URL (with your affiliate ID) looks like this:

http://xyzdog.com/shop/dog-training-products/alpha-2000-dog-training-whistle?affid_270265

So … you begin writing articles about the effectiveness of training dogs using dog training whistles and link the words “dog training whistle” in your articles to the XYZ Dog Company‘s website using the above URL …

Post with an embedded affiliate link. — A post with our embedded affiliate link.

Let’s jump forward in time a few months to where you now have published hundreds of links pointing to the product’s page on blog posts, articles, product reviews, recommended resources, banners, social media posts and ads, dog training forums, etc. and are receiving regular affiliate commission checks from sales based on your referrals…

A post with an embedded affiliate link. — This link is working and making us money…

One day, you realize that your affiliate sales commission payments for this product have stopped, so you click through to the product page and discover that:

The product has been moved to a different page, or
The product has been discontinued, or,
The company has gone out of business and the website no longer exists…

An example of a broken affiliate link. — This link is no longer making us money…now we’re losing sales!

Now you have hundreds of links all over the web pointing to an error page or a website that no longer exists. Worse still, you realize that the same thing can happen with other products that you are recommending and you have no idea where most of these links are even located.

Finding and replacing these broken links can be a time-consuming nightmare!

These nightmare scenarios can be easily avoided using a link redirection tool or a plugin, where all you do is change the destination URL in the tool’s dashboard and all instances of the link are then automatically updated everywhere, allowing you to replace links to an old or obsolete product with a new one, or point visitors to another page or website quickly and easily.

Here is a powerful tool that will do all of this and more…

Trackerly – Link Redirection Management And Tracking Tool

If you are implementing an effective content marketing strategy to grow traffic or increase search rankings, you can end up publishing a lot of content and having loads of links to manage.

Depending on your marketing strategy and the type of links you are using, managing external links in your content can become cumbersome, especially when the links point to third-party websites, web pages, or resources, or are being used in external ads, forums, directories, and other places you don’t control.

As we’ve just seen, if the page, product, or website URL that your link is sending visitors to is moved, renamed, removed, or deleted, you would have to find and change every instance of that link on your site, which can be a tedious, frustrating, and time-consuming process, or leave all these links broken and pointing to error pages or the wrong information, which can affect your reputation.

If you do affiliate marketing, you also will often be asked to promote products using ‘ugly-looking’ affiliate links that look like this:

https://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=DUBVe/vdMLg&offerid=311675.10000156&type=3&subid=0&LSNSUBSITE=LSNSUBSITE

You can use a link redirection tool to fix broken links, but what if you want to do more with your links, like:

Update hundreds of links on your website by simply changing one link
Redirect links using your own domain name
Track results and analyze conversions for multiple banner ads or affiliate marketing campaigns
Split-test different destination URLs
Shorten long and ‘ugly-looking’ affiliate links
Use QR Codes
And a whole lot more?

This is where a link management and redirection tool like Trackerly can make life easier for you and put you in complete control of your marketing campaigns.

Trackerly

Trackerly is a professional, robust, and well-supported link redirection management and tracking tool. It is provided as a subscription-based SAAS (Software As A Service) with a WordPress plugin component and it goes well beyond what most other redirection software tools can do.

With Trackerly, you can manage and analyze all of your links from one central cloud-based control panel.

Manage all of your links from one central location.

Trackerly Benefits & Features

Trackerly provides many powerful benefits & features, including:

Total Link Management: Add, edit, delete, test, manage, and organize unlimited redirect links, affiliate links, domains and link destinations, create custom groups, create “on-the-fly” links, etc.
Search & Filter: You can search, filter, and view link data by:
- Selected time periods – previous week, previous month, custom dates,
- Filter by clicks – most/least clicked, fastest rising/falling, newest/oldest created, name, last used, etc.
- Text filters – redirect name, destination name, pixel name, redirect URL, destination URL, pixel URL, traffic source URL, searched keywords, redirect group, destination group, IP, etc.
- Marketing filters – redirect groups, marketing types, redirect domains, destination groups, destination niches, etc.
- Feature filters – redirect type, pixel type, link juice, injections, scarcity offers, etc.
Increase Revenue: Create ‘cloaked’ affiliate links and pages displayed using your own domain, split-test different affiliate links and rotating destinations, add scarcity to redirect links, and more.
Generate Reports: View lists and reports of link clicks, number of repeat visitors, countries, search phrases, search robots, marketing types, redirect groups, destination groups, traffic sources, unique IPS, etc. Reports can also be saved and loaded.
Training & Support: Trackerly provides video access to tutorials, training, and highly responsive technical support.

Search & Filter Links

As time goes on, you can easily find yourself having to manage hundreds, even thousands of links.

Trackerly provides great link searching and filtering tools.

For example, you can search links and destinations for partial or exact matches.

Trackerly provides link search and filtering features

Or use any of its more advanced marketing and feature filters, even save and load reports.

Trackerly's advanced link search and filtering tools — Trackerly’s advanced link search and filtering tools.

Trackerly Wizard

Trackerly also provides a ‘Wizard’ that lets you manage everything in your account just by clicking a few buttons.

You can access the Wizard from the main dashboard menu.

Or load individual links into the wizard.

Using Trackerly

Let’s go through some useful functions and applications of Trackerly.

How To Create A New Redirect Link

To create a new redirect link, click on ‘New’ and select ‘Redirect’…

If you are creating a ‘branded keyword link’ (redirect links with custom keywords that use the same domain name as your website), do the following:

Give the link a title
Select the domain (if using multiple domains)
Add a unique keyword to create the link (i.e. ‘yourdomain.com/keyword’)
Add tags to help organize your link into a custom group (optional), and
Click ‘Next’ to continue.

Enter redirect link details — Enter your redirect link details.

Step 2 is completely optional. You can select a Marketing Type for tracking your link, enter additional details and private notes about your link, or just click ‘Next’ to continue.

Add link tracking details — Add your link tracking details (optional).

Next, create a new link destination, or select an existing destination (or more than one to split-test links) for your redirect link, and click ‘Save’.

Specify the destination URL of your new redirect link.

Your new redirect link will be created. Copy the link to your clipboard to begin using it in your content, emails, newsletters, advertising banner codes, etc.

Your new redirect link is ready to use — Your new redirect link is now ready to use!

How To Edit Destination URLs

Let’s say that one of your redirection links points to a destination URL that has been changed, moved, or deleted, a page that has changed from HTTP to HTTPS, or an affiliate product that is no longer available.

This redirect link needs to point to a different URL.

If you’re using a link management tool like Trackerly, editing the destination URL of your link is very easy to do.

For the example below, we’ll edit a link that has changed from HTTP to HTTPS after adding SSL to the website.

Find the link you want to edit using the search or filtering features, load the link into the wizard and click on ‘Manage Destination’.

Next, click on the ‘Edit’ button to change the destination URL.

Manage Destination - Edit Button — Click on the Edit Button.

Make the change to the URL (i.e. fix it or replace it).

If the link has previously been clicked on, it will contain tracking data. You cannot edit the destination URL if the link contains data.

Destination URL cannot be edited if link contains data — The destination URL cannot be edited if the link contains data.

To edit the destination URL, you will first need to delete the link data.

To delete link data, click the ‘Back’ button to return to the previous screen and click on ‘Delete Data’ (Note: DO NOT DELETE the link itself).

Delete data, not the link — Delete the data, not the link.

You will be asked to confirm if you really want to delete the data. Click on ‘Confirm’ to proceed.

Confirm data deletion — Confirm the data deletion.

Once the link data has been deleted, click again on the ‘Edit’ button to access the details of your destination URL.

Click button to edit destination URL — Click the button to edit the destination URL.

Make changes to your destination link and click ‘Save’ to update your link settings.

Once your changes have been made, click the ‘Close Wizard’ button to exit the wizard and return to your main dashboard.

Here are some additional things you can do with Trackerly.

Split-Test Link URLs

After creating or editing a redirect link, you can split-test different URLs simply by selecting two or more destinations.

Split-test link destinations — You can split-test multiple link destinations.

This is great for testing conversions between different affiliate products, different landing pages, sending visitors to rotating destination links, etc.

Create QR Codes

Another great feature of Trackerly is the ability to easily generate QR Codes.

To generate a QR Code, create a new redirect and select ‘QR Code’ from the redirect link type drop-down menu.

Redirect type - QR Code — Select Redirect type – QR Code

Enter your redirect link details and click ‘Next’.

Enter or edit your destination URL details and click ‘Save’.

Your QR Code image will be created. Right-click on the image to save it to your hard drive.

QR code link redirect created — Your QR code link redirect is now created.

You can also copy the link to your clipboard from the individual link menu shortcuts.

Copy link to clipboard — Copy the link to your clipboard.

Use the link wherever you want your QR code to appear – in your web content, videos, banners, in printed format (e.g. packaging, marketing materials, etc.).

Just like other links, you can change the destination URL of the QR Code from your control panel.

To learn more about using QR Codes in your marketing, see this tutorial: Using QR Codes With WordPress

Trackerly Support

Trackerly provides built-in wizards and human technical support for the software.

For example, Trackerly alerts you if there are any issues with one or more of your domains.

Trackerly alerts you of issues with your domains — Trackerly alerts you if there are any issues with your domains.

Click on ‘Domains,’ then select the domain with the issues (highlighted in red), and click on ‘Repair Domain’.

Since Trackerly doesn’t store your domain details, you will be asked to enter your domain access details (FTP URL, username, and password) before the repair wizard can begin.

Once your domain details have been entered. the software installer will go through a checklist and repair the issue.

Trackerly Installer — Trackerly’s Installer has done its magic!

If the Trackerly wizard cannot repair your domain, it will notify you what the issue is and what to do next. You can then contact support and the matter will be looked into further by one of their technical experts.

Trackerly – Summary

As you can see, with Trackerly, you have complete control over individual link redirection functions. you can edit information about your links, copy links to your clipboard, duplicate redirects, manage destinations, point links to different destinations, change link settings (e.g. add split-testing or scarcity), preserve link destination SEO, etc.

Trackerly gives you complete management and control over your links!

We have used Trackerly since it was first released and continue to use it on a daily basis to manage thousands of redirect links across our many different domains.

There is probably no other link redirection and tracking tool on the market that includes so many powerful link management features and functionality, or that is as feature-rich and comprehensive as this software.

For more information, go here: Trackerly

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Search Optimization Tools

Optimize your content for SEO and improve your content marketing results with these search optimization tools and resources.

Search Engine Optimization Tools And Resources

Optimize your content for SEO and improve your content marketing results with these search optimization tools and resources.

Search optimization tools and services can help you research your competitors, discover new content opportunities, find traffic-driving keywords, create content optimized for search engines, build quality backlinks, and improve your content marketing results.

This section lists useful search optimization tools and services that will save you time doing SEO research for content planning and content promotion and running content audits.

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Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that lets you understand how well your content is performing across all devices and platforms.

Use Google Analytics to help you:

Formulate your content audit and your content marketing strategy. Use the tool’s information to gain insights about visitor behavior on your site: who is visiting your website, how they have found you, where they are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay engaged with your content, etc.
Find your best-performing content in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.
Estimate how effective your content has been in achieving your marketing and business goals.

For example, to view a general breakdown of traffic by organic, direct, referral, and social channels, go to Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels…

Search Optimization Tools: Google Analytics Reports - Acquisition Channels — Use Google Analytics Reports to view a breakdown of all your traffic channels.

To identify the social traffic networks where users are engaging with your content, go to Reports > Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals…

Google Analyics - Social Traffic — Learning how to use Google Analytics can provide you with valuable insights to help you create better content targeted to audiences on different channels.

Other useful insights you can gain from Google Analytics could be:

Patterns derived from your visitors’ behavior, such as finding out which are your most popular blog articles in a specific country read by visitors belonging to a certain demographic profile
Comparing referred visits across different content items to help you decide what should be your next content project.
Which content is sending you the most traffic from offsite campaigns using custom URLs with UTM parameters.

As you can see, Google Analytics is a powerful, comprehensive, and useful tool. We recommend taking some courses to get a better understanding of how to get valuable insights using this tool.

More info: Google Analytics

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another powerful tool from Google that can help you understand how your website is performing on Google Search, and what you can do to improve your search results to bring more relevant traffic to your website.

Google’s Search Console provides information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. This can help you monitor and optimize your site’s search performance.

Google Search Console Dashboard — Use Google’s Search Console information to help you monitor and optimize your site’s search performance.

Using the URL Inspection tool within Search Console allows you to submit recently updated web pages to Google’s index and view the status of your site’s pages.

Google Search Console - URL Inspection tool — Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to get new pages of your website indexed.

And submitting sitemaps and RSS feeds helps Google crawl your site and index your content.

Google Search Console - Sitemaps — Adding sitemaps to Google helps Google discover your site’s pages and index your content.

We cover using sitemaps in this section of the course. Also, if your site uses WordPress, check out the WordPress SEO plugins section for plugins that can automate Google indexing of your content using sitemaps.

To learn how to use Google’s Search Console to better understand how your website is performing on Google Search and ways to improve your search performance to drive more relevant traffic to your business, go here: Search Console User Guide & Training

More info: Google Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools provides site performance data and free SEO tools that help you explore your site, analyze backlinks, manage keywords, and gain insights to improve your page rankings on Bing search results.

Bing Webmaster Tools - Search Performance — Track your site’s search performance on Bing.

For more information on how to use this tool, check out Bing Webmaster Tools Help Center.

More info: Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular SEO service that includes tools to help you get higher search engine rankings.

These tools include link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and site audits.

Ahrefs dashboard — Ahrefs provides valuable tools for SEO research and insights on ways to improve our content for better results.

Ahrefs offers a free keyword research tool.

Ahrefs - Free Keyword Generator — Ahrefs offers a free keyword generator tool.

Simply choose a source and location for your keyword research and ask the tool to find keywords.

The tool will then generate a list of related keywords and keyword ideas.

Ahrefs - Free Keyword Generator: Keyword ideas results: phrase match — Ahrefs’s keyword tool generates phrase-match keyword ideas…

It also provides a list of questions related to the keyword, which is useful for generating new content topic ideas.

Ahrefs - Free Keyword Generator: Keyword ideas results: Questions — And keyword-related questions too!

Note: To obtain a detailed list of related keywords, along with data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and other relevant metrics, requires the paid version of the tool.

Ahrefs - Keyword Explorer — Ahrefs – Keyword Explorer (paid version).

For an overview of Ahrefs, see Backlinko’s Ahrefs: The Definitive Guide.

To learn more about Ahrefs, visit their help center, academy, or website.

HubSpot

HubSpot develops and markets software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service and provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, customer support, and search engine optimization.

Essentially, HubSpot brings everything you need to create engaging content targeted to your audience and grow your business into one tool.

The video below provides an overview of HubSpot:

More info: HubSpot

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content marketing tool designed to help you develop a more effective content strategy.

BuzzSumo provides access to comprehensive and data-driven content research by analyzing billions of data points to help you:

Find the best-performing content that will help you get more likes, links, and shares
Identify influencers that can help your brand or campaign, and
Track comments and trends on social media so you can respond faster and capitalize on opportunities.

You can use BuzzSumo to do things like:

Research the top-performing content on the web
Find the top-performing videos on YouTube
Analyze your and your competitors’ Facebook pages
Find backlinks for any URL or domain

BuzzSumo Content Analyzer — Use BuzzSumo tools like the Content Analyzer to research the top-performing content on the web.

More info: BuzzSumo

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a website crawler. It crawls your website, collects URLs from your sitemap, categorizes it for you, and generates the information you need to perform an SEO audit, from page URLs and page titles to on-page SEO insights.

Screaming Frog - URL scan results screen — Scan your site’s URLs with Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog can audit up to 500 links for free and provides a ton of SEO-based analysis about how to improve your website’s SEO. You can plug in your Google Analytics to extract page performance data and export everything to a spreadsheet.

More info: Screaming Frog

URLProfiler

URLProfiler lets you audit links, content, and social data.

You can integrate Google Analytics data into your profiles, do a full link audit, and build a complete and comprehensive content inventory for your website.

The video below shows you how to create a content inventory of your site using URLProfiler:

More info: URLProfiler

Dr. Link Check

Dr. Link Check is a tool that lets you easily find broken and malicious links on your site.

Simply enter a URL and the tool’s bots will automatically crawl through the HTML and CSS code of your entire website and examine all the links it can find, including internal page links and outbound links to other websites, as well as links to images, style sheets, and other resource files.

Dr. Link Check - Link scan — Enter a URL and Dr. Link Check automatically checks your site for broken and malicious links.

The tool performs checks like:

Broken link checks – Check links for validity and follow them to make sure the server is reachable and the link target still exists.
Blacklist checks – Check links against blacklists of known phishing and malware sites that may harm visitors.
Soft error checks – Check the content of linked pages for issues such as error or placeholder messages, even if the server responded with “200 OK” and didn’t indicate any problems.
SSL certificate checks – Check if SSL certificates are issued by trusted certificate authorities, have not expired, and are valid for the current hostname.

Once the scan is done, you can view the results on the web page…

Dr. Link Check - Link scan results — Dr. Link Check scan results.

Or export these to CSV or PDF.

Dr. Link Check - Export Link scan results — Export scan results to CSV or PDF.

The tool’s free version will scan a maximum of 1,500 links on your site.

Note: Every unique HTML document, image, style sheet, script, or other resource referenced from your website counts as a link (resources linked from multiple pages still only count as one link).

Paid subscriptions are available that allow you to scan more links, analyze blacklisted links, view soft errors, schedule automatic scans and notify you of results via email, and more.

More info: Dr Link Check

Majestic

Majestic is a tool that analyzes billions of URLs a day and provides accurate data to help you understand your and your competitors’ link profile and develop a Search Engine positioning strategy.

As stated on their website,

“Majestic surveys and maps the Internet and has created the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world.

This Internet map is used by SEOs, New Media Specialists, Affiliate Managers and online Marketing experts for a variety of uses surrounding online prominence including Link Building, Reputation Management, Website Traffic development, Competitor analysis and News Monitoring. “

Majestic maintains two huge indexes from which it extracts its data: a Fresh Index and a Historic database with records going back to 2006, providing a database with the world’s most complete backlink profile.

Majestic indexes — Majestic maintains a huge database of Internet data.

Majestic lets you extract information and perform tasks like:

The best websites in your industry or niche
Track your favorite sites
Find links near you and your competitors
Check out top backlinks for any website
Filter by topic, quality, language, and a range of industry-standard metrics
Compare top-level metrics for websites and URLs
Discover link opportunities by looking at your competitor’s websites
Look for mutual links between any two websites

Majestic tools — Use Majestic’s web-based link investigation tool to gain valuable SEO insights.

More info: Majestic

SemRush

SemRush provides a suite of SEO tools that lets you uncover millions of keywords, analyze any domain’s backlinking profile, run SEO audits, and track your SERP positions daily.

You can enter a domain URL and receive a robust audit with a customized report that shows you where you can make improvements to your site.

Adding your analytics tool account allows SemRush to provide more information (e.g. which posts your audience engages with the most) and help you identify which content performs well for your audience to create a more targeted content strategy.

Visit the website: SemRush

WooRank

WooRank is a useful content auditing tool. With tools like SEO monitoring and Site Crawler, WooRank lets you know how your landing pages are performing, how any disruptions to your website have affected your SEO, and how Google sees your site and interprets the information for search engines.

Visit the site: WooRank

SerpRobot

SerpRobot is an accurate SERP checking tool that lets you check keyword positions in real-time, on any location, and across multiple devices.

More info: SerpRobot

DynoMapper

DynoMapper is a website discovery, planning, and optimization tool that lets you organize your website projects using visual sitemaps, content inventory, content audit, content planning, daily keyword tracking, and website accessibility testing.

Dynomapper's Visual Sitemap Generator — Dynomapper’s Visual Sitemap Generator

With DynoMapper, you can:

Create an inventory of your website’s pages, images, documents, videos, audio, and files, use the content audit tool to optimize your assets and plan content tasks using the content calendar tool.
Add your Google Analytics details to display analytic metrics, and sort and filter pages in your visual sitemap, which can be exported to PDF or CSV.
Automatically import keywords from a domain and receive daily keyword tracking reports by location or device about your rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Use the website accessibility testing tool to scan your entire website for WCAG / Section 508 compliance, and identify known errors in web design and content for ADA Website Compliance.

More info: DynoMapper

UserTesting

UserTesting is a platform that helps you gain insights and feedback about your site’s usability and the quality of your content from real human users.

You can then use this feedback to improve your content’s SEO.

Visit the website: UserTesting.com

Keyword Tools

Identifying keyword opportunities that can help boost your search results and drive more targeted traffic to your website is an important aspect of creating an effective content plan.

Here are some keyword research tools you can use to build a list of keywords and keyword phrases for your content strategy:

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is the keyword search and ad planning tool from Google Ads that helps advertisers find keywords for ad targeting.

Google’s Keyword Planner lets you find keyword ideas, search volumes, Google Ads competition, and cost-per-click (CPC) data for search terms.

To use the Google Keyword Planner tool, you need to create a Google Ads account (see this tutorial if you need help setting up a Google account).

More info: Google Keyword Planner

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool from Google that lets you perform keyword popularity comparisons in a given country or region for up to 5 different keywords and see how interest in those keyword searches has changed over time.

For example, the Google Trends graph below shows you the relative popularity of worldwide searches for “ground coffee” versus “whole bean coffee” over the past twelve months.

Google Trends - Comparison Chart — Use Google trends to compare keyword searches over a period of time.

For additional information about Google Trends, see the Content Research Tools lesson.

More info: Google Trends

Google Autocomplete

Google’s Autocomplete tool (Formerly known as Google Suggest) is a prominent feature of Google search.

When a user enters a search term into Google, its sophisticated algorithm suggests search queries it thinks best matches the entered term’s intention and displays suggested keywords under the search box.

Clicking on any keyword from Google’s autofill list loads the search results page for that user.

KeywordTool

KeywordTool is a free tool that helps you understand what people are searching for online.

It gets keywords from different search engines (e.g. Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, App Store, Play Store, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and others) and shows you keywords, products, and hashtags searched on various search engines in different countries around the world from their autocomplete data.

KeywordTool - Keyword suggestions — Use KeywordTool to build a list of keywords extracted from many different autocomplete search engines and platforms worldwide.

The free version of Keyword Tool can generate up to 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term from Google autocomplete in seconds.

The paid version provides advanced features and additional data like search volume data, cost-per-click data, Google Ads competition data, competitor, keyword analysis, bulk search volume analysis, and twice as many keyword results on average than the free tool version.

Use this tool to quickly find and analyze thousands of relevant long-tail keywords for content creation, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or other marketing activities.

More info: KeywordTool

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer is a versatile and cutting-edge SEO keyword research tool with a massive database of over 1.25 billion traffic-driving keywords

This powerful tool lets you transform data into actionable insights with the following features:

In-Depth Keyword and SERP Analysis: Conduct comprehensive keyword and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) analysis.
Accurate Search Volume Prediction: Predict search volume with over 95% accuracy and effectively gauge a keyword’s potential impact.
Comprehensive Keyword Lists: Generate and save keyword lists with scoring for easy prioritization.
Effortless Data Export: Easily export keyword research suggestions, analyses, and lists into metrics-rich, well-formatted CSVs.
Long-Tail Keyword Targeting: Identify long-tail keywords, high-relevance terms, and question-based keywords.
Predictive Keyword Metrics: Sort by Keyword Difficulty, Volume, and expected Organic Click-Through Rate for effective strategy planning.
SERP Details Analysis: Understand SERP rankings with detailed breakdowns, including Moz Domain Authority, Page Authority, and backlink metrics.
Global SEO Strategies: Search keyword suggestions and rankings by country.
Competitive Keyword Analysis: Uncover your site’s and competitors’ important keywords and identify high-impact suggestions for instant improvement.
Keyword Suggestions: Discover relevant suggestions sorted by Moz’s Relevancy metric and integrate these into campaigns or keyword lists.
Rich SERP Features Preview: Analyze rich search engine results, including Top Stories, Images, Knowledge Graphs, and more.
Keyword Lists Organization: Efficiently organize, track, and compare thousands of keywords. Display Monthly Volume, estimated CTR, and more for strategic planning.
Explore Keywords by Site: Uncover organic search keywords for any site. Track or export up to 10,000 rows for a detailed analysis.
Organic Keyword Analysis: Perform gap analysis on your competitors. Filter results by ranking, search volume, or Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score.

You can explore this tool’s extensive features with a free trial.

More info: Moz Keyword Explorer

For additional information, see this tutorial: How To Research Keywords For SEO Content

WordPress SEO Plugins

If your site runs on the WordPress platform, there are many WordPress SEO Plugins you can use to optimize your content for search engines, automate and speed up search engine notifications, and help search engines (and users) find and index more of your site’s content.

Visit the WordPress SEO Plugins section for more details.

Video Courses For Beginners – SEO

The video courses below cover basic areas of search engine optimization and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Keyword Research Tools

Learn how to do keyword research using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.

More info: Keyword Research Tools

Google Tools

Learn how to use Google Tools like Google Analytics & Gmail.

More info: Google Tools

WordPress SEO

Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and how to craft website pages and blog posts that will help you get better search engine rankings and improve your traffic results.

More info: WordPress SEO

How To Optimize WordPress

Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and improve your page loading speed.

More info: How To Optimize WordPress

***

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Summary

There are many search optimization tools and resources that can help to improve your SEO. This lesson lists a number of useful SEO tools and resources that can help to improve your results.

Action Steps

Research and try some of the above tools and services to find the right tools for your content strategy and setup.

Resources

Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.

References

Google Help Documentation

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Google Laptop

***

Media Creation Tools

Use these media creation tools and resources to create different types of media for your content.

Media Creation Tools And Resources

Use these media creation tools and resources to create different types of media for your content.

Images, videos, report covers, etc. can enhance and add value to your content.

In this section, we look at various media creation tools and resources you can use to enhance your content.

Contents

***

Note: As this section contains an extensive (and growing) list of tools and resources, we have split this section into the following modules for ease of navigation:

Image Creation And Editing Tools

Create and edit images, logos, infographics, charts, graphs, flowcharts, and covers for your eBooks, guides, and reports with these image tools.

Video Creation And Editing Tools

Create and edit product, sales, promotional, and training videos with these video tools and resources.

Logo Makers

Logo makers let you create a unique and professional-looking logo for your business with no design experience.

Video Courses For Beginners – Media

The video courses below cover basic areas of media production and editing and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

Using Graphic Creation Tools

More info: Using Graphic Creation Tools

How To Create Engaging Presentations

Learn how to create beautiful and engaging presentations that will help you sell more products and services online.

More info: How To Create Engaging Presentations

How To Use CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to control how web pages and page elements display on your screen. This video course shows you how to use CSS.

More info: How To Use CSS

***

For more video courses, see this section: Digital Business Video Courses

Resources

Content Troubleshooting Guide – Use this guide to troubleshoot content-related issues.
Digital Business Video Courses – Video courses to help you develop the digital skills you need to manage content effectively.
WordPress User Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users.

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Tablet

WordPress Content Plugins

These WordPress plugins will save you time planning, creating, and managing content.

WordPress Content Plugins

These WordPress plugins will save you time planning, creating, and managing content.

There are many WordPress plugins you can use to help you plan, organize, curate, protect, and even create content for your site.

This section provides examples of various plugins that will help you do this.

Refer to the WordPress User Manual if you need help installing, activating, updating, or deleting plugins in WordPress, and ALWAYS make a full backup of your website’s files and database before making any changes to your site.

***

Legal Information Plugins

Your website needs to comply with many laws and regulations and there are a number of legal pages that you should add to your site.

You can add these manually, or use a plugin like the one shown below.

WP Legal Pages

WP Legal Pages automatically generates 25+ legal policy templates for your website.

Simply add your business details and the plugin will quickly create the following pages:

GDPR Privacy Policy
GDPR Cookie Policy
Terms of Service
Terms & Conditions
CCPA (California Consumers Privacy Act)
Amazon Affiliate Disclosure
Privacy Policy Wizards
Linking Policy
Blog Comments Policy
Affiliate Agreement
Affiliate Marketing Disclosures
External Links Policy
DoubleClick DART Cookie Policy
Returns & Refunds
Digital Goods Refunds
Anti Spam Policy (CASL Compliant)
Privacy Policy for Facebook Apps
Earnings Disclaimer
Medical Disclaimers
General Disclaimers
FTC Disclaimer Widgets
FTC Testimonials Disclosure
California Privacy Rights Policy
DMCA Policy
Children’s Online Privacy Policy (COPPA)
Newsletter Subscription Policy
Refund Policy
FTC Disclosure Statement
Impressum

Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:

More info: WP Legal Pages

Additionally, see this tutorial: How To Add Legal Pages to Your WordPress Site

Content Generation Plugins

There are a number of tools and plugins that can help to speed up your content creation process, as the examples below show.

We recommend using plugins like the ones listed below as tools to aid in your content research and content creation, not as content generators per se.

Search engines like Google reward quality content designed to add value to humans, not content aimed at search bots, so keep this in mind when using tools like the ones listed below.

MyCurator

MyCurator is a content curation plugin for WordPress that can help to speed up your content research by showing you relevant articles related to your topic using AI technology.

You can train the plugin to deliver more reliable information in its results using upvoting and downvoting features.

My Curator - Content Curation plugin for WordPress. — Train MyCurator to deliver better results using up or down vote buttons.

The plugin lets you curate articles in your WordPress Editor
and adds an excerpt, image, and attribution.

You can curate content for topics for free, but accessing its cloud services requires an API Key. Low-priced monthly plans (with a free 30-day trial) are available for users that want to curate content on lots of different topics or multiple sites.

The video below provides more information about this plugin:

There are also a number of training videos available on how to use this plugin.

More info: MyCurator

Learn more about content curation here: Content Writing Tools

Watsonfinds

Watsonfinds analyzes your content and provides insights about how your audience may respond emotionally as they read it.

The plugin displays a popup when you analyze your content with insights divided into 5 different emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear).

You can then modify the words used in your content to match your message with how you would like your audience to respond.

The video below explains how the plugin works:

More info: Whatsonfinds

WPRobot

WP Robot is a popular autoblogging plugin for WordPress.

This plugin allows you to drip-feed content to your site on auto-pilot at regular intervals that you specify. Your posts will then be targeted to any keyword you select and in any topic you choose.

You can autopost articles from over 20 content providers and specify which modules you want to autopost content from, run multiple posting campaigns using a different template for each campaign, run, copy, and pause individual campaigns, and much more.

More info: WP Robot

Content Organization Plugins

WordPress makes available various content organizer plugins. Here are a few popular ones:

Content Views

Content Views is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to display and organize your posts in a grid or list layout. It provides various customization options to organize your content effectively.

Key features of this versatile plugin include:

Grid Shortcode & Block: Easily display various content types like posts, pages, images, and taxonomy terms in attractive layouts such as grids, lists, sliders, and accordions.
Flexible Content Display: Effortlessly showcase recent posts, category-specific content, tag-filtered posts, and more.
Editor Compatibility: Compatible with both the classic editor and Gutenberg block editor for seamless integration into any WordPress environment.
Multiple Layout Options: Offers a wide array of responsive layouts, including grids, lists, sliders, masonry, timelines, and more, catering to diverse website needs.
Powerful Query Filters: Enables precise content filtering by post type, taxonomy, custom fields, keywords, authors, dates, and other criteria.
Front-End Filtering (PRO): Advanced filtering options for website visitors, including category, tag, taxonomy, and custom field filters in various formats.
Pagination Options: Supports both normal and AJAX pagination styles, enhancing user experience.
Theme Layout Replacement (PRO): Easily switch to alternative layouts for specific WordPress pages without altering the theme.
Integration Compatibility: Seamlessly integrates with popular plugins like WooCommerce, The Events Calendar, Advanced Custom Fields, WPML, and more.
Additional Features: Mobile-friendly design, complete control over layout and styling, lazy loading for images, SEO optimization, and social sharing integration.

With its extensive feature set, Content Views simplifies content management for users of all levels.

For a more detailed tutorial explaining how to use this plugin effectively, go here: Organizing Your Content With The Content Views Plugin

More info: Content Views

PublishPress Series

PublishPress Series is a plugin that lets you organize multiple posts on the same topic or time periods into issues or series.

This plugin is ideal for sites that want to publish content in the style of magazines or newspapers, as well as short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, etc.

For example, you can:

Turn posts into monthly issues for a magazine.
Group together newspaper articles on the same topic.
Organize chapters into a story.

You can easily add a post that you are writing to an existing series, or start a new series. You can also add a new post into the middle of an existing series, and the plugin will adjust the order, and filter the post list by series to see all the posts you’ve already added to the series.

The free version of the plugin lets you display options for your series information, supports advanced layouts, provides widgets and blocks, and allows you to quickly manage all posts linked to a series. You can re-order, schedule, publish, and unpublish all the posts in a series.

The paid version of this plugin supports custom post types, multiple series, shortcodes, and extra features, such as allowing you to add multiple authors and guest authors to WordPress posts, manage user roles, permissions, and capabilities (e.g. moderation, revisions, etc.), group content together into a series, and more.

More info: PublishPress Series

Content Control

Content Control is a versatile plugin that lets you control the visibility of different elements on your WordPress site. It’s useful for organizing content by restricting or displaying it based on various criteria.

Post Types Order

Post Types Order allows you to reorder posts, pages, and custom post types using a drag-and-drop interface. It helps you organize your content effortlessly.

Before installing any plugin, make sure to check the compatibility with your WordPress version and read user reviews to ensure it meets your specific requirements. Additionally, always create a backup of your site before making significant changes.

Content Collaboration Plugins

Multicollab Team Collaboration

Multicollab is a collaboration plugin tailored for editorial teams that allows team collaboration with Google Doc-style content editing directly within the WordPress Gutenberg interface.

It seamlessly integrates into the WordPress dashboard to bring real-time commenting, suggesting, and collaborating directly to your WordPress interface, eliminating the need to juggle between Google Docs and WordPress, the frustration of copy-pasting, and the limitations of traditional editorial processes.

With this plugin, users can effortlessly share feedback, comment on text and media blocks, and invite team members to collaborate seamlessly.

Features include inline commenting, team collaboration, detailed reports, and instant email notifications, all within your WordPress environment.

Designed for Gutenberg, Multicollab streamlines content collaboration in WordPress and enhances your editorial workflow without disrupting your existing processes. It is a valuable tool for efficient, organized, and high-quality content creation in WordPress.

Atarim Visual Collaboration

Atarim Visual Website Collaboration, Feedback & Project Management

Atarim Visual Collaboration is a user-friendly plugin that simplifies website collaboration, allowing seamless feedback collection and efficient project management. Almost 10,000 agencies and freelancers worldwide use it on over 120,000 websites, making it an essential productivity tool for any collaborative project.

Atarim reduces project completion time by automating workflows, freeing up valuable time for team members and making gathering feedback and managing tasks effortless, whether it’s submitting feedback directly on WordPress websites or managing requests and tasks efficiently.

The plugin caters to various users, including freelancers, agencies, and website owners, streamlining collaboration processes. It replaces multiple project management tools, eliminating fragmentation and the need for constant screenshots.

Atarim offers a plethora of features, including visual collaboration, urgency updates, status changes, automated screenshots, file uploads, and technical information tracking. Its cloud-based platform allows centralized request management, enhancing efficiency and communication.

With Atarim, collaboration extends beyond project completion, facilitating ongoing communications and feedback. Plus, it’s free to use forever, empowering teams to embrace visual collaboration and enhance project and task management.

Additional collaboration plugins include:

Admin Page Notes – Add notes and links on your pages to give your clients, authors or other editors clear directions when editing their site.
BuddyPress Docs – BuddyPress Docs enhances BuddyPress communities with collaborative workspaces akin to Google Docs, offering wiki-style collaboration, document editing and management, and shared Dropbox functionality. Key features include:
- Document linking to groups or users, customizable privacy levels.
- Support for fully-private document uploads.
- Document taxonomy with tags.
- Sortable and filterable document lists.
- Front-end document editing with TinyMCE.
- Overwrite prevention and idle detection/autosave.
- Comprehensive revision history access.
- Dashboard management of documents for site administrators.

Content Protection Plugins

If you want to protect your content from being copied or stolen, there are WordPress plugins you can use to help protect your site from content theft.

WP Content Copy Protection

WP Content Copy Protection is a free plugin for WordPress that uses various methods to protect your online content from being stolen by mouse, keyboard, and browser content-copying methods like right-clicking and saving images, highlighting and copying text, source code viewing, and common keyboard copy shortcut keys.

The premium version of the plugin provides everything included in the free version, plus advanced content protection features for WooCommerce-powered eCommerce sites, the ability to exclude specific pages, posts, or categories from being protected, enabling or disabling protection for site admins only, or registered users only, or admin and registered/logged-in users, advanced image protection, feed removal, extended keyboard copy protection commands, and more.

The plugin will not affect your SEO, embeddable codes, or advertising (e.g. Adsense).

More info: WP Content Copy Protection Free | WP Content Copy Protection Pro

For additional content protection plugins, see this article: How To Prevent Content Theft In WordPress

Anti-Spam Plugins

Spam adds unwanted content to your site (e.g. comment spam) which can have a negative impact on your visitors and search engines.

WordPress has a number of plugins that can help you combat and prevent spam.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if these look like spam or not and lets you review any spam it catches under your site’s Comments admin screen.

The Akismet servers monitor millions of blogs and forums, watching the methods and tricks used by spammers in real-time.

When spambots, comment factories, buffer sites, and social engineering tricks are identified, Akismet uses this knowledge to try and prevent automated or human spammers from trying to place a spam comment on your site.

Akismet was developed by Automattic, a company founded by the creator of WordPress itself, Matt Mullenweg, and has proven to be very effective in fighting SPAM. Millions of WordPress users have Akismet installed on their sites.

More info: Akismet

For more anti-spam plugins, go here: WordPress AntiSpam Plugin

WordPress Engagement Plugins

These WordPress plugins will help to boost and improve user engagement with your content and your website.

WordPress Engagement Plugins

These WordPress plugins will help to boost and improve user engagement with your content and your website.

There are many different ways for your visitors to engage with your business through your website.

Most of these ways involve interacting with some form of content on your site, so it’s important to be able to manage this content effectively.

WordPress provides many different kinds of plugins to boost and improve engagement with visitors on your website in areas like:

Contact Forms
FAQs
Knowledgebase
HelpDesk
Chat
Advertising
Lead Generation
Event Calendars
Event Registrations
Bookings & Appointments
Maps
Membership Sites
eCommerce
Courses
Social Sharing
Testimonials
Company Pages (e.g. Meet The Team)
etc.

This section provides examples of various WordPress plugins you can use to improve user engagement with your website in the areas above and manage the content in these areas.

Many of the plugins described below can also be easily configured and added to your site’s pages or content using a shortcode.

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Managing Content On Your Site With WordPress Engagement Plugins

While using plugins can save time and money on web development costs, using plugins to boost and improve user engagement on your site usually requires adding additional content to the plugin and managing it via the plugin itself.

Let’s look at some examples of WordPress engagement plugins and what kind of content you would need to add and manage to boost user engagement effectively.

Analytics

Features like custom reports and segments in Google Analytics allow businesses to delve deeper into specific engagement metrics, gaining a comprehensive understanding of how visitors interact with their content.

They can then use a data-driven approach to implement specific steps and methods with proven tactics and tools to effectively track and boost user engagement on their WordPress websites and further increase user engagement.

WordPress analytics plugins play a crucial role in enhancing user engagement on websites. These tools provide valuable insights into user behavior, allowing site owners to make informed decisions to optimize their content and user experience.

By tracking various metrics, such as popular content, bounce rates, and user interactions, these plugins enable website administrators to tailor their strategies for maximum user engagement.

Analytics plugins like those listed below offer a user-friendly solution to set up and monitor user engagement in WordPress.

Beehive – WordPress Analytics

Beehive is an all-in-one Google Analytics Dashboard plugin that lets you easily track all of your important website statistics straight from your WordPress dashboard.

Beehive Pro features beautiful charts and graphs, Google Tag Manager, Custom Stats Dashboard, User Roles & Permissions, and more. It also allows you to enable display ads and view their current analytics in real-time and includes personalized authentication screen icons and project names, eCommerce compatibility, and constant updates with enhancements.

More info: Beehive (Free) | Beehive Pro

Forms

Most WordPress form plugins typically forward the sender’s message through to an email address and then store the information on your site’s database.

Using a contact form on your site effectively, then, requires having documentation and processes for areas like:

Forwarding the information (i.e. who gets which kind of information, e.g. sales, support, billing, etc.?)
Replying to senders (e.g. policies, guidelines, attachments, etc.)
Handling stored contact information on your database to make sure that your site complies with all data storage and privacy laws (for example, the GDPR if your site processes information about European citizens).

Here is an example of a WordPress contact form plugin you can use on your site…

Forminator

Forminator is a free custom form builder plugin for WordPress that lets you create and add different kinds of forms to your site like contact forms, opt-in forms, payment forms, and even quizzes and polls.

You can easily set up a professional contact form for your site in just a few clicks.

Forminator contact form setup — Forminator lets you easily set up contact forms. Source: WordPress.org

Forminator adds its own block to the WordPress Block Editor.

Forminator includes a Gutenberg Block — Forminator adds its own block to the WordPress Block Editor. Source: WordPress.org

The plugin integrates with many applications like Zapier, Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, and different email marketing apps.

Forminator - Integrations screen — Forminator has built-in integrations with 1000+ apps. Source: WordPress.org

Use Forminator to create forms that allow users to upload files to your site, collect electronic signatures, etc.

The plugin includes advanced features to help your site stay compliant with GDPR and a form preview button so you can view and adjust your form before embedding it on a page.

Forminator - form example with file uploader. — Forminator lets you create forms that allow users to upload files to your site. Source: WordPress.org

You can also use the plugin to create and add payment forms to your site. Forminator features codeless styling that lets you create the look you want without knowledge of code or CSS, use conditional logic to create dynamic forms, and add calculations and data validation fields to your forms.

Forminator - Free calculations and payment gateways — Add lead-generating calculators to your site with Forminator. Source: WordPress.org

The forms let you accept payments from users with PayPal and Stripe.

Forminator - PayPal and Stripe included. — Accept payments on your site with PayPal and Stripe. Source: WordPress.org

The plugin also lets you submit blog posts from a form and build interactive quizzes and polls.

Forminator - Poll example — Build interactive quizzes and polls to boost user engagement on your site. Source: WordPress.org

You can publish polls that display real-time graphs and stats

Forminator - Polls with real-time graphs and stats — Publish polls with real-time graphs and stats. Source: WordPress.org

To learn more about using this plugin, see this tutorial: How To Get The Most Out Of Using Forminator or watch the video below:

Plugin info: Forminator

To learn about other WordPress contact form plugins, go here: How To Add A Contact Form To WordPress

FAQs

Including FAQs on your site helps visitors and prospective customers get their questions answered and overcome objections before making purchasing decisions.

WordPress FAQ plugins can save you time and resources when providing customer support by allowing you to create a “self-service” help center for a fraction of the resources of hiring a support team to handle customer inquiries.

Many FAQ plugins also make it easier to organize your questions by allowing you to group your FAQs by categories (e.g. for questions about products, ordering, etc.), and place these on a dedicated FAQ page using a shortcode.

Look for FAQs plugins that let you easily add new FAQs and update your FAQ content using a drag-and-drop interface, and build an FAQ section for your website using different categories and customizable styles and colors.

There are many great FAQ plugins for WordPress available.

For example…

Ultimate FAQ

Ultimate FAQ is an FAQ and accordion plugin for WordPress that includes easy-to-use Gutenberg blocks, shortcodes, widgets, an advanced FAQ search, and FAQ schema.

Creating and adding different FAQ categories in the plugin is just like using regular post categories.

Ultimate FAQ - FAQ Categories screen — Add FAQ Categories to the plugin just like you would add regular post categories.

FAQs are essentially custom post types, so you can treat each FAQ entry as you would when creating a regular WordPress post…

Ultimate FAQ - FAQs screen — Create FAQs and publish these or save them as drafts, just like regular posts.

You can easily view all your FAQs inside your WordPress dashboard using the plugin’s FAQ Summary panel…

Ultimate FAQ - FAQ Summary panel — All the FAQs you have created are listed inside your WordPress dashboard in the FAQ Summary panel.

To display your FAQs to site visitors, simply create a dedicated FAQs page, add the shortcode (or use the FAQ plugin’s block), and publish.

For example, here is a page with the FAQ shortcode inserted…

Edit Page - FAQ Shortcode — Insert a shortcode where you want to display your FAQs…

And this is what your site visitor will see after the page has been published…

A Frequently Asked Questions page listing all the FAQs in their categories.

Additional features of the plugin include the following:

Create unlimited FAQs
Create unlimited FAQ tags and FAQ categories
Add an FAQ block (WordPress Block Editor)
Add an FAQ shortcode
A responsive accordion layout that works on all sites and devices
FAQ page ordering and sorting options
Group FAQ options
Translation ready
Bulk import FAQs from a spreadsheet
Style your FAQ page layout

This plugin is user-friendly and includes a guided walk-through wizard that helps you configure the plugin’s settings, create your first FAQs, and create an FAQ page.

Watch the video below for an overview of this plugin:

As you can see, managing your site’s “frequently asked questions” using an FAQ plugin is both time-saving and very effective.

Plugin info: Ultimate FAQ

Tip: See this article for great tips on building an FAQ section on your website.

Customer Support – Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, and Live Chat

Like FAQs, Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, and Live Chat plugins allow you to automate and manage important areas of your business like customer support and help sections for a fraction of what it would cost to hire, train and set up a live support team.

If you plan to add a Knowledgebase, Helpdesk, or Live Chat section to your website to provide customer support, answer user questions, or address their concerns, it’s important to plan and create as much of the content that you will feed into these sections as you can beforehand.

You can use a WordPress plugin like the one shown below to continually add and update support-related content.

ThriveDesk

ThriveDesk is a light and fast knowledgebase, helpdesk, and live chat plugin for WordPress.

The plugin lets you provide timely customer support by integrating live chat, helpdesk, and a knowledgebase into one feature-rich application.

To learn more about all the features and integrations included in this plugin, see the plugin info here: ThriveDesk

Advertising

If you plan to display ads on your website through banners, text ads, or contextual ads (e.g. Google AdSense), then you will need to manage your advertising content effectively, especially if you are promoting content like time-sensitive offers, products of the week, expiring discount codes, etc. on multiple pages or sections of your website.

This means having an organized system for storing and accessing information like:

Banner ad images
Ad copy and destination URLs
Scripts (e.g. Google AdSense publisher code)
Details of advertisers, ad inventory, ad schedules, where ads are placed, etc. (e.g. a spreadsheet)

There are many WordPress advertising plugins you can use to display and manage ads on your website.

Here are a couple you can check out…

AdRotate

AdRotate is a plugin that lets you easily manage all your advertising campaigns, affiliate banners, text links, etc. from one location.

You can create advertisements using any kind of ad banner or text link, group adverts together, and place them anywhere on your site using shortcodes or AdRotate’s Post/Page Injection sections.

AdRotate - Post Injection — Use AdRotate’s shortcode or Post/Page Injection sections to add groups of adverts to your site.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to use this plugin, go here: How To Add Rotating Advertising Banners To Your WordPress Site

Plugin info: AdRotate

WP AdCenter

WP AdCenter is another advertising plugin you may want to look at if you plan to monetize your WordPress site with banner advertising.

WP AdCenter is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you:

Create and manage different ad zones.
Place your own banners anywhere on your site
Notify your advertisers after 80% of the campaign is over
Export your campaign details as a spreadsheet
Rotate banners or place multiple banners in one Ad-Zone
Use the same slot to display different ads (without requiring refresh)
Automate your income – with PayPal
Monetize your WordPress site with affiliate banners, Google AdSense, etc.

The plugin integrates with payment gateways like PayPal and lets you offer advertising spots for sale on your site. Your advertisers can buy available spots and use the plugin’s built-in intelligent reporting features to review AdZone performance and optimize revenue.

Additional features include:

Unlimited ad zones.
Unlimited banner sizes.
Unlimited campaigns.
Set automatic start and end campaign dates.
Place ad zones into your WordPress theme using shortcodes and widgets.
Add media easily.
Detailed statistics with downloadable/printable charts.
Collect payments automatically.
Add different effects to your ads (fadezoom, blindX, blindY, and more).
Responsive ads work well on mobile and desktop devices.
Display multiple banners per AdZone and multiple ads in a row, column, or grid.
Auto-disable expired ads.

See the video below for an overview of the plugin:

Plugin info: WP AdCenter

Lead Generation

After working out your marketing and content promotion strategies for generating new business leads, using content promotion tools with lead generation plugins like the ones listed below will not only make it easier to implement your strategies but also manage their content.

Hustle

Hustle is a versatile free marketing and lead generation plugin that you can use to build a mailing list and convert site traffic on a WordPress site.

The plugin includes opt-in forms, targeted marketing popups, slide-ins, embeds, shortcodes, designer-made form templates, and social sharing capabilities.

Hustle - Animated overview — Hustle lets you create great-looking lead generation pop-ups, slide-ins, and embeds using professionally-designed templates.

You can fully customize the look of your campaigns in the plugin’s settings.

Hustle - Appearance settings — Use Hustle’s built-in appearance settings to customize the look of your campaigns.

You also have complete control over your lead generation forms.

With pop-ups, for example, you can choose the visibility conditions that will display your pop-ups to visitors (e.g. only display the pop-up if visitors land on certain pages or visit posts published under certain categories, or use specific devices/browsers, or are visiting from a specific country, etc.).

Hustle - Conditions screen. — Target your audience with Hustle’s display conditions.

You can also use pre-built layouts, align the position of your images in your selected layouts and more.

Hustle not only lets you easily grow your mailing list and display targeted ads across your site with pop-ups, opt-ins, and slide-ins, but you can also add social sharing widgets to your site so visitors can share your content across different social media platforms.

Hustle - Social Sharing Feature — Quickly build floating social share bars to add to your content.

Additional plugin features include:

Fully customizable and mobile responsive layouts with granular control of all form design elements (e.g. adjust images, typography, color, margins, padding, borders, spacing, shadow, module sizing, etc., or use your own custom CSS).
Smart triggers for pop-ups and slide-ins (e.g. time on page, scroll, exit intent, and more).
Set campaign schedules (e.g. start and end dates, schedule modules to show on specific days of the week, at a certain time of day, choose a custom timezone, etc.)
Follow-up emails with manual or automated email messages.
Integrations with social media platforms, form builders, email services, etc.
Smart exit intent technology (detects when visitors are about to leave your site and displays a pop-up or slide-in to grab their attention).
Recaptcha to protect your signup forms from spam.
Adblocking detection and override.
Intelligent results tracking of individual modules with conversion stats, and insightful charts.

For additional options (e.g. unlimited pop-ups, slide-ins, embeds, and social sharing bars), we recommend upgrading to the Pro version of the plugin.

Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:

Additionally, see these tutorials to learn how to use the plugin:

Plugin info: Hustle

Post Gopher

Normally, you would need to create content for your lead magnet AND for the article or post that will promote your lead magnet to your visitors and prospects. What if your articles or blog posts already contain compelling content? Couldn’t you use these as lead magnets?

This is where this clever little WordPress plugin comes in that automatically turns your articles and blog posts into lead magnets, helps you get more free web traffic, and grows your subscriber list … all completely on auto-pilot!

Post Gopher is a WordPress plugin that converts your blog posts and pages into downloadable PDF books. It builds beautiful forms, integrates directly with your autoresponder, captures leads, and sends out download links completely on autopilot.

Post Gopher handles everything on autopilot

Post Gopher does the following while you focus on creating content:

Automatically converts your blog posts or pages into PDF lead magnets,
Auto-generates lead capture forms that integrate seamlessly with all major autoresponder services,
Sends a customizable email to your new subscribers with the download link to their PDF version of your blog post or article.
Tracks your results with a built-in dashboard that provides details on your most popular posts, conversion rates, and when readers return to your blog using the links inside their PDF file.

After the plugin has been activated and configured, Post Gopher displays a fully customizable lead generation banner on your posts and pages.

Add a lead generation call-to-action banner to your posts.

Everything can be customized to suit your preferences, from the text and design of your call-to-action banners to pop-up form colors, text and fields, and even your PDF templates.

You can also specify which posts and pages will display the lead generation banner, where to position it in your content (e.g. top, bottom, top & bottom), and more.

If someone visits your site, decides to download and read your post content later, and clicks on the banner, Post Gopher automatically converts your post or page into a downloadable PDF book or report, adds the user details to your autoresponder, and emails them a link to download the PDF file.

Post Gopher integrates directly with your autoresponder, capturing leads and sending out download links to your new subscribers on autopilot.

Post Gopher automatically adds new readers to your autoresponder.

The plugin includes built-in statistics reporting for tracking views, clicks, opt-in rates, downloads, and return visitors, and analyzing your best performing lead generation content and most popular blog posts.

Built-in stats panel lets you track and analyze results. — The built-in stats panel lets you track and analyze results.

Post Gopher, then, is an easy “set and forget” tool that passively collects leads, grows your list, boosts user engagement, and helps you get more traffic on autopilot.

If your website or blog provides lots of high-quality content, use this plugin to help you leverage your content creation efforts into growing an engaged subscriber list, increasing your reach, and getting you more dedicated content readers.

Plugin info: Post Gopher

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a lead generation plugin for WordPress that combines a list-building solution focused on cutting-edge conversion tactics and conversion optimization.

The plugin combines every kind of opt-in form you need with a simple drag-and-drop design editor designed to help you build a profitable list by showing relevant and highly targeted offers to your visitors based on posts, categories, tags, and more.

Thrive Leads also includes an advanced but easy-to-use A/B testing feature and actionable reporting & insights covering the most important metrics you need to assess how your opt-in forms are performing and where your most valuable traffic is coming from.

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to use this plugin, go here: Thrive-Leads: List-Building Plugin For WordPress

Plugin info: Thrive Leads

Event Calendars

Does your business run or promote events like:

Social or community events (e.g. art classes, camps, golf tournaments, church events, etc.)
Community events (fundraisers, festivals)
Workshops, Seminars, Conferences (physical or virtual)
Or any other event?

If so, then plugins like the ones listed below will help you manage your events and all the information associated with running these events.

WP Event Manager

WP Event Manager is a lightweight and scalable plugin that lets you implement a full-featured event management system for live and virtual events on WordPress.

WP Event Manager: Event Listing - Grid Layout — WP Event Manager lets you display and manage all of your physical and virtual events.

The plugin works out of the box with practically every available WordPress theme saving you time and money on developing custom solutions.

The free version of the plugin has all the core features and functionalities you need to create a robust event management system on your site in a few minutes.

You can also purchase and install a number of premium add-ons that will enhance your event management capabilities by allowing you to do things like:

Sell tickets
Accept registrations
Display an event calendar on your website with upcoming events
Add Google Maps
Add recurring events
Collect information about the attendees at the point of registration
Send notifications to event managers
Change event colors to match event types and categories
And even turn your WordPress website into a live streaming platform for virtual events.

WP Event Manager - Single Event Page — Provide your site visitors with all the information they need to register for your events.

Check out the video below for an overview of the plugin, of go here for a step-by-step tutorial on using this plugin: How To Create An Event Listing Website With WordPress

Plugin info: WP Event Manager

Event Espresso

Event Espresso is another popular event registration and ticketing manager plugin for WordPress.

It can turn your existing WordPress website into a fully-featured event registration and ticketing website that can accept online payments, add custom registration forms and emails, seating limits, multiple price options, discount codes, and printable tickets and event apps on your phone.

For a more detailed article on this plugin, go here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management Plugin

Plugin info: Event Espresso

Bookings & Appointments

If your business depends on taking bookings and appointments, you will need to manage a calendar for scheduling your bookings, sending confirmation emails, rescheduling appointments, etc.

All of these processes can be automated using WordPress plugins like the one shown below

Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar is a free booking and reservations plugin that allows you to manage your time more effectively by adding appointment bookings to your site and sending out customized emails automatically.

The plugin works right out of the box. Your visitors can check the availability of your services and book appointments online quickly and easily (and even pay for appointments online) using an intuitive and user-friendly interface.

Booking Calendar - Interface — Booking Calendar lets your site visitors view available times and schedule appointments on your website.

The plugin sends notifications to site administrators and users. You can access information about your bookings and easily manage all of your scheduled bookings and appointments from the plugin’s Booking Listing screen.

Booking Calendar - Booking Listing screen — View and manage all of your bookings and appointments from the plugin’s Booking Listing screen.

The plugin also provides a number of features and screens where you can view detailed information about your bookings and appointments and make changes.

Booking Calendar - Calendar Overview — View detailed information about all of your bookings and appointments.

And you can manually schedule bookings and appointments by entering customer information via the Add booking screen.

Booking Calendar - Add booking screen — Take bookings over the phone or via email and manually enter the information into your calendar.

Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, supports multiple languages, and is also available in a premium version that offers many more features and functionalities.

Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:

This plugin is suitable for a wide range of business services – medical, dental, health & fitness, repair services, massage therapists, yoga classes, restaurants, making room reservations, event venues, etc.

Plugin info: Booking Calendar

Maps

Adding maps to your site, such as Google Maps, can also help visitors and customers find you more easily, increase local SEO, and allow you to display the location of events.

Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:

Note: If you plan to add maps to your site, make sure to store the coordinates of your physical location in your documentation.

You can obtain this information by following these instructions: Discover Coordinates Or Search By Latitude And Longitude

For a step-by-step tutorial on adding maps to WordPress, go here: How To Add A Map To WordPress

eCommerce

The WordPress CMS is powerful and flexible enough to transform any website into a full-featured eCommerce store using plugins.

eCommerce stores built on the WordPress platform can range from anything like regular websites offering users the ability to pay for a service online through a payment processor (e.g. PayPal, Stripe, etc.), to running enterprise-sized eCommerce sites selling thousands of products.

Your store content and information are normally managed from the plugin within your WordPress dashboard, although there are many solutions that integrate with WordPress, where your WordPress site serves as the “shop front” for your customers and you manage all the content on your store from your eCommerce solution’s website.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce plugin for WordPress.

Installing the plugin automatically adds eCommerce capabilities to any WordPress site.

The WooCommerce core platform is free. You can enhance the functionality of your store with hundreds of free and paid extensions from the official WooCommerce Marketplace, and manage your store from anywhere using the free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS).

Being open-source also means that you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data.

More info: WooCommerce

For more plugins, go here: WordPress eCommerce Plugins: A Comprehensive Guide

Membership Sites

WordPress lets you turn a simple website into a large, professional, and feature-rich membership site containing private content that is accessible only to members using plugins.

There are many membership plugins available for WordPress. While they all perform a similar function (i.e. restrict content access to members only), most membership plugins will let you set up different membership levels, manage registrations and members, set different access levels to content, and automate actions like content sequencing and delivery (e.g. drip feeding of content with monthly subscriptions).

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is a membership plugin for WordPress that lets you restrict exclusive content for members using a lightweight built-in eCommerce solution.

With the plugin installed, you can create unlimited subscription packages with membership levels (e.g. free, trial, premium, etc.), set up content previews that display an offer for visitors to sign up to access the rest of the content, offer discounts and coupon codes, and much more.

Plugin info: Restrict Content Pro

For more membership plugins, go here: WordPress Membership Plugins: A Comprehensive Guide

Courses

An e-Learning or e-Course site incorporates features found in e-commerce and membership sites with a Learning Management System (LMS).

You can build WordPress sites to promote and deliver one or many e-courses with course grading, quizzes, sequential modules, etc.

LMS WordPress Theme

LMS Online Learning Theme — Run e-Learning Courses with the WordPress LMS Theme

The LMS WordPress Theme lets you build e-courses using any WordPress theme you like.

You can add class courses, timetables, registrations, quizzes, social logins, purchase options, and more.

All course information can be managed within the theme inside your WordPress dashbaord.

More info: LMS WordPress Theme

WP Courseware

WP Courseware is a learning management system plugin for WordPress that lets you set up professional training courses and build e-learning products quickly with WordPress.

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on using this plugin, go here: WP Courseware – WordPress eLearning Management Plugin

Plugin info: WP Courseware

Social Sharing

There are many WordPress plugins that can help your business reach a wider audience online and build your social following by sharing your content on social media.

For example, you can use the Hustle plugin mentioned earlier (see above) to add social sharing capabilities to your WordPress site.

Hustle plugin for WordPress - Social Sharing — Social sharing plugins make it easier for visitors to promote your content on their social networks.

The plugin supports all popular platforms and includes features like a social counter, a floating or inline social bar, style settings, visibility conditions, and more.

More info: Hustle

For more social sharing plugins, go here: Social Sharing Plugins For WordPress

Testimonials

Testimonials add powerful social proof content to your site.

Having testimonials on your site, however, also requires an effective system for requesting, collecting, managing, and displaying this content on your site.

Testimonial plugins like the one shown below can help you in all of these areas.

Thrive Ovation – Set & Forget Testimonials

Thrive Ovation - Testimonials Plugin For WordPress — Thrive Ovation – Testimonials Plugin For WordPress

Thrive Ovation is an all-in-one, set-and-forget testimonials management plugin for WordPress.

You can turn comments left on your site into testimonials with one click, leverage the power of social testimonials by integrating with Facebook and Twitter and collect testimonials on auto-pilot.

Thrive Ovation also provides a time-saving testimonial management dashboard, giving you a complete bird’s eye overview of user-submitted, comments, social media, and imported testimonials in one testimonial library that allows you to see testimonials that are ready for display, waiting for approval or review, have been rejected, are missing a photo, etc.

Thrive Ovation - Testimonial Management Dashboard — Thrive Ovation – Testimonial Management Dashboard

Additional plugin features include:

Insert testimonials wherever you like using shortcodes.
Edit and update testimonials from one location, which then update dynamically throughout your site.
A library of fully customizable, professionally designed testimonial templates.

Plugin info: Thrive Ovation

For more plugins and a step-by-step tutorial on adding testimonials to WordPress, go here: How To Add Testimonials To WordPress

Company Pages

There are many plugins you can use to add and manage information about your company and your staff.

Here is an example:

Simple Staff List

Simple Staff List is a free plugin that lets companies display information about their employees on their website.

The plugin makes it very convenient to manage information about your staff and their profiles. You can add new staff members, edit existing team members’ details, remove profiles from employees who are no longer with the company, and more, all from one central location.

Enter information about your staff into the plugin’s profile fields…

Add information about your staff or team members.

After you have entered the information for all staff members and configured other plugin settings, copy and paste the shortcode into a page (e.g. “Meet the Team”) and publish.

Visitors now have a page where they can learn more about your team members.

Your visitors can now learn more about your team on your Staff Profiles page.

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to set up and use this plugin, go here: How To Add A Staff Directory In WordPress

Plugin info: Simple Staff List

Summary

There are many WordPress plugins you can use to help boost user engagement with your content.

We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and tracking your results to improve your content’s performance and boost user engagement on your site.

The above is just a small sample of WordPress plugins you can use to improve engagement on your website using the WordPress CMS.

For more plugin tutorials, go here: WordPress Engagement Plugins

If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:

WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Tutorials for advanced WordPress users.

Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on boosting user engagement with your content using WordPress.

Return to the main WordPress Plugins section.

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Image: Laptop

WordPress Media Plugins

Use these WordPress media plugins to make managing media files on your website easier.

WordPress Media Plugins

Use these WordPress media plugins to make managing media files on your website easier.

This section provides examples of various WordPress media plugins you can use to manage files in your content and on your site, like:

Images
Videos
Audio Files
Documents
Embedded Content
Downloadable Content
Media Stored Remotely

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Media Library Plugins

Media files used in WordPress are typically uploaded to the WordPress Media Library if files are saved on your web server (as opposed to being stored in a cloud service like Amazon S3).

Plugins can extend the functionality of your WordPress media library.

Media Library Folders

Media Library Folders enhances the functionality of the WordPress Media Library by allowing you to add and build new folders and subfolders to label and organize your media folders and perform operations on these folders and their contents.

Media Library Plus - Dashboard screen — Media Library Folders lets you organize your media files into folders.

The plugin provides an effective way to manage image and video folders when creating WordPress image galleries and albums.

The paid version of the plugin offers enhanced functionality like the ability to organize media using categories, add images to WooCommerce product galleries, offload Media Library items to external cloud storage services like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces, and more.

The video below provides an overview of the plugin:

More Info: Media Library Folders

For a step-by-step tutorial on using the WordPress Media Library and additional Media Library plugins, go here: How To Use The WordPress Media Library

Content Embedding Plugins

WordPress plugins can make embedding media files into your content easier.

EmbedPress

EmbedPress lets you easily embed media-rich content like documents, videos, PDFs, audio files, maps, charts, and slides into your WordPress site.

The plugin connects to over 100 services and media platforms and lets you embed content from these services by simply pasting in their URL. It also includes blocks for the WordPress Block Editor.

The premium version of the plugin gives you additional features like enabling lazy loading for loading embedded images on your website faster and adding custom-branded logos for all your video embeds.

Watch the video below for an overview of the plugin:

More info: EmbedPress Free | EmbedPress Premium

For a step-by-step tutorial on using the blocks to embed content into WordPress, go here: WordPress Embed Block

File Download Plugins

WordPress lets you manage your download files right out of the box but it doesn’t have advanced management features like:

Download password protection
Tracking file revisions
Monitoring/restricting the number of downloads
Preventing unregistered users from accessing your files
Managing and selling digital downloads
etc.

You can easily add these features using file management and download management plugins like the plugin below:

Easy Media Download

Easy Media Download is a free plugin that makes it easy for users to download digital media files from your website (music, videos, images, etc.). The plugin supports downloadable files in all formats. It creates buttons that begin downloading files immediately when clicked on. Shortcodes allow you to place download buttons anywhere in your content.

Check out the video below to see the plugin in action:

More info: Easy Media Download

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add, edit, and manage downloadable files in WordPress and more WordPress download plugins, go here: How To Add Downloadable Files In WordPress

Image Plugins

There are many great WordPress plugins you can use to manage images on your site more effectively, compress and optimize images to make your pages load faster for visitors, add visual effects, styled borders, or frames to images, display images in galleries and slides, etc.

Smush – Image Optimization

Images can take up a lot of storage space on your server and slow down your site.

Smush is a free image compression and image optimization plugin that saves storage space, helps your site load faster and reduces image file size without reducing the quality of your images.

You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually, or in bulk. You can also Super Smush your images, which compress these even further without losing image quality.

Smush image compression and optimization plugin - dashboard screen. — Smush automatically detects and optimizes all of your images.

This plugin is highly recommended for all WordPress sites, and especially for sites that use loads of high-quality images (e.g. photography, design, portfolio sites, etc.)

See this tutorial to learn how to use Smush: How To Get The Most Out Of Smush Image Optimization or watch the video below:

More info: Smush

Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery is a user-friendly and feature-rich plugin that lets you add responsive image galleries and albums to your website.

The plugin lets you add image descriptions and tags to gallery images and makes renaming, uploading, removing, and copying images in the galleries you create easier.

Photo Gallery - Gallery Editing screen. — Photo Gallery’s Gallery Editing screen makes it easier to edit images in your galleries.

The plugin also lets you add videos and audios to your galleries, customize gallery layouts, create unlimited responsive gallery and album views, set up and manage multiple widgets, add image watermarking and right-click protection, and more.

The Photo Gallery plugin also provides additional extensions to take its functionality further, making this a great choice for image-heavy websites like photography websites, portfolios, blogs, and any sites that want to feature professional-looking image galleries with easy user navigation.

With the Photo Gallery Premium version of the plugin installed, you can add commenting capabilities with Captcha protection, add a dynamic tag cloud widget with an image tag cloud and text tag cloud options, and set role permission capabilities (i.e. specify who can edit galleries, albums, and images).

The video below provides more information about the plugin:

More info: Photo Gallery (Free) | Photo Gallery (Premium)

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add, edit, and manage images in WordPress and more WordPress image plugins and image tools, go here: Using Images In WordPress

Video Plugins

WordPress lets you easily integrate videos into your content. You can add videos to your posts, pages, custom post types…even your sidebar menu using plugins.

Video Player

Video Player is a WordPress plugin that lets you manage the entire video player using a friendly interface. You can customize the player look & feel, playlist, and CSS file.

The plugin comes in two versions: Right Side playlist and Bottom Playlist.

Some of the plugin features include:

Support for any type of video file that Flash Player supports: FLV/H.264 encoded video: MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, F4V, YouTube, RTMP (using FMS or RED5), and RTMP live streaming.
Ability to play audio MP3 files.
Support for Google Analytics
You can set this player to any size you want, changing the player width, the player height, and the playlist width.
Ability to integrate with your posts and pages using a shortcode

For more details, go here: Video Player

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add videos to WordPress and more WordPress video plugins, go here:

Audio Plugins

Just like videos, WordPress also lets you easily integrate audio files into your content.

HTML5 Audio Player

HTML5 Audio Player is a compact and responsive audio plugin for WordPress that supports .mp3 and .ogg file formats and works on all browsers and devices.

You can add audio files and audio previews to your WordPress posts and pages using a shortcode.

For more info, go here: HTML5 Audio Player

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to add audio files in WordPress and more WordPress audio plugins, go here: How To Add Audio Files In WordPress

Plugins For Managing Media Stored Remotely

In addition to plugins that will help you better manage media files on your WordPress site, you can also install plugins that integrate 3rd-party media services and platforms with your site and allow you to manage media stored in remote locations (e.g. cloud services like Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.).

S3 Media Maestro

S3 Media Maestro lets you display videos hosted on Amazon S3 on your site, protects your files from unauthorized sharing, and lets you easily manage and deliver media or download files securely using Amazon’s S3 web storage services.

You can easily configure default media player settings for video and audio players like player type, skins, splash images, volume, size, metadata, etc.

S3 Media Maestro - Settings — S3 Media Maestro media player settings.

You can use this plugin to set up online learning and video membership sites. S3Media Maestro prevents paying customers from sharing links to your content with others by creating unique expiring links that will only work for your customers. Anyone else who tries to use the same link to your content will be denied access.

More info: S3 Maestro

Google Drive Embedder

Google Drive Embedder lets you add files stored on Google Drive to your content and supports many files.

Use this plugin to:

Locate files more easily
Centralize your organization’s documents in Google Drive
Host post and page file attachments, backed by Google Drive
Control employee access (allow non-Google users to view Google Drive files and folders or restrict access by WordPress user roles)
Allow drag-and-drop of files into embedded Google Drive folders, and explore folders without leaving WordPress.
Display files through embedded viewers, or links to open or download.

More info: Google Drive Embedder

Dropr

Dropr lets you easily access files from your Dropbox account and add them to your WordPress website.

The plugin essentially turns your Dropbox account into a secondary WordPress Media Library. You can access your Dropbox files from the WordPress text editor screen, then drop files into your content without having to upload them to WordPress, saving you server bandwidth.

The plugin also includes its own block for the WordPress Block Editor.

Dropr Gutenberg Block — Dropr includes its own Block.

More info: Dropr

Summary

There are many plugins available for managing media files on your WordPress site.

We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and reading the additional tutorials on how to use media in WordPress.

The above is just a small sample of WordPress plugins you can use to make managing media easier on your WordPress CMS.

For more plugin tutorials, go here: WordPress Media Plugins

If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:

WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.

Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on using media with WordPress.

Return to the main WordPress Plugins section.

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WordPress SEO Plugins

Use these WordPress SEO plugins to optimize your content for search engines, boost your search rankings, and improve your content marketing results.

WordPress SEO Plugins

Use these WordPress SEO plugins to optimize your content for search engines, boost your search rankings, and improve your content marketing results.

WordPress SEO plugins help to improve your content SEO and provide information to search engines that help them better understand and organize your content for indexing and displaying on search results.

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Contents

Website SEO Plugins

The plugins listed below help to optimize your content and will even notify search engines when you publish new content for faster page indexing.

SmartCrawl

SmartCrawl is a free plugin that helps to improve your content’s SEO and search rankings on search engines like Google and Bing with built-in keyword optimization tools, XML sitemaps, meta tags, titles and descriptions, and more.

SmartCrawl features one-click setup, automatic XML sitemaps, improved social sharing, real-time keyword, and content analysis, Schema Types builder, traffic redirection, SEO scans and reports, and integration with 3rd-party tools (e.g. Moz SEO Tools).

You can quickly and easily set up and use SmartCrawl with the plugin’s setup wizard.

WordPress SEO Plugins: SmartCrawl - Quick Setup Wizard. — Use SmartCrawl’s Quick Setup Wizard to quickly install and set up the plugin on your site.

Once installed, you can run a scan of your site’s content…

WordPress SEO Plugins: SmartCrawl SEO Scan — Run an SEO test with SmartCrawl to analyze your content.

After running your scan, go to the plugin’s dashboard to activate various SEO features and begin configuring SEO settings for your site…

WordPress SEO Plugins: SmartCrawl dashboard — Configure all of your site’s SEO features and settings from SmartCrawl’s dashboard.

You can create optimized title and meta descriptions for each post and preview how these will display on Google Search results…

SmartCrawl SEO screen — Preview how your content will display in Google’s search results.

You can also customize post titles, descriptions, and featured images for social shares…

SmartCrawl Social settings — Configure SEO settings for promoting your content on social media.

And configure advanced SEO settings and instructions for displaying your content in search results…

SmartCrawl Advanced settings screen. — Configure advanced SEO settings for your articles.

Smartcrawl also lets you configure Schema markup settings for your website.

SmartCrawl - Schema settings — Configure schema settings for your website with SmartCrawl.

You can also add preset Schema types that include all the properties recommended by Google or add your own custom schema types.

SmartCrawl WordPress SEO Plugin - Add Schema Type screen. — Add schema types to your site to help Google understand and rank your content better.

SmartCrawl is a powerful WordPress search engine optimization plugin that makes your site easier to find and improves your website and content ranking, for free.

Watch the video below for an overview of what the plugin can do to help improve your site’s SEO:

The PRO version of the plugin offers advanced features like reports, automated scanning, automated linking for specific keywords, a crawler that checks for broken URLs, 404 errors, and multiple redirections, plus access to 24/7 support for all things WordPress-related.

More Info: SmartCrawl

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular and widely used WordPress SEO plugin.

The plugin includes many SEO features designed to help site visitors and search engines to better understand your content, like canonical URLs, meta tags, title and meta description templates, XML sitemaps, Schema, SEO and readability analysis tools, Google preview, and more.

WordPress SEO Plugins: Yoast SEO - General Screen - Features Tab — Enable or disable SEO features from the Yoast SEO settings panel.

The premium version of the plugin includes additional features like extensions for news SEO, video SEO, local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO, integrations with other SEO tools and services, blocks for the WordPress Block Editor, and advanced optimization tools.

If your WordPress theme does not support breadcrumb navigation links by default, you may have to edit your theme’s templates and add a snippet of code to display breadcrumbs.

More info: Yoast SEO

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a powerful plugin that helps you optimize your website for search engines. It offers features like XML sitemap generation, meta tag optimization, social media integration, and advanced options for more experienced users.

More info: All in One SEO Pack

Rank Math

Rank Math is a feature-packed SEO plugin that provides a wide range of optimization options. It offers features like advanced schema markup, redirection management, XML sitemap generation, and easy integration with popular SEO tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

More info: Rank Math

IndexNow Plugin

IndexNow Plugin is a free plugin for WordPress that enables the automated submission of URLs to multiple search engines without having to register and verify your site.

The plugin automatically generates and hosts an API key on your site and detects when you create, update, or delete a page or post, and notifies search engines to ensure they have the latest updates about your site.

You can also toggle the automatic submission feature, manually submit a URL, view a list of recent URL submissions, retry any failed submissions from the recent submissions list, download recent URL submissions for analysis, and view the status of recent successful and failed submissions.

WordPress SEO Plugins: IndexNow Plugin - Settings — Access all of your URL submission tools and reports in the IndexNow Plugin Settings screen.

More info: IndexNow Plugin

Analytics Plugins

It’s important to track how, when, and where users are visiting your site. This data lets you see where you can make improvements to your site, increase rankings, and drive more web traffic.

BeeHive

Beehive gives you access to powerful data insight from Google Analytics reports inside your WordPress dashboard.

With the Beehive Google Analytics Dashboard plugin installed, you can track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration, and referrers, and enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.

Beehive Analytics - Bring Google Analytics to your dashboard. — Customize your dashboard view with the stats you need from Google Analytics.

You can also easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup display.

Once installed, you can use the plugin’s dashboard to see what promotional channels are performing the best and driving the most traffic to your site.

Beehive Analytics Plugin - See what channels perform the best. — Know what channels are sending you the most traffic and performing best on your site.

Set up analytics reports that include information like:

Analytics Overview – See all Users and Page Views for the current day, yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or across the year.
Session Report – See the number of interactions with your website taking place within a specific timeframe.
User Report – The total number of users for the requested time period.
Pageview Report – Know when a page containing your tracking code is visited.
Pages/Sessions Report – The average number of pages visited on your website per session.
Average Time on Page Report – See how long visitors are staying on your site.
Bounce Rate Report – See how many people leave your website after visiting one page.
Top Countries Report – See where your visitors are coming from.
Most Visited Page Report – Know what pages are being visited and how long visitors are staying.
Trends Report – Monitor trends and improve your content based on user behavior.
Referrals Report – See where most of your traffic is coming from and where you should be focusing most of your effort.
Medium Report – See how much traffic is coming from direct, email, referrals, social, or organic channels.
Search Engines Report – Know which browsers users are visiting your site from and use this information to improve and test your site’s performance across different browsers.
Social Networks – Learn which social networks are driving the most traffic to your site.

Beehive Analytics WordPress Analytics Dashboard Plugin - Get traffic insight form top countries and page views. — Beehive analytics lets you see which locations you should be targeting and which pages of your site are performing the best.

Beehive is one of the best free Google Analytics WordPress plugins available and comes packed with additional features to suit all kinds of websites, from blog and small business websites to eCommerce sites and enterprise networks, including:

Google Tag Manager integration
Built-in display advertising tracking for remarketing campaigns, Google Display Network Impression Reporting, demographic and interest reports
Security and GDPR privacy tracking features like Toggle IP Anonymization to anonymize your visitor IPs, stop demographic reports, protect user IDs, and more.
Roles and capabilities manager that let you customize reports, set what users have access to, and hide traffic data based on different user permissions.

Beehive Analytics Plugin For WordPress - Compare Statictics both visually and numerically. — Compare your statistics and results over different time frames.

For a tutorial on how to use this plugin, go here: How To Get The Most Out Of Beehive

More Details: Beehive Google Analytics Dashboard plugin

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is a very popular and widely-used Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

The plugin provides a website analytics dashboard inside WordPress with real-time stats, reports, and actionable insights.

MonsterInsights includes many features like universal website tracking and Google Analytics 4 setup across multiple devices and campaigns, enhanced eCommerce tracking, page level analytics, tracking for affiliate links, ads, authors, categories, tags, searches, custom post types, users, and other events, GDPR compliance, and seamless tracking integration with many popular WordPress plugins and services.

More info: MonsterInsights

Sitemap Plugins

Site maps help visitors find what they are looking for more quickly and easily on your site and search engines to discover more of your content.

Typically, search engines crawl your site’s content using XML Sitemaps, while visitors use HTML site maps. You can also add news sitemaps, video sitemaps, etc.

There are WordPress plugins you can use to add all kinds of sitemaps to your website.

To learn more about the differences between an HTML site map and an XML sitemap, what they are used for, and how to add them to your WordPress site, see these tutorials:

XML Sitemaps

From version 5.5 onward, WordPress has included its own in-built XML sitemaps.

Since XML sitemaps are now a core feature in WordPress and it’s not recommended to have more than one XML sitemap on your site as it may confuse search engines, you could simply use the native WordPress sitemap instead of a plugin.

The native XML sitemap feature of WordPress, however, is very basic and supports only a small set of content types.

SEO plugins like SmartCrawl and Yoast SEO also include XML sitemaps that are more advanced and give you options to decide what goes into that sitemap.

For example, if you noindex a post or page in Yoast SEO, the plugin immediately removes it from your sitemap. Other features of plugin sitemaps include properties like last modified date to help crawlers distinguish between what’s new and what’s old, images, etc.

If you plan to use SmartCrawl or Yoast SEO or have installed either of these SEO plugins, you don’t need to install an additional XML sitemap plugin and can override the native sitemap that ships with WordPress.

With SmartCrawl, for example, you can configure all of your sitemap settings from the plugin’s Sitemaps screen. This includes switching to the native WordPress sitemap (which will disable SmartCrawl’s sitemap), choosing which post types to include in your sitemap, and including/excluding other posts and post types.

SmartCrawl - Sitemaps screen. — SmartCrawl includes a full-featured XML sitemap.

The plugin generates and updates your sitemap when new content is added, changed, or removed, and automatically notifies Google.

Smartcrawl XML sitemap. — An XML sitemap is generated automatically by SmartCrawl.

SmartCrawl also generates a News Sitemap if your site publishes news-related articles and a Multilingual sitemap for each language you have on your site.

If you want to use a standalone plugin to create XML sitemaps, there are a number of sitemap plugins available in the WordPress directory.

For example…

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps is a standalone XML sitemap plugin for WordPress.

The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages and custom URLs and notifies all major search engines when you create and publish new content on your site.

More info: XML Sitemaps

Remember to add your XML sitemap (and RSS feeds) to search engines like Google and Bing via their search consoles. Also, see this section of the Content SEO lesson for more information.

HTML Site Maps

WP Sitemap Page

WP Sitemap Page is an HTML site map plugin that automatically generates a sitemap of all your pages and posts using a shortcode.

To see an example of an HTML site map generated by this plugin, visit our own Site Map page.

Note: This plugin does not generate an XML sitemap. It simply allows you to list all of your pages and posts on a single page for human visitors (i.e. not search engine bots) and exclude pages from displaying on your site map.

More info: WP Sitemap Page

Redirection Plugins

Whenever you change or redirect the URL of a post or page on your website to another page or website, it’s a good idea to let search engines know.

Use a WordPress plugin like the one shown below to manage your link redirections and to notify search engines that links have been redirected.

Redirection

Redirection is a very popular link redirection management plugin for WordPress. Use this plugin to point old, removed, deleted, or trashed posts to new posts on your site or URLs on external sites, easily manage 301 redirections, and keep track of 404 errors.

Simply enter the old URL (i.e. the Source URL) and the new URL (the Target URL), click a button, and the plugin will add the necessary code to your site to inform search engines that the page with your content has moved to a new location.

Redirections plugin screen - Content SEO tool. — Use a plugin like Redirection to let search engines know when you redirect URLs on your site.

For more instructions on using this plugin, see this section of the WordPress CMS Plugins lesson.

Summary

In addition to SEO tools and services, there are a number of WordPress SEO plugins you can use to optimize your content for search engines, automate and speed up search engine notifications, and help search engines (and users) find and index more of your site’s content.

We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and tracking your results to improve your content’s performance in the search engines.

The above is just a small sample of WordPress plugins you can use to improve your content SEO.

For more SEO plugin tutorials, go here: WordPress SEO Plugins

If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:

WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.

Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on improving your SEO using WordPress.

Return to the main WordPress Plugins section.

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WordPress CMS Plugins

Use these WordPress CMS plugins to help make your Content Management System easier to use and your website easier to manage.

WordPress CMS Plugins

Use these WordPress CMS plugins to help make your Content Management System easier to use and your website easier to manage.

WordPress offers many powerful built-in features for managing and organizing your website and its content.

The CMS plugins listed in this section will help to extend and enhance the functionality of these features and make using and managing your CMS easier, more efficient, and more productive, speeding up your content publishing and allowing you to manage different business setups and production workflow requirements.

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Editorial Calendar

Editorial Calendar makes it easier to see the status of all posts in your blog and when they’ll be published.

From the calendar, you can edit your post titles, post content, and scheduled times, use drag and drop to move posts around and change your post dates, manage post drafts and posts from multiple authors, and a whole lot more.

Check out the video below for an overview of what you can do with this plugin:

More info: Editorial Calendar

EditFlow

EditFlow is a plugin that lets you collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress. The plugin includes a number of useful content management workflow features, such as

Calendar – Provides a convenient month-by-month look at your content.
Custom Statuses – Lets you define the key stages of your workflow.
Editorial Comments – Provides threaded commenting in the admin section for private discussion between writers and editors.
Editorial Metadata – Helps you keep track of important details.
Notifications – Receive timely updates on content that you’re following.
Story Budget – View your upcoming content budget.
User Groups – Keep users organized by department or function.

More info: EditFlow

Better Search Replace

Imagine having loads of published pages on your website and then having to change something in your content that appears throughout your website.

You would either have to go through every page of your website and find every instance of the content you want to change…or you can use a plugin like Better Search Replace.

Better Search Replace is a great time-saving plugin for WordPress that lets you search for text strings (e.g. words, values, dates, sentences, URLs, etc.) throughout your website and replace these quickly and automatically on your site’s database, saving you the hassle of having to manually find and replace every instance.

Better Search Replace - Replacing http with https — An example of using Better Search Replace to quickly update thousands of http links to https.

The plugin is very easy to use and requires no technical skills. After installing the plugin, go to your WordPress admin menu and select Tools > Better Search Replace.

Tools - Better Search Replace — Select Tools > Better Search Replace from your WordPress admin menu.

On the main screen, do the following:

Enter the string or URL to search into the “Search for” field,
Enter the string or URL to be replaced into the “Replace with” field,
Select one, multiple, or all database tables you want the tool to search through using Ctrl-Click (Windows) or Cmd-Click (Mac).
Make sure the “Run as dry run” checkbox is ticked In the Additional Settings section. This enables the tool to make a “dry run” search and replace query without replacing anything in your site’s database (which helps to prevent errors).
Double-check what you have entered into the Search and Replace fields, and click the Run Search/Replace button to begin the process.

In the example below, we decided to change the URL text (called the post slug) in one of our lessons, after creating our course content and adding the old URL link to many pages.

So, instead of manually going through all the course content to find every page on our website pointing to the old URL and changing it to the new URL, we simply used Better Search Replace.

After installing the plugin, we entered the old URL in the “Search for” field, and the new URL in the “Replace with” field, and selected all tables on our database to seach.

Better Search Replace - Main screen. — Enter the text or URL that you want to search and replace.

We then ran a “search and replace” in dry run mode. The tool found 17 instances in our site’s database that needed updating.

Better Search Replace - Dry Run results. — Dry Run results.

We then unticked the “Run as dry run” checkbox to make permanent changes and clicked the button to run the search and replace function again.

Better Search Replace - Run Search/Replace — Run Search/Replace again without the dry run to make your changes.

The tool went through all of the site’s database tables and made the replacements. In our example, 47 database tables were searched and all instances of the old page URL were replaced with the new page URL.

Better Search Replace - Results. — Search and replace completed.

You can view which tables were changed by clicking on the “Click here for more details” link in the results notification.

Better Search Replace - View search/replace details. — View search/replace details.

To view full details about any changes made to your site’s database and access a whole range of advanced features, upgrade to the premium version of the plugin.

Tips:

After performing a search/replace, test and check your content to make sure that the replacement has been done correctly. This is especially important if replacing links and URLs in your content.
Use Better Search and Replace with a plugin like Broken Link Checker (described below) to avoid broken links when making changes to URLs.

More info: Better Search Replace (Free) | Better Search Replace (Premium)

Broken Link Checker

Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and lead to poor user experience. Checking for broken links in your content, therefore, is part of good content management.

Manually checking for broken links, however, can be extremely tedious and completely unnecessary when you can use a plugin instead.

Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that automatically monitors and tests all of your site’s internal and external links to help you find and fix broken links.

The plugin continually scans and reports broken links, giving you the choice of editing the URL, removing the link, marking “broken” links as working, leaving the link as is, and various other options.

Broken Link Checker - Plugin Screen — Broken Link Checker lets you find and fix broken links on your site.

For a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to use this plugin, go here: How To Detect And Fix Broken Links In WordPress

More info: Broken Link Checker

Redirection

Redirection is a really popular link redirection management plugin for WordPress.

Use this plugin to point old, removed, deleted, or trashed posts to new posts on your site or URLs on external sites, easily manage 301 redirections, and keep track of 404 errors.

Upon installation and activation, the plugin presents you with a wizard that includes a brief overview of how to use the tool and then guides you through the setup process.

Use the Redirection wizard to set up the plugin for optimal performance.

Once the plugin is set up, you can use it to manage unlimited redirections on your site.

Redirection Plugin For WordPress - Main Screen — Manage unlimited redirections with this plugin.

Redirecting outdated links not only helps to improve user experience but also your site ranking, so this is also an essential WordPress SEO plugin.

Adding a redirection is simple:

Click on the Add New button to create a new redirection.
In Source URL enter the URL you want to redirect from.
In Target URL enter the URL you want to redirect to.
Click the Add Redirect button.

Redirextions screen - Add New — Add new redirections in a few clicks.

After adding a new redirection URL, there are various additional functions you can perform, including editing your redirection.

For complete usage instructions, see the plugin’s documentation section.

More info: Redirection

Easy Table of Contents

Easy Table of Contents lets you insert an automatically generated table of contents (ToC) into your posts, pages, and custom post types.

You can disable the ToC for specific posts and pages, choose which heading styles will display in the ToC, choose different customization options and settings, and a whole lot more.

Screenshot of a ToC generated by the Easy Table of Contents Generator plugin. — An example of a Table of Contents automatically generated by the plugin.

You can see the plugin at work by clicking on any of the lesson pages of this course.

Example of a Table of Contents generated using the Easy Table of Contents plugin — Visit any lesson page on this site to see a Table of Contents generated automatically using the Easy Table of Contents plugin.

More info: Easy Table of Contents

User Role Editor

User Role Editor is a powerful free plugin that provides advanced user role management tools for WordPress.

With the plugin installed, you can easily create and edit new roles and manage permissions for all users with just a few clicks and set specific capabilities for each role separately simply by ticking or unticking checkboxes.

User Role Editor plugin screen. — The User Role Editor plugin lets you easily change role capabilities by enabling or disabling checkboxes.

There are many useful things you can do with the User Role Editor plugin, such as allowing or disallowing registered users to upload files to your site or disallowing certain types of users to delete posts they have already published.

You can also customize roles and set permissions and capabilities like removing the ability of authors to publish posts on your site, forcing posts to be submitted for review by an administrator before being approved for publishing, etc.

For a more in-depth tutorial on how to use this plugin, go here: How To Manage WordPress Users

More info: User Role Editor

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) lets you automatically display pages, posts, and custom post types related to the post your site visitors are currently reading.

Once installed and activated, the plugin’s algorithm analyzes your site’s post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies to find related content on your site and lets you display these on your posts using a range of different placement options, templates, and styles.

Screenshot of Related Posts example. — The plugin automatically generates related posts for your site visitors. Source: YARPP

Showing visitors relevant content from your site can help boost visitor engagement by keeping them longer on your site.

Increasing sessions and pageviews on your site can also help to improve SEO. The plugin also gives you options like displaying related content to visitors who are leaving your site.

An example of YARPP-generated posts displaying to exiting site visitors. — Display related posts to visitors exiting your website. Source: YARPP

More info: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Posts Table with Search & Sort

Posts Table with Search & Sort lets you organize posts into sortable and filterable tables, making it easier for users to find the content they want.

Posts Table with Search and Sort animated screenshot. — List your posts in a searchable and sortable filter. Source: Posts Table with Search and Sort

Your site visitors can filter content by date, category, tag, or author.

Tables display with pagination and responsive layouts for smaller screens.

Screenshot of a table generated with the Posts Table with Search and Sort plugin. — Create tables like this automatically using the plugin. Source: Posts Table with Search and Sort

The Pro version of the plugin includes over 50 advanced features, giving you complete control over all aspects of your tables.

These features include the ability to include any post type in tables, such as blog posts, pages, documents, and more, rename table headings, display or exclude items from showing in tables using a wider range of options, choose column widths and image sizes, embed audios and videos, and a whole lot more.

More info: Posts Table with Search & Sort (Free) | Posts Tables Pro (Premium)

Content Views

Content Views is a really useful and versatile plugin for displaying your content in attractive grid and list views.

The plugin makes it easy to display and sort posts, pages, and other content types without using code using filters like recent posts, categories, tags, authors, etc.

You can also add only selected posts to a view, and arrange the list by alphabetical order, published date, random order, or by dragging them into the order you’d like to see the content displayed.

Post grids are responsive and will automatically resize to look great on all devices.

The premium version of the plugin includes many additional useful grid and filter features, including displaying custom post type, filtering by custom taxonomy and custom field, frontend filter, displaying the grid on your Blog and Category pages, displaying ads in the grid, and much more.

We have created a tutorial that shows you how we use this plugin to keep the content on this website organized here: Web Content Organization

More info: Content Views (Free) or Content Views Pro (Premium)

TranslatePress

TranslatePress is a WordPress translation plugin that lets you create a bilingual or multilingual site for targeting users in other countries with content translated into different languages.

TranslatePress front-end visual translator editor. Source TranslatePress.

The interface allows you to easily translate the entire page at once, including output from shortcodes, forms, and page builders. It also works out of the box with WooCommerce.

This is a self-hosted translation plugin, so you’ll own all your translations.

Translate images and image sliders with TranslatePress. — You can also translate images and image sliders with TranslatePress. Source TranslatePress.

TranslatePress Multilingual Sites Premium includes a range of add-ons that let you extend the functionality of this WordPress translation plugin.

For example, you can:

Add an unlimited number of translation languages
Redirect first-time visitors to their preferred language based on their browser settings or IP address
Translate meta information for improved SEO (e.g. page title, description, URL slug, image alt tag, etc.)
Allow existing users to help translate the site without admin rights
Make translated content visible only to certain user roles
Configure and display different menu items for different languages
And more.

Watch the video below for an overview of what the plugin can do:

TranslatePress Multilingual Plugin

More info: TranslatePress (free) | TranslatePress (Premium)

Export All URLs

Export All URLs lets you export the URLs of all your site’s pages, posts, and custom post types to a CSV file, which you can then easily import into a spreadsheet.

This plugin is useful for performing a content audit or site migration.

More info: Export All URLs

Duplicate Posts & Pages

Duplicate Posts & Pages is a handy plugin that lets you quickly and easily duplicate (clone) posts, pages, and custom posts.

You can set up default preferences for your newly duplicated posts and pages in the plugin’s settings section.

For example, depending on your site’s configuration, you can specify which editor new posts and pages should be saved as (classic or block editor).

Additionally, you can save duplicated items as a draft, private, public, or pending post or page, select where to redirect posts/pages after creating this, and add a suffix to your duplicated post or page.

After setting your preferences, simply hover over the post or page you want to duplicate and click on “Duplicate This” in the item’s menu.

If you need to give different user roles access to the post/page duplication function or use additional features like allowing which post types can be duplicated, then consider upgrading to the Pro version of the plugin.

The video below provides an overview of the plugin’s capabilities.

More info: Duplicate Posts & Pages

For additional plugins that you can use to duplicate posts and pages, see this tutorial: How To Clone Posts and Pages In WordPress

Disable Comments

Don’t want others commenting on your posts? Use the Disable Comments plugin to prevent site-wide comments in WordPress.

If you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts then you can do this directly through WordPress. If you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site, then use this plugin.

With this plugin installed, you can globally control comments on your website and disable comments according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.

The video below provides an overview of what this plugin can do:

More Details: Disable Comments

Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions

WordPress (and the WordPress Autosave and Post Revisions Feature) stores all of your deleted posts, pages, comments, post revisions, spam comments, unused tags, etc. in the WordPress database.

All of this unnecessary data can significantly increase, bloat, and slow down your website.

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions is a free ‘one-click’ WordPress database optimization plugin you can use to delete all the extra table data you don’t need from your site’s database.

You can choose what to remove to avoid accidentally deleting data.

This includes:

Old post, page, or custom post revisions (you can choose to keep a certain number of your most recent revisions and delete older revisions)
Trashed posts, pages, and comments (optional)
Spam comments (optional)
Unused tags (optional)

And a whole lot more!

Optimize database After Deleting Revisions - Main Screen — Optimize database After Deleting Revisions – Main Screen

You can also schedule optimization to run automatically hourly, daily, or weekly at a specific time (optional) and enable one-click database optimization links in your site’s admin bar and admin menu (optional).

After the plugin cleans up your database, it then optimizes its tables for better performance (optionally you can exclude certain tables, or even specific posts/pages, from optimization), and creates a log of the optimizations (optional).

More Info: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

For more plugins that can help you optimize your WordPress site’s database and delete unnecessary post revisions, go here: WordPress Plugins For Managing Post Revisions

Advanced Custom Fields

Advanced Custom Fields is a very popular WordPress plugin that expands your Content Management System’s capabilities significantly by allowing you to add extra content fields (called custom fields) to your WordPress edit screens.

The plugin lets you create new custom fields with just a few clicks using a user-friendly field builder.

You can create as many fields as you like, each with its own name, type, and settings. Each field you create is then added to a group that allows you to organize your fields and specify the edit screens where these will appear.

In addition to posts, you can add and display custom fields on pages, custom post types, user profiles, comments, media, and more.

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

For more help using ACF, refer to the plugin’s documentation, see this tutorial, or watch the videos below:

Explanation of ACF – Part 1

Explanation of ACF – Part 2

More info: Advanced Custom Fields

WPCode

WPCode is a code snippets plugin that makes it easy to add code snippets in WordPress without having to edit your theme’s files (note: Editing theme files like functions.php is not recommended, as you will lose all custom code functions if you update your theme or switch to another theme).

WPCode All Snippets screen. — The WPCode plugin includes a built-in WordPress code snippets library.

The plugin’s Global Header and Footer interface makes it easy to add code for applications like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, and custom CSS to your WordPress site’s header and footer and other areas of your website.

WPCode's Global Header and Footer screen. — Easily add code like Google Analytics to your site using WPCode’s Global Header and Footer screen.

You can also use WPCode to insert custom code for running different applications on your site (e.g. email newsletter forms) and then insert these into your posts and pages using a shortcode.

WPCode lets you add PHP code snippets (with smart code validation to prevent PHP errors), JavaScript code snippets, CSS code snippets, HTML code snippets, and text snippets with full conditional logic.

WPCode Edit Snippet screen. — Add custom code snippets to WPCode and insert these into your posts and pages using a shortcode.

Use this plugin to save time inserting scripts that need to go into either the Headers or Footers section of your website and manage all your header and footer scripts and other custom code snippets from a single screen.

Some examples of codes you may want to add using this plugin include inserting:

Google Analytics tracking code.
PHP Code Snippets or JavaScript code snippets without modifying your theme’s functions.php file.
Facebook Pixels code, Google Conversion Pixels code, and other Advertising Conversion Pixel Scripts with conditional logic.
Google AdSense Ads code, Amazon Native Contextual Ads code, and other Media Ads code.
Site Verification Meta tags for Social Media, Google Search Console, and other Domain verification scripts.
Add Rich Text Ads and Content Snippets automatically on posts & pages.

This plugin is quick and easy to set up, offers a ready-made Code Snippet Library and Custom WordPress Code Snippet Generator, and lets you add unlimited code snippets. You can also export/import code snippets,

More Info: Code Snippets

CoBlocks

The WordPress Block Editor is part of WordPress’ Gutenberg project, which aims to redefine what is possible with the WordPress CMS.

Many new blocks are being developed to extend the power of the WordPress CMS and CoBlocks is an example of this.

CoBlocks is an innovative collection of page-building WordPress blocks for the new Gutenberg WordPress block editor.

It provides many additional blocks and true row and column building for a true page builder experience for Gutenberg.

CoBlocks plugin for WordPress — CoBlocks adds true row and column-building capabilities to the WordPress block editor.

CoBlocks’ additional blocks include:

Accordion Block
Alert Block
Author Profile Block
Carousel Gallery Block
Click to Tweet Block
Collage Gallery Block
Counter Block (New!)
Dynamic Separator Block
Events Block
FAQ Block
Features Block
Food & Drinks Block
Form Block
Gif Block
GitHub Gist Block
Hero Block
Highlight Block
Icon Block
Logos & Badges Block
Map Block
Masonry Gallery Block
Media Card Block
Offset Gallery Block
OpenTable Reservations Block
Post Carousel Block
Posts Block
Pricing Table Block
Resizable Row/Columns Blocks
Services Block
Shape Divider Block
Social Profiles Block
Social Sharing Block
Stacked Gallery Block

CoBlocks - sample of additional blocks. — CoBlocks provides many additional blocks to the WordPress Block Editor.

As well as providing many additional blocks, CoBlocks also gives you custom typography controls that let you design web pages and control typographic elements including fonts, sizes, weights, transformations, and more.

More Info: CoBlocks

Additionally, here are some other useful WordPress plugins that will help you manage your site and its content more effectively:

Smush – Image Optimization

Smush - WordPress image optimization plugin. — Smush – WordPress image optimization plugin.

Smush is an easy-to-use plugin with an intuitive dashboard and advanced settings that speeds up your website’s loading time, improves its performance, and prevents your website from becoming slow and sluggish.

It does this by optimizing your website’s images, making them smaller in size without sacrificing quality. This results in faster loading times and improved website performance.

With Smush Pro, you can optimize unlimited images in bulk at once with just a few clicks and use features like lazy loading and automatic compression to further improve your website’s speed. Plus, with Super Smush multi-pass lossy compression, you can save up to 2x the space without sacrificing image quality.

Smush Pro also offers a CDN for faster optimization results and can preserve image EXIF data.

By using Smush Pro, you can experience faster load times, reduced server space usage, and better web accessibility for all of your site’s users.

More info: Smush (Free) | Smush Pro

Hummingbird – Site Optimization

Hummingbird - WordPress Optimization Plugin — Hummingbird – WordPress site optimization plugin.

Hummingbird is a powerful performance and optimization plugin for WordPress that will help improve your website’s speed and performance.

Hummingbird Pro offers advanced features such as minification, GZIP compression, browser caching, and image optimization, which can help to significantly improve website speed and performance.

It also includes a performance report that examines the same vital components of your website as Google PageSpeed Insights and gives you an overall score out of 100, as well as scores for aspects of your site that you may want to consider fixing, including render-blocking resources, server response time, image optimization, and minification.

Other benefits of using Hummingbird Pro include uptime monitoring, which keeps an eye on your site around the clock and notifies you if anything goes wrong, including slow response times, server errors, and pages disappearing.

More info: Hummingbird (Free) | Hummingbird Pro

Defender – WordPress Security

Defender is a plugin that provides complete security for WordPress sites.

Defender offers a range of features such as scheduled security scans, vulnerability reports, safety recommendations, blacklist monitoring, and customized hardening for your site.

Defender Pro also includes secure cloud-based audit logs so you can see every change made to your site, plugin and theme code file change detection, and automated scans and reports with va checklist of all issues that need fixing.

Defender Pro deters hackers with IP banning, login lockout, updating security keys, two-factor authorization, and more. It prevents brute force attacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting XSS, and prevents hackers from exploiting WordPress vulnerabilities.

Defender Pro also offers a range of benefits such as easy installation, one-click security tweaks, disabling trackbacks and pingbacks, hiding error reporting, preventing information disclosure, preventing PHP execution, changing the location of WordPress’s default login area with login masking, enabling round-the-clock firewall protection, setting up login lockout, automating blocking of bot IPS with 404 detention, blocking users based on location with geolocation IP lockout, blocking or allowing IPs with IP Banning, and enabling two-factor authentication.

More info: Defender (Free) | Defender Pro

SmartCrawl – WordPress SEO

SmartCrawl is a powerful plugin that helps optimize the on-page SEO of your website for search engines, improve your online presence, increase website traffic, and create better user engagement.

SmartCrawl offers a range of features that help optimize your website for search engines, including automated SEO scanning, real-time keyword and content analysis, detailed audits and reports, and one-click recommendations.

With SmartCrawl Pro, you can create targeted content that ranks at the top of your favorite search engine. It also allows you to fine-tune your title and description on each post and page, create comprehensive sitemaps for your site, verify your site with Google and Bing, connect to a free Moz account for SEO reporting, and enable automatic internal link building.

SmartCrawl Pro is easy to use and comes with a setup wizard that walks you through the most important settings. It also offers multiple keyword analysis, additional SEO recommendations, the ability to disable SEO and readability analysis in the post list, and more.

More info: SmartCrawl (Free) | SmartCrawl Pro

Forminator – Form Builder

Forminator is an easy-to-use and feature-rich form builder plugin that lets you create a wide range of forms, from simple contact forms to complex order forms with payment collection, polls, quizzes, and more.

Forminator Pro includes extra features such as forms that let you collect eSignatures.

More info: Forminator (Free) | Forminator Pro

Hustle – Lead Generation

Hustle is a plugin that provides unlimited pop-ups, slide-ins, email opt-ins, and social sharing modules for marketing campaigns.

With Hustle Pro, you can create and customize modules to grow your email list and increase subscribers, leads, and customers by displaying targeted ads with unblockable popups, slide-ins, opt-ins, and embeds.

Hustle Pro seamlessly integrates with over 1000 third-party applications and provides conversion reports with configurable metrics.

More info: Hustle (Free) | Hustle Pro

Snapshot – WordPress Backups

Snapshot is a backup plugin for WordPress that allows you to create and manage backups of your website’s data and store these on-site and off-site with FTP and SFTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, and WPMU DEV cloud.

Snapshot Pro lets you restore a website easily from the admin dashboard, even when the site is down or locked up.

With Snapshot Pro, you can create unlimited snapshots, schedule backups, and customize what’s backed up. You can also store unlimited snapshots, auto-remove old backups, set backup intervals, and download log files.

The plugin is also flexible when it comes to backing up WordPress, allowing you to back up a single install of WordPress or, back up the main site and sub-sites of a Multisite network separately.

You can also manage snapshots directly in the WordPress dashboard or use the plugin in conjunction with WPMU DEV’s managed backups to save backups to multiple locations, creating redundant backups and ensuring no loss of content in the event of a hack or error.

More info: Snapshot

Branda – White Label WordPress

Branda is a white-labeling and admin-customizing plugin for WordPress that allows you to customize every aspect of WordPress, from the front end to the back end of your website.

Branda Pro offers a wide range of features, including the ability to reorganize the admin menu and bar, create custom login, maintenance mode, and coming soon pages, personalize widgets, add new help content, create a custom color scheme, add custom CSS, choose a new email template, edit the author box, create a personalized cookie notice, personalize the database error page, add header and footer content, control comments, select a new favicon, and set text replacement rules.

With Branda Pro, you can completely white-label WordPress with over 30 modules for customizing the dashboard. This is useful for WordPress developers and design agencies, or if you plan to provide WordPress sites to other users fully branded as your own (or just want to customize your own site).

More info: Branda (Free) | Branda Pro

Shipper – WordPress Site Migrations

Shipper is a WordPress plugin that helps you migrate WordPress sites from one host to another, simplifying the migration process, and saving you time and money.

The plugin offers two forms of migration: API Migration and Package Migration. API Migration transfers everything directly to the new site using a secure API, while Package Migration creates a package of the site’s files and databases that can be manually uploaded to the new host.

Shipper also offers pre-flight checks and helpful hints to speed up the migration process, as well as accurate ETA’s and calculated website sizes. Additionally, Shipper Pro handles moving local to production, development to live, and offers password confirmation to protect connected sites from hackers.

More info: Shipper

Summary

There are a number of WordPress CMS plugins you can use to automate tasks in your Content Management System and make running your WordPress site easier and more securely.

We recommend installing some of the plugins listed above and learning how to use these to manage your WordPress CMS more effectively.

The above is just a small sample of plugins you can use to enhance your WordPress CMS.

For more plugin tutorials, go here: WordPress Management Plugins

If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:

WordPress Training Manual – A detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users (non-coders).
WPMU DEV Blog – Hundreds of WordPress tutorials for advanced WordPress users.

Make sure to subscribe to our updates to receive our free email course on managing your content effectively, which includes useful information and practical tips on using WordPress as a CMS.

Return to the main WordPress Plugins section.

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