Chatbots

Chatbots are a powerful tool for managing customer support documentation.

Chatbots

Chatbots are not only revolutionizing customer conversations, but they are also a powerful tool for managing customer support documentation.

ChatbotsAre your customers spending a huge amount of time searching through your documentation for answers? Do you wish you could automate your customer support and free up valuable time for your team?

If so, then it may be time to consider adding an intelligent chatbot to your site!

In a separate lesson, we address the topic of managing customer support documentation using AI-powered tools like chatbots.

In this lesson, we present various solutions to integrate AI-powered chatbots with your documentation to engage your customers in natural and meaningful conversations and provide instant support and personalized experiences.

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What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is an innovative conversational tool that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and human language to provide instant responses to customer queries. By employing cutting-edge technology such as natural language processing (NLP), chatbots simulate human-like conversations, revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers.

Through the use of AI, chatbots can understand and interpret the nuances of human language, comprehending the intent and context behind customer inquiries. This allows them to generate intelligent and contextually relevant responses, making interactions with customers feel more personalized and human.

By leveraging NLP, chatbots go beyond simple keyword recognition, enabling them to understand the meaning behind customers’ messages. They can process and analyze input in real-time, extracting crucial information and accurately addressing customer needs.

Whereas customers seeking support traditionally engaged with businesses through static FAQs or waiting for customer support agents to be available, chatbots provide instant assistance, 24/7, ensuring they receive prompt responses to their inquiries.

Whether it’s answering frequently asked questions, providing product recommendations, or guiding users through complex processes, chatbots are designed to deliver efficient and effective support.

Moreover, chatbots can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, scaling effortlessly to accommodate high volumes of inquiries. This enables businesses to provide consistent and uninterrupted support, even during peak periods, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The versatility of chatbots extends across various communication channels, including websites, messaging platforms, and mobile apps. They seamlessly integrate with these platforms, meeting customers where they are and facilitating convenient interactions.

As technology continues to advance, chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, capable of learning and improving over time. Through machine learning algorithms, chatbots can analyze user interactions, gather insights, and adapt their responses accordingly, constantly enhancing their performance and accuracy.

To learn more about the benefits of leveraging custom chatbots for superior customer support and more effective documentation management, see this lesson: Managing Customer Support Documentation Using AI

AI-Powered Chatbot Solutions

The services below can help your business harness the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI, and integrate AI-powered chatbots to streamline customer support document management and elevate customer experience.

DocsBot

DocsBot - AI-powered chatbots
DocsBot – add an AI chatbot to your site trained with your content and documentation.

DocsBot is powered by ChatGPT and provides an innovative and inexpensive solution for streamlining your customer support process and managing the way users search through documentation on your website.

DocsBot used on WPTrainingManual.com
Use DocsBot’s Q&A feature to help users find information faster on your site. Source: WPTrainingManual.com

Key features of this tool include:

Instant Answers with Custom Chatbots

DocsBot enables you to build custom chatbots that are specifically trained with your content and documentation. This means that your bots have in-depth knowledge about your product, tutorials, whitepapers, technical specifications, and more.

When customers have detailed questions, DocsBot’s ChatGPT-powered bots can provide instant answers, including code examples and formatted output.

Additionally, DocsBot provides links to the source documentation used in its reply that users can click on to explore your content in more depth.

This is great for helping users find product documentation, tutorials, etc.

DocsBot reply with a list of sources
DocsBot replies include links to the source documentation.

Effortless Deployment and Customization

With DocsBot, deploying custom chatbots is a breeze. You can train and deploy bots within minutes, saving you valuable time and resources.

The Q/A bot feature allows you to make your documentation interactive, providing detailed and direct answers to queries about your product.

DocsBot used on WPTrainingManual.com
DocsBot provides instant answers and links to sourced content.

You can even embed DocsBot into your website effortlessly using fully customizable widgets. Just add a script tag or WordPress plugin, and you’re ready to go.

DocsBot chatbot
Adding the chat widget to your site lets you provide user support on every page they visit.

Custom Copywriting Made Easy

In addition to customer support, DocsBot offers an extra feature that can enhance your content creation process. If you need help writing marketing copy or blog posts, DocsBot utilizes a customized ChatGPT, specifically trained on your product, to assist in generating high-quality content.

Efficient Support Ticket Management

Writing the same responses to support tickets repeatedly can be a monotonous task. DocsBot eliminates this challenge by allowing you to train your bot on your support history and documentation. As a result, DocsBot can automatically reply to new support tickets, saving you both time and money.

Empower Your Employees with Internal Knowledge Bots

Searching for information within your organization’s knowledge base can often be a time-consuming process for employees. With DocsBot, you can address this issue effortlessly. DocsBot indexes your internal knowledge base and documentation, enabling your employees to find answers instantly. This functionality boosts productivity and saves valuable time, allowing your team members to focus on more critical tasks.

Seamless Integration with Powerful API

DocsBot offers a powerful API that enables you to integrate AI chat into your own products seamlessly. Whether it’s your website, app, or WordPress plugin, DocsBot can provide answers to your users. The API integration opens up endless possibilities for leveraging DocsBot’s capabilities and enhancing user experiences across various platforms.

User-Friendly Interface and Content Indexing

Managing your documentation and content is made simple with DocsBot’s intuitive interface. With just a few clicks, you can index your documentation, blog posts, or any other content source.

The URL and sitemap importers allow you to index webpages or entire websites effortlessly. You can also upload document files in various formats such as TXT, DOC, PPT, EML, HTML, PDF, or bulk upload via ZIP. DocsBot takes care of the content indexing process, transforming it into a ChatGPT-powered bot for you or your users.

Effortless Content Updates and Integration

Keeping your content up to date is vital, and DocsBot makes it effortless. Schedule regular updates to ensure your content stays fresh and accurate. Whether it’s updating webpages, support docs, or blog posts, DocsBot’s seamless integration with URL and sitemap importers simplifies the process.

DoscBot content refresh
DocsBot offers source refreshing options to keep your bot updated with your latest documentation.

You can also train your DocsBot on your blog content using WordPress export files or RSS feeds, making it easier to surface your best content to those seeking answers.

Extensive Content Source Options

DocsBot offers an impressive range of options for content sources. You can add any type of content you want your bot to be able to answer questions about. Whether it’s a URL, document files, WordPress, sitemaps, URL lists, CSV files, or even YouTube transcripts, DocsBot ensures you have the flexibility to customize your bot’s knowledge base to fit your specific needs.

DocsBot is a game-changing solution for managing your customer support documentation effectively. With its ChatGPT-powered bots, intuitive interface, and seamless integration options, DocsBot empowers you to automate your customer support, enhance content creation, streamline support ticket management, and boost employee productivity.

DocsBot offers a free version that you can sign up to test the tool with no credit card required and various paid options to suit your business needs.

For a working example of DocsBot in action, visit WPTrainingManual.com.

For more info, visit the site: DocsBot

Intercom

Intercom - Custom Chatbots
Intercom provides no-code Custom Bots for your business.

Intercom provides bots that can be completely customized without the need for coding and designed and launched within minutes.

Intercom chatbot
Intercom’s Custom Bots can assist users with questions related to different areas of your business.

The bots can be adapted to your business needs, seamlessly integrating with your tech stack, automating workflows, and extending your sales and support teams.

Intercom’s Custom Bots efficiently gather upfront customer information, prioritize and route new conversations, and streamline your support process, allowing your business to experience faster customer resolutions and generate leads 24/7.

More info: Intercom

Engati

Engati - AI Chatbots
Engati – low-code, enterprise-grade AI chatbot and live chat platform.

Engati provides a comprehensive Chatbot and Live Chat Platform, with a wide range of intelligent solutions to enhance customer interactions.

Engati - chatbot with language translation capabilities.
Engati offers chatbots with multi-lingual capabilities.

Engati focuses on solutions that deliver seamless omnichannel engagement, and consistent customer experiences across various channels such as web, mobile, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

It provides an array of powerful features and capabilities, including:

  • Whatsapp Chatbot
  • Shopify Chatbot
  • AI Chatbot
  • Instagram Chatbot
  • Live Chat

The platform seamlessly connects with your existing systems and tools, supports multi-lingual conversations, and offers flexible chatbot training options to provide tailored and accurate responses.

Industries that can benefit from Engati’s chatbots include e-commerce & retail, logistics, travel & hospitality, insurance & banking, government, edtech, and real estate.

More info: Engati

Drift

Drift Custom Chatbots
Drift’s custom chatbots provide specific messages and interactions for your users.

Drift offers custom chatbots that help to engage with your website visitors using specific messages and interactions for each visitor and every page. The chatbot will even pre-qualify visitors and schedule a meeting with your sales team.

Drift chatbot example
Drift’s custom chatbots help you engage with users.

Key features include:

  • A/B Testing capability lets you test different bot messages to improve conversions.
  • Custom-train your AI model with GPT in minutes
  • 50+ native integrations and a Zapier connection to over 500+ apps.

More info: Drift

Zapier

While Zapier is primarily an automation platform that lets you connect apps and automate workflows without coding skills required, it offers a feature called Zapier Interfaces that lets you create your own custom AI chatbot.

Zapier Interfaces
Zapier lets you create your own custom chatbot without coding.

To learn how to create your own custom chatbot using Zapier, see this tutorial on their website: How To Create A Custom AI Chatbot Using Zapier Interfaces

Hopefully, the various solutions presented above will help you integrate AI-powered chatbots with your documentation.

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Image generated using Photoshop.

Content Management System FAQ

Find answers to frequently asked questions about content management systems (CMS).

Content Management System FAQ

Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about content management systems.

Content Management System FAQsContent management is a critical aspect of modern businesses and organizations.

It encompasses everything from creating and storing content to distributing it to the right people at the right time.

As such, it’s no surprise that there are many questions and misconceptions about what content management is and what it entails.

As this entire website is devoted to helping you better understand why and how to manage your content more effectively, in this blog post, we’ll focus on answering some of the most frequently asked questions about content management systems (CMS), including what a CMS is, the different types of content management systems, the benefits of using a content management system, and how to choose the right one for your business.

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What is a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is a software tool that provides a centralized platform for managing digital content, making it easier for organizations to keep their digital content up-to-date, consistent, and secure.

For a more comprehensive explanation, see this lesson: Content Management System (CMS)

What is the difference between a content management system (CMS) and content management?

CMS and content management are related but distinct concepts.

A CMS, or Content Management System, refers to a specific type of software application that provides the tools and technologies needed to manage your digital content.

A CMS includes features such as authoring and editing tools, version control, workflows, and publishing capabilities.

A CMS also provides a centralized platform for organizing, storing, and managing digital content such as text, images, videos, and documents, through a centralized platform, making it easier for organizations to keep their digital content up-to-date and consistent.

Content management, on the other hand, is the process of managing digital content throughout its lifecycle. This includes tasks such as creating, editing, organizing, storing, and publishing content, as well as managing versions, workflows, and access controls.

Content management is a broader concept that includes the use of various tools and technologies, including using a CMS, but also encompasses other types of software, such as digital asset management systems (DAMS), component content management systems (CCMS), and enterprise content management systems (ECMS), which we will touch on shortly in this article.

In summary, a CMS is a specific type of software tool used for managing digital content, while content management refers to the overall process of managing digital content throughout its lifecycle.

For practical lessons and tutorials on content management and its components, go here: Content Management

For a detailed lesson on using a CMS, go here: Content Management System (CMS)

What are the benefits of using a content management system (CMS)?

A CMS offers several benefits, including:

  • Ease of use: Non-technical users can easily create, publish, and manage content without the need for HTML or coding skills.
  • Improved efficiency: A CMS streamlines the content creation and publishing process, making it faster and more efficient.
  • Better organization: A CMS allows for the centralized storage of all digital content, making it easier to find and manage.
  • Consistency: A CMS helps maintain a consistent look and feel for all digital content, improving brand consistency.
  • Accessibility: A CMS allows for multiple users to access and contribute to the content, improving collaboration.

What are the different types of content management systems?

Different types of CMS include:

What are the key features of a content management system?

The key features of a CMS include:

  • Content creation tools: A CMS should have tools for creating and editing content, such as a WYSIWYG editor or HTML editor.
  • Content management: A CMS should provide a centralized location for storing and managing content, as well as tools for organizing and categorizing content.
  • User management: A CMS should allow for multiple users to access and contribute to the content, with features for controlling access and managing user roles.
  • Publishing and distribution: A CMS should provide tools for publishing and distributing content, as well as the ability to schedule content for future publishing.
  • Analytics and reporting: A CMS should provide metrics and analytics to track the performance of published content and inform content strategy.

What are the different deployment models for a CMS?

There are two main deployment models for a CMS: on-premise and cloud-based.

  • On-premise CMS: This type of CMS is installed and hosted on the organization’s own servers. It provides greater control and customization, but also requires IT resources for setup and maintenance.
  • Cloud-based CMS: This type of CMS is hosted by a third-party provider and is accessed through the internet. It offers lower upfront costs and less maintenance but may have limitations on customization and control.

How do I choose the right CMS for my organization?

Choosing the right CMS for your organization requires evaluating your specific needs and requirements. Consider factors such as:

  • Size and complexity of your organization: Choose a CMS that can scale and grow with your organization.
  • Technical expertise: Consider the technical skills of your team and choose a CMS that is easy to use and requires minimal technical expertise.
  • Budget: Consider the cost of the CMS, including upfront costs, recurring costs, and potential hidden costs.
  • Integration requirements: Consider any existing systems and tools your organization uses, and choose a CMS that can integrate with them.
  • Content management needs: Consider the type of content you need to manage and choose a CMS that provides the necessary features and capabilities.
  • Deployment model: Decide whether you want an on-premise or cloud-based CMS, and choose the model that best fits your needs.

How does a CMS improve website accessibility?

A CMS can improve website accessibility by:

  • Providing a centralized location for managing and organizing content, making it easier to ensure that all content meets accessibility standards.
  • Offering WYSIWYG editors and other content creation tools that allow users to create accessible content without needing specialized knowledge.
  • Providing features for managing and updating content, reducing the risk of outdated or broken accessibility features.
  • Allowing multiple users to access and contribute to the content, improving collaboration, and reducing the risk of inaccessible content.

How does a CMS improve the user experience?

A CMS can improve the user experience by:

  • Streamlining the content creation and publishing process, making it faster and more efficient.
  • Providing a centralized location for managing and organizing content, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
  • Allowing for consistent branding and design across all digital content, improving the overall look and feel of the website.
  • Providing analytics and reporting to track the performance of published content, allowing for continual improvement of the user experience.

How does a CMS improve search engine optimization (SEO)?

A CMS can improve SEO by:

  • Allowing for the creation and management of meta tags, which are used by search engines to understand the content on a website.
  • Providing tools for creating and managing internal links, which help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of the website.
  • Allowing for the creation and management of sitemaps, which provide a roadmap for search engines to crawl and index the website.
  • Providing analytics and reporting to track the performance of published content, allowing for continual improvement of SEO efforts.

How does a CMS support collaboration and teamwork?

A CMS supports collaboration and teamwork by:

  • Allowing multiple users to access and contribute to the content, improving collaboration.
  • Providing features for controlling access and managing user roles, allowing for secure collaboration.
  • Allowing for centralized storage and management of all digital content, improving organization, and reducing the risk of version control issues.
  • Providing tools for tracking changes and managing revisions, improving accountability, and reducing the risk of conflicts.

A CMS is a powerful tool for managing digital content, but it can also be complex and confusing. We hope that by answering the most frequently asked questions about CMSs, you have a better understanding of this technology and how it can benefit your organization.

For more lessons related to Content Management Systems (CMS), click on one of the links below:

Content Management System (CMS)
Content Management System (CMS)
Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.
Content Management System FAQ
Content Management System FAQ
Find answers to frequently asked questions about content management systems (CMS).
Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)
Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)
Learn about the key benefits and features of a Web Content Management System (WCMS) and popular WCMS platforms.
Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS)
Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS)
Learn about the key benefits and features of an Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) and popular ECMS platforms.
Component Content Management Systems (CCMS)
Component Content Management Systems (CCMS)
Learn about the key benefits and features of a Component Content Management System (CCMS) and popular CCMS platforms.
Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS)
Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS)
Learn about the key benefits and features of a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) and popular DAMS platforms.

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Image: AI-Generated

Document Management Systems

A Document Management System can improve your organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Document Management Systems

A Document Management System can improve your organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Document Management Systems - Image of a businesswoman holding up a document.A Document Management System (DMS) can play a crucial role in your content documentation system by providing a central location to store, manage, and organize all of your electronic and physical documents, automating tasks, providing security and compliance, and integrating with other tools.

In this lesson, we will discuss the key benefits and features to look for when selecting a Document Management System, and provide a list of popular DMS applications.

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What Is A Document Management System?

Document management systems (DMS) are software programs designed to help organizations manage, store, and track their electronic and physical documents.

These systems provide a centralized repository for all documents, making it easy for users to access and share information.

They also offer powerful tools for organizing, searching, and retrieving documents, as well as for controlling access to them.

Benefits Of Using A DMS

When selecting a DMS, it’s important to consider the specific needs of your organization.

Some key features of a DMS to look for include:

  • Document organization: A DMS should provide a centralized repository for all documents, making it easy to organize and categorize them. This can save time when searching for specific documents and ensure that all documents are stored in a consistent and easy-to-find location.
  • Document security: A DMS should include robust security features to protect sensitive information and ensure compliance with industry regulations. This can include user-level access controls, encryption, and backups.
  • Document version control: DMSs should provide version control functionality, which allows users to track changes made to a document over time and easily revert to previous versions.
  • Document retrieval: A good DMS should make it easy to search for and retrieve documents, even if they are stored in different locations. This can save time and increase productivity.
  • Document collaboration: A DMS should include tools for collaboration, such as commenting and shared editing. This can improve team communication and coordination.
  • Document workflow: Many DMSs include tools for automating document-related tasks, such as routing documents for approval or tracking their status. This can streamline document-related processes and improve efficiency.
  • Integration: Your DMS should easily integrate with other software systems you already use, such as email or project management tools. This can improve the overall workflow and collaboration between different tools.
  • Cost-effective: A good DMS should help to reduce the need for paper storage, which can save on costs related to printing, paper, and storage space.
  • Mobile access: Some DMSs allow users to access documents from mobile devices, which means employees can access their work even when away from the office.
  • Compliance: DMSs can help organizations to comply with legal and regulatory requirements by providing document retention and destruction policies, and audit trails of access and changes.
  • Time-saving: A great DMS should automate many of the manual tasks associated with document management such as document retrieval, organization, and version control, which can save time and increase productivity.

Popular DMS Applications

Here is a list of popular Document Management Systems:

  • Microsoft SharePoint: A web-based DMS that offers document storage, collaboration, and workflow tools. It also integrates with other Microsoft Office applications.
  • Google Drive: A cloud-based DMS that allows users to store and share files, including documents, images, and videos. It also includes tools for collaboration and commenting on documents.
  • Dropbox: A cloud-based DMS that enables users to store and share files and folders. It also includes tools for file syncing, version control, and collaboration.
  • Box: A cloud-based DMS that offers tools for storing, sharing, and collaborating on documents. It also includes advanced security and compliance features.
  • Evernote: A note-taking application that can also be used as a DMS. It allows users to store and organize documents, images, and audio recordings.
  • DocuSign: An electronic signature and document management platform that allows users to sign and send documents electronically. It also includes tools for tracking document status and compliance.
  • Acrobat DC: A PDF editing and management tool that allows users to create, edit, and sign PDF documents. It also includes collaboration and commenting tools.
  • NetDocuments: A cloud-based DMS that offers document storage, search, retrieval, and collaboration tools. It also includes advanced security and compliance features.
  • iManage: A DMS that is specifically designed for the legal industry. It offers document management, email management, and knowledge management tools, as well as advanced security and compliance features.
  • M-Files: A DMS that uses metadata to organize and classify documents. It also includes tools for document workflow and collaboration, as well as advanced security and compliance features.
  • Alfresco: An open-source DMS that offers document management, collaboration, and workflow tools. It also allows for integration with other software systems.
  • OpenText Content Suite: A DMS that offers document management, collaboration, and workflow tools, as well as advanced security and compliance features. It also allows for integration with other software systems.
  • FileHold: A DMS that offers document management, version control, and search and retrieval tools, as well as advanced security and compliance features. It also allows for integration with other software systems.
  • Docuware: A DMS that offers document management, workflow, and search and retrieval tools, as well as advanced security and compliance features. It also allows for integration with other software systems.
  • PairSoft(formerly PaperSave): A DMS that is specifically designed for the accounting industry. It offers document management, workflow, and search and retrieval tools, as well as advanced security and compliance features.

DMS vs CMS: What’s The Difference?

A Document Management System (DMS) and a Content Management System (CMS) are both software solutions that are used to manage, store, and distribute digital content.

However, there are some key differences between the two:

  • Content scope: A DMS is specifically designed to manage and store documents, such as Word, PDF, and Excel files. A CMS, on the other hand, is designed to manage and distribute a wider range of content, such as text, images, videos, and audio files.
  • Functionality: A DMS typically includes tools for document management, version control, and collaboration. A CMS, on the other hand, includes tools for creating, editing, and publishing content, as well as for managing and organizing website content.
  • User experience: DMSs are typically used by a specific group of users within an organization, such as the legal or accounting department. They are designed to be used by employees within the organization. A CMS, on the other hand, is used to manage and distribute content to a wider audience, including external users, customers, and clients.
  • Access Control: A DMS usually has more robust access control features than a CMS, as it is designed to manage and protect sensitive documents, while a CMS is designed to distribute content to a wider audience.
  • Integration: A DMS may have more integration options with other business-specific software such as accounting or project management systems. A CMS, on the other hand, may have more integration options with e-commerce and marketing platforms, as it’s focused on publishing and distributing content to the public.

In short, while both systems can be used together to manage all of your digital content…

A DMS focuses on managing and protecting documents within an organization, while a CMS focuses on creating, managing, and distributing content to a wider audience.

Learn more about Content Management Systems (CMS)

Document Management System (DMS) vs Document Library

A Document Management System (DMS) and a Document Library are both tools used to store and manage documents, but they serve different purposes and have different functionalities.

A Document Management System is designed to manage, track and store documents, as well as facilitate document collaboration, workflow, and sharing.

A DMS usually includes features such as version control, document check-in and check-out, audit trails, access controls, and document retention policies.

A DMS is also typically used in more complex environments, such as large organizations, where a significant amount of documentation is produced, and where document workflows and processes need to be strictly controlled and monitored.

On the other hand, a Document Library is a simpler tool designed to provide easy access to documents and resources. It usually allows users to upload and store documents in a central location, and share them with others.

A document library may include features such as search, filtering, categorization, and tagging to help users find the documents they need.

It is typically used in smaller organizations, such as small businesses or nonprofits, where the volume of documentation is lower and where simple access and organization of documents are the primary needs.

In short, a Document Management System is a more complex tool that provides advanced document management features, while a Document Library is a simpler tool designed to provide easy access to documents and resources. The choice between the two depends on your organization’s needs and the complexity of your document workflows and processes.

Learn more about Document Libraries

Summary

A Document Management System (DMS) can provide significant benefits to your organization by making it easy to manage, store, and share documents.

A DMS that includes the features you need will help to ensure that your team has the tools they need to be productive and efficient.

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Image: Businesswoman

Logo Makers

Logo makers let you create a unique and professional-looking logo for your business with no design experience.

Logo Makers

Logo makers let you create a unique and professional-looking logo for your business with no design experience.

Logo MakersIf you are looking for a cost-effective and time-saving way to create a professional-quality logo for your business, online logo makers may be the solution you are searching for.

User-friendly logo-making platforms allow businesses to create custom logos using pre-designed templates and customization options, making it easy to create a unique and professional-looking logo even if you have no design experience.

In this section, we’ll explore the benefits of using online logo makers, list popular online logo-making tools, and provide tips for creating a successful logo that will enhance your business brand.

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Why Use Logo Makers?

Creating a professional-looking logo is an important part of building a strong brand identity for your business.

In the past, this process typically involved hiring a designer or agency to create a custom logo from scratch. However, with the proliferation of online logo-making tools, it is now easier than ever to create your own business logo.

Online logo makers are user-friendly platforms that allow businesses to create custom logos using pre-designed templates and customization options.

These tools offer a range of benefits, including cost-effectiveness, time-saving, and professional quality. Additionally, they are typically easy to use, even if you have no design experience, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes and industries.

Benefits Of Using Logo Makers

Using logo makers can be an effective way to improve your business branding and offer the following benefits:

  1. Cost-effectiveness: Creating a professional-quality logo from scratch can be expensive, as it usually requires hiring a designer or agency. Logo makers offer a more affordable alternative, as they allow your business to create its own logo using pre-designed templates and customization options.
  2. Time-saving: Designing a logo from scratch can be a time-consuming process, as it involves conceptualization, sketching, and revisions. With a logo maker, you can create a logo for your business, website, blog, or any other project in a matter of minutes, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.
  3. Professional quality: Many logo makers offer a wide range of customization options, such as different font styles, colors, and graphics, which allow you to create a logo that is unique and professional-looking.
  4. Accessibility: Logo makers are typically easy to use, even for those with no design experience. This makes them accessible to businesses of all sizes and industries.
  5. Versatility: A good logo maker lets you create logos for different mediums, such as social media, websites, and print materials. This ensures that your branding is consistent across all channels.
  6. Convenience: Online logo makers are available 24/7, so you can create a logo at a time that is convenient. This is particularly useful for small businesses or startups that may not have the resources to hire a designer on a full-time basis.
  7. Collaboration: Some logo makers offer collaboration features, such as the ability to invite team members or clients to provide feedback on the design. This can be a useful tool if your business wants to involve multiple stakeholders in the logo creation process.

Overall, using media creation tools like logo makers can be a cost-effective, time-saving, and professional way for your business to improve its branding and stand out in the market.

Logo Makers

Use the tools below to generate professional logo designs quickly, easily, and inexpensively.

Canva

Image Tools: Canva
Canva

Canva is an online design and publishing tool with an entire suite of visual media and design creation tools.

To create a custom logo quickly and intuitively using Canva’s free logo maker:

  1. Launch the tool and search for “logo”,
  2. Choose a professional template from Canva’s massive library of logo templates,
  3. Customize the logo to your liking by tweaking and finetuning elements like fonts, colors, text, and images,
  4. Experiment with design tools like filters,
  5. When you’re happy with it, save your logo for download, printing, or sharing on social media.
Canva Logo Ideas
Canva gives you loads of great logo ideas!

The video below provides great tips on creating a business logo and gives you a walkthrough of the software:

Canva does a lot more than logos. You can use it for all your digital creations, including presentations, video messages, social media posts, marketing (e.g. business cards, flyers, posters, tickets, stickers, etc), and even office templates for invoices, reports, CVs, etc.

Canva offers both a Free and Pro version. The Free version is great for quick design tasks (e.g. mock-up logos) and lets you download your finished logo as a 500px PNG or JPEG, or a print-ready PDF.

The Pro version lets you create logos with a transparent background, offers a much larger selection of templates, and provides advanced tools and features that allow you to build your own brand kit and create a cohesive brand identity with every design you create using the software.

More info: Canva

Looka

Image Tools: Looka
Looka is an AI logo generator.

Looka is an AI-based logo maker that you can use to generate beautiful-looking logos.

By following the tool’s wizard, you get to select categories, styles, themes, and colors you like, and you are then presented with an AI-generated selection of logos based on your choices.

Here, for example, are some logo designs generated by Looka after inputting some information into the tools wizard…

Looka AI-generated logos
Some AI-generated logo designs from Looka.

After selecting a logo design, you can fully customize it with many additional options and features and even create a branding kit with a paid subscription.

Looka logo customizer screen
You can fully customize your logo and create a branding identity.

If you’re not sure what kind of design you’d like for your logo or lack professional design skills or an illustration in your team, then Looka is a great tool for generating logo design ideas and logo images quickly.

More info: Looka

Logo.com

Image Tools: Logo.com
Logo.com

Logo.com provides a completely free logo maker that lets you design unlimited custom logos with no designing skills and download high-resolution file formats such as vector, PNG, SVG, and JPG in full-color and even font files, with no hidden costs.

After your logo is created, you can edit your logo’s layout, design, colors, font, business name, and slogan at any time free of charge.

Logo.com - Logo designer
Logo.com’s Logo designer screen.

Creating a logo with Logo.com is very simple. Just browse through the logo designs, edit and customize the design you like, add your brand or business name and let the logo design engine assemble your logo. You can further customize or preview your logo and even see how it will look on all kinds of merchandise, stationery, and on apps.

As stated earlier, creating logos is free. You can subscribe to Logo.com’s branding plan which allows you to brand all kinds of downloadable and shareable templates and applications with your logo, brand colors, and fonts.

More info: Logo.com

DesignEvo

Image Tools: DesignEvo
DesignEvo

DesignEvo is a logo maker that lets you start designing logos from its logo editor right away.

The site provides handy editing tools, logo templates, millions of icons, many different fonts, and other resources that make creating logos fast and easy to use for all kinds of uses.

DesignEvo Logo Maker
You can design logos for all kinds of uses with DesignEvo Logo Maker.

Creating an account lets you save your projects, make unlimited changes, and re-download at any time.

More info: DesignEvo

FreeLogoDesign

Image Tools: FreeLogoDesign
FreeLogoDesign

FreeLogoDesign is a logo maker that offers both a free and paid plan.

It features a large selection of thousands of customizable logo templates, over 35 business categories, millions of icons, and user-friendly editing tools.

While the site provides features that allow you to create logos optimized for different social media platforms, the free logo download option only includes low-resolution images. For high-resolution images and a range of logo format options including PNG and SVG vector files, consider upgrading to the paid plan.

More info: FreeLogoDesign

LogoMaker

Image Tools: LogoMaker
LogoMaker

LogoMaker is an online logo maker that lets you create, edit, and save as many logos as you like.

It offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use logo editor, thousands of logo designs, and a diverse catalog of templates.

You can create a logo in 3 easy steps:

1) Enter your details
2) Select a logo template
3) Customize your logo’s colors, fonts, layout, and more.

Logomaker - Make a logo in 3 easy steps
Make a logo in 3 easy steps with Logomaker.

You can design and save as many logos as you want and when you are happy with your logo design, you can purchase and download your files.

LogoMaker offers a Premium logo package that gives you unlimited logo edits for 1 year, multiple layouts of your new logo, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn logo files, plus access to your logo from any device and access to the customer team for help getting your logo right.

More info: LogoMaker

Logo Creation Tips

Use the tips below to create a successful logo that effectively represents your business and helps you stand out in the market:

  1. Keep it simple: A successful logo should be simple and easy to recognize, as it will be used across a variety of mediums and applications. Avoid using too many colors, fonts, or graphic elements, as this can make the logo cluttered and hard to read.
  2. Make it memorable: A logo that is memorable and distinct can help your business stand out in the market. Consider using a unique symbol or icon in your design, or play around with negative space to create something eye-catching.
  3. Consider your audience: Your logo should appeal to your target audience and accurately reflect your brand. Conduct market research to understand what your customers respond to, and use this information to inform your design.
  4. Think about versatility: Your logo should work well across a variety of mediums and applications, from your website to social media to print materials. Consider how the logo will look in black and white, as well as in different sizes.
  5. Choose the right colors: The colors you choose for your logo can have a big impact on its effectiveness. Different colors can evoke different emotions, so choose a color palette that reflects your brand’s personality and values.
  6. Work with a professional: While online logo makers can be a useful tool, it is still a good idea to seek out the guidance of a professional designer. They can help you create a logo that is not only visually appealing but also strategically aligned with your brand.

Logo Makers And Content Management

Online logo makers not only allow you to easily create custom logos for your business and provide a range of benefits, but most of the online tools listed above also allow you to store and manage your designs inside your account dashboard, so your team can access and edit these anytime.

Whether you are a small startup or a well-established company, an effective logo is an important element of your branding strategy and can help you stand out in the market.

***

Image: FreeLogoDesign.com

Headline Generating Tools

Create compelling headlines for your articles quickly and easily with headline-generating tools.

Headline Generating Tools

Create compelling and high-converting headlines and titles for your blog posts and articles quickly and easily with headline-generating tools.

Headline Generating Tools - Never Run Out Of Fresh Article Headline Ideas, Post Titles, And Email Subject LinesWithout a compelling post title or an attention-grabbing article headline, your site visitors may never get to see your message.

In this lesson, we look at headline-generating tools that can help to improve your click-through results.

If you need help coming up with effective headlines for your content, see our free content creation email course.

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Why Using Powerful Headlines In Your Content Is Important

Did you know that by simply replacing a few words in your headline, you can significantly increase your web traffic and engagement with readers, get more opt-ins to your email lists, boost your conversions, and generate more sales?

This can translate into thousands of dollars more in sales of your products or services…all because of a few words!

You can lift your conversions simply by changing a couple of words in your headline
Changing a few words in your headline can increase your conversions by 30% – 400%!

If you are not using high-converting headlines for your articles, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Think about this…

  • Top companies have understood the importance of using powerful headlines before the internet was even around.
  • Just one great headline can flood your website with viral shares, web traffic, and loads of clicks!

The difficulty with trying to find post titles or headlines that are proven to convert better than others is that you need to crunch through a massive amount of web traffic in order to arrive at statistically significant results.

Typically, many corporations with large budgets will split-test, optimize, and analyze their headlines extensively.

Headline-Generating Tools

Fortunately, now there are smarter tools to help save you time and money on what can otherwise be a very time-consuming and resource-intensive process.

For example…

Fresh Title Headline Generator

Headline Generating Tools - FreshTitle Headline Generator
FreshTitle – Headline-Generating Tool

Fresh Title is a one-click software headline-generating tool that lets you brainstorm hundreds of proven headlines and titles for your web content in seconds and is compatible with both Mac and PC.

Simply enter a niche key phrase (e.g. make money working from home, speed reading, growing organic vegetables, etc.) and Fresh Title’s built-in method provides you with over 830 pre-optimized and proven headlines with a single click that you can then copy and paste into your web content.

FreshTitle Headline Builder - One-Click Access To Thousands Of High-Converting Blog Titles
FreshTitle Headline Builder gives you one-click access to thousands of high-converting headlines and post titles.

As well as entering niche keywords into the software, you can answer a few simple questions and the software will provide you with an additional 125 detailed and more finely optimized headlines that are also proven to convert.

Here are just some of the benefits of using Fresh Title to generate hundreds of proven post titles and headlines for your web content:

A Brainstorming Tool With Limitless Blog Post Title Ideas 

The FreshTitle headline builder tool gives you instant access to thousands of proven headlines for any content you want.

You can use this powerful application to generate fresh ideas for post headlines, Facebook posts, text ads, ebook headings, email subject headlines, etc.

Save Thousands Of $$$

You can instantly pump out hundreds of proven titles for all kinds of content in seconds and save thousands of dollars on the cost of hiring copywriters, data analysts, and web conversion experts.

You can use this tool in popular services, like:

  • Blogging Platforms – e.g. WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly, Joomla, etc.
  • Email Platforms – e.g. Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact, CampaignMonitor, etc.
  • Social Media Networks – e.g. Facebook, GooglePlus, Flickr, etc.
  • Press Releases – e.g. EinPressWire, eReleases, etc.
  • eCommerce – e.g. WooCommerce, Amazon, OsCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, etc.
  • Article Platforms – Ezine Articles, ArticleCity, Articlesbase, etc.
  • Video Platforms – YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc.
  • Landing Page Platforms – LeadPages, Instapage, Megaphone, etc.
FreshTitle works with all popular online services
FreshTitle works with all popular online services.

FreshTitle is an intuitive one-click software tool that installs quickly and includes several powerful built-in tools, such as:

Title Builder

Enter a keyword, click a button, and generate hundreds of title ideas for your posts, email newsletters, etc.

Title Builder
Instant Headline Builder

Swipe Bank

FreshTitle includes a huge swipe database with over 420,000 headlines and email subject lines that are proven to convert. You can instantly copy and modify these for your own marketing campaigns.

FreshTitle - Swipe Database
FreshTitle includes a swipe database with hundreds of thousands of headlines and email subject lines.

News Headlines

Fresh Title Headline Generator pulls up the most popular headlines in real time from Google and Bing, giving you insights into your competitors’ most effective headlines.

FreshTitle - News Headlines Tool
Use the News Headlines Tool for competitive analysis.

My Titles Tool

The software also includes a built-in easy-to-use personal database tool for storing all of your favorite headlines. You can transfer headlines from the other sections to your My Titles area and edit the headlines to suit your own needs.

Fresh Title - My Titles
Use FreshTitle’s My Titles tool to edit headlines and store these in your own personal database.

Additionally, the tool comes with a built-in thesaurus, allowing you to further customize your post titles, plus a function for storing notes (e.g. marketing campaign results), a feature for rating your headline items, and a counter that lets you see which content items you most frequently use…

FreshTitle's built-in thesaurus
FreshTitle includes a built-in synonym finder.

Fresh Title Headline Builder And Title Analyzer Software Bundle

Dave Guindon, the creator of Fresh Title will occasionally bundle the headline generator with another powerful tool called Title Analyzer as a bonus.

Title Analyzer - Powerful Title Analysis Tool
Title Analyzer – headline analysis tool

Title Analyzer is a powerful headline analysis tool that can help you decide which headline is more likely to increase traffic, clicks, and conversions.

TitleAnalyzer uses a built-in algorithm to compare and analyze the performance of your titles.

TitleAnalyzer
Imagine knowing which titles will drive more web traffic, clicks, and sales without testing!

Title Analyzer lets you compare, analyze and calculate performance scores for multiple headlines without requiring you to be online to do all of the processing work.

TitleAnalyzer lets you enter multiple titles
Calculate performance scores for as many titles as you like!

The software’s internal algorithm accesses 1,800+ power words to calculate the overall performance score of your items.

TitleAnalyzer uses a large database of power words to score your titles
Title Analyzer includes a large database of power words used to score your headlines/

Title Analyzer not only scores your titles using a complex equation based on factors like power word density, the optimal number of characters, etc., but it also suggests ways to further improve your content.

TitleAnalyzer's Title Statistics screen
Title Analyzer provides suggestions on ways to further improve your headlines.

The tool also comes with an additional built-in headline editor that lets you quickly and easily optimize your titles using color-coded statistical data and a built-in thesaurus connected to its internal power words database.

TitleAnalyzer Editor: Choose the best power words for your post titles
Find the best power words for your headlines and post titles.

Fresh Title is well-supported and runs on both Mac and PC computers. You will get lifetime access to the software and a no-risk, thirty-day, full refund guarantee.

You can install the product on up to three computers (PC and Mac). The purchase price includes free minor version updates and discounts on future major version releases. Major version updates may require an additional fee.

For a demo video of the software in action, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, contact details, and more, visit the website.

Note: Price details for FreshTitle depend on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Also, some of the features discussed above may not be offered as a bundle when you visit the website.

More info: Fresh Title – Headline Generator

FreshTitle Headline Builder - Powerful Post Title, Email Subject Titles And Blog Content Idea Generation Tool
Never run out of ideas for compelling post headlines and email subject titles with headline-generating tools.

***

Images: laptop, old newspaper

Content Management System (CMS)

Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.

Content Management System (CMS)

Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.

WordPress add new post screenA Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that allows users to easily create, manage, and publish digital content, typically for websites.

It provides an interface for users to add and edit text, images, videos, and other types of digital media, and to manage the organization and presentation of that content.

A CMS typically includes a database to store the content and a set of tools for managing users, permissions, and workflow.

Note: While there are different types of content management systems available, this course focuses mostly on using WordPress, a popular and free CMS platform that allows businesses to easily manage their content and most aspects of their website without requiring technical skills or relying on technical experts.

In this lesson, you will learn why a CMS is a powerful content management tool, discover the benefits of using a content management system, explore different CMS platforms, and discover what you can do using the WordPress CMS platform.

***

What Is A Content Management System (CMS)?

A content management system (CMS) is a software application that provides a centralized platform for organizing, storing, and managing digital content.

A CMS typically includes a variety of tools for creating, editing, and publishing content, as well as for managing the content lifecycle, which includes tasks such as version control, workflow, and publishing.

The main goal of a CMS is to simplify the process of managing content, making it easier for organizations to keep their digital content up-to-date and consistent.

A CMS typically includes a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for non-technical users to manage content, as well as features such as templates, workflows, and access controls that allow organizations to maintain a consistent look and feel across their digital properties.

CMSs can be used to manage a variety of content types, including web pages, blog posts, images, videos, and more. Some CMSs are designed for specific types of content, such as e-commerce products, while others are more general-purpose and can be used for any type of digital content.

Why Use A Content Management System (CMS)?

A Content Management System (CMS) allows your business to easily manage and publish website content without the need for technical skills.

Some of the key benefits and features of using a CMS to manage your website content include:

  • Ease of use: A CMS typically has a user-friendly interface that allows non-technical users to easily create, edit, and publish content on the website.
  • Centralized control: A CMS allows multiple users to access and manage your website’s content, which is particularly useful if your business has multiple departments or team members responsible for different aspects of the website.
  • Versatility: A CMS can be used to manage different types of content, such as text, images, videos, and audio files.
  • Collaboration: A CMS allows multiple users to work on the same website content, making it easy for teams to collaborate and review changes before they are published.
  • Scalability: As your business grows, a CMS can easily be scaled to accommodate more content, users, and features. A CMS can also be used to manage small websites or large, complex sites with thousands of pages.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO): Many content management systems include built-in SEO features, such as the ability to create custom URLs and meta tags, which can help improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.
  • Security: A CMS can provide security features such as user access controls and backups, which can help prevent unauthorized access to your website and protect against data loss.

Popular CMS Platforms

There are many popular content management systems to choose from, each with its own set of features and capabilities.

Platforms like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal are open-source and have a wide range of functionalities, templates, and plugins that can be used to customize your website to suit the needs of your business.

For a comprehensive list and information on popular content management systems, go here: Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)

A Very Brief History Of Websites

Pre-CMS / Static Websites

Before Content Management Systems came along, websites were traditionally built by gathering together a collection of separately linked static pages where every element of a page (e.g. navigation menus, page layout, content, etc.) was created using web code (e.g. HTML) and assembled by a web designer or website developer using a web editor application tool (e.g. Dreamweaver).

A composite image showing different aspects of a static website.
Websites used to be static collections of web pages that only coders could understand and use…until CMS-driven websites came along!

These separate pages were then uploaded to a web server and accessed online by typing in the page URL associated with the page file into a web browser.

Then, something called a Content Management System, or CMS came along.

A Content Management System is an application that lets you organize and store all your documents, images, videos, and any other type of digital content on a database, and quickly and easily add, retrieve, edit, delete and publish content on your website with no coding skills required.

A CMS also allows multiple editors and authors to access, manage and work collaboratively on a website’s content and publish it under different authors and in different areas of the website.

A CMS also takes care of a number of “behind the scenes” content management tasks such as:

  • Generating website navigation elements automatically (e.g. menus, links, etc.)
  • Storing content in an organized way, making it searchable, findable, and indexable.
  • Keeping track of registered users, including managing user permissions, logins, and security settings.
  • Allowing multiple users to collaborate, edit and publish content on the site.
  • And much more.
CMS functions
A content management system lets you manage every aspect of your content.

In short, a Content Management System gives businesses complete control over their content and its management and lets anyone easily perform content-related tasks, like:

  • Content creation, editing, and deletion
  • Content publishing / content delivery
  • Content organization (e.g. archiving)
  • Content formatting
  • Content revision
  • Content indexing, searching, and retrieval
  • Content export and import

Now that you understand a little more about the benefits of using a content management system, let’s talk about the CMS platform we recommend using to build and manage a website.

It’s called WordPress.

Laptop displaying WordPress home page on screen.
Download WordPress for free on WordPress.org

Why Use WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform. WordPress is 100% FREE and is used to power millions of websites around the world (over 40% of all websites).

WordPress is the world's leading CMS
WordPress is the world’s leading content management system for websites. Source: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms 

WordPress logoWordPress is:

  • Free
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to manage
  • SEO friendly
  • Mobile friendly
  • Powerful
  • Flexible
  • Interactive
  • Secure
  • Cost-effective
  • Well supported

WordPress is much more than a CMS. It’s a complete website-building and web-publishing platform. You can build any type of website you like with WordPress and easily change anything and everything on the site anytime you want.

Using WordPress is easy and requires no technical expertise or coding skills.

There are many ways that WordPress puts your business in complete control of your digital presence.

For example, WordPress gives your business a “speed to market” advantage…

Slide - Speed To Market
Publish content quickly with WordPress – just think, write … and publish!

WordPress also lets you publish time-sensitive content quickly and make it available online immediately. This is great for getting information out fast, such as:

  • Limited-time offers, special offers, discounts, etc.
  • New product releases, new product reviews, promotional videos
  • Company announcements
  • Industry or company events
  • Pricing updates
  • Customer/Reseller training tips, etc.

After your WordPress site has been set up and configured, you can easily create rich content anytime you think of something you would like to inform, promote, or communicate to others.

Then, simply hit the “publish” button and the information will be made live immediately and instantly available to online users.

Management & Marketing Automation

Another reason WordPress puts your business in control of your digital presence is that your website can be expertly configured so that all you need to do is publish new content and WordPress will then automatically and instantly:

  • Notify search engines like Google, Bing, etc. (you can specify exactly how you want Google to display your listings in its search results),
  • Post excerpts of the content to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. with links pointing back to the website (you can specify exactly how excerpts should display on social media sites),
  • Notify and syndicate dozens and even hundreds of other online properties like blogs, search directories, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed aggregators, etc.

Instead of a ‘static’ web presence that involves time-consuming activities like publishing content on a website and posting new content on social media accounts and other online properties to drive traffic and generate leads, your WordPress site can be configured to instantly syndicate (i.e. distribute) and get your newly-published content indexed faster, automatically driving more web traffic and generating new leads for your business…

Chart - publishing content on WordPress instantly posts the content on social media.
Posting content to different sites can be very time-consuming! You can publish content on WordPress and instantly posts this content on social media.

WordPress lets you set up a content distribution and a lead and traffic generation system automatically…

Diagram: Publish content...automate the rest!
Automate content distribution with WordPress to drive more traffic, leads & sales!

WordPress can also automate management and maintenance tasks on a website like scheduling files and data backups, updating software, adding and managing new users, and more.

An expertly configured WordPress site lets you do all this by configuring internal (i.e. built-in) settings, adding different add-ons, and integrating many essential (and mostly free) external services…

Diagram of epertly-configured WordPress site components
An expertly-configured WordPress site can automate many digital processes in your business!

As your business grows and evolves, you can easily add more functionality and automation to your WordPress site at minimal cost, like:

  • Adding eCommerce to sell products and services and process payments online
  • Capturing leads with opt-in forms and automatically adding new subscribers to newsletters and autoresponders
  • Adding a membership site that allows visitors to register on the site as private members with different membership levels, unique logins, etc.
  • Adding directories, forums, social networking features, social sharing, and engagement features, etc.
  • And so much more!

All this can be done inexpensively (or even for free) in WordPress using ‘app-like’ add-ons called plugins.

Once plugins are installed and configured, you can direct your site visitors to different areas of your website such as your online store, subscription forms, membership area, directories, etc. using calls to action placed in your content, graphic banners, navigation menus, etc. and let the automated processes configured on your site and your plugins do the rest.

Additionally, WordPress comes with a powerful built-in Content Management System (CMS) that works right out of the box, allowing you to easily create and manage your digital content, website administration (including updating and backing up site files and data), and automate various aspects of your digital marketing.

One of the many benefits of using the WordPress CMS is that it is 100% free to use and modify for any commercial purpose. This helps to prevent you from becoming locked into a ‘proprietary’ CMS platform that could make it harder to leave or switch to another provider.

So…

You can configure your WordPress site to automate management and marketing processes like backups, content distribution, and syndication, search engine indexing, web traffic generation, lead, and sales automation, and more, without involving website developers or web designers or requiring technical expertise or coding skills.

You can also easily look after ongoing management processes like keeping your site’s software and plugins updated, adding and configuring new site functionality, making changes to site design, layout, and content to improve sales conversions, and training other team members to do the same without hiring website developers or web designers.

Building a website with WordPress, then, puts you in complete control of your digital business processes, saving you considerable money and allowing you to generate better online results.

WordPress
Want to be in complete control of your digital presence? Then choose WordPress!

A CMS platform like WordPress can put your business in complete control of your digital presence, automate key digital management, content scheduling, and marketing processes, and help you improve your online business online results.

A WordPress website can also be expanded easily and inexpensively at any time and allows businesses to integrate additional features, functionality, and services like:

  • Social media, social media content sharing, and social engagement tools
  • External services and accounts (e.g., Google webmasters, SaaS, and cloud services)
  • eCommerce, membership sites, directories, event bookings, and registrations, etc.
  • Support services (helpdesks, online chat, forums, affiliate management, etc.)
  • Subscriber options (newsletters, autoresponders, opt-in forms, etc.)
  • Reporting tools (e.g., server monitoring, web analytics, etc.)
  • And many additional functions.

Unique WordPress Features

WordPress includes many unique features that make managing websites easy, including:

Plugins

Like most apps and add-ons, plugins install with a few clicks and allow users to easily add and configure almost every kind of functionality imaginable to their website (e.g. forms, banner ad management, membership sites, directories, e-commerce, notifications, live chat, pricing tables, etc.).

Learn more about plugins here: Using WordPress Plugins

Themes

Themes are web design templates that let users change the entire look and feel of their site and/or customize the site’s web design with just a few clicks without affecting its content.

Learn more about plugins here: Using WordPress Themes

Widgets

Widgets let users reorganize and rearrange the site’s web layout and add new functionality without touching code using features like drag and drop and pulldown menus.

Learn more about plugins here: Using WordPress Widgets

And More…

Additional unique features of WordPress that make managing a website easier include a customizable dashboard, a visual content editor and block editor, custom navigation menus, custom post types, live previews, updates, setting different user roles, permissions, and logins, comment moderation, site cleanup, optimization, and security tools, and a whole lot more!

WordPress can also be configured to fully automate or reduce many complex website management tasks to processes using a few clicks.

This includes:

  • Managing and scheduling content for publishing
  • Performing data and file backups
  • Updating core software, plugins, and themes
  • Registering and managing users and subscribers
  • Moderating comments from visitors, preventing comment SPAM, etc.
  • Preventing brute force attacks and threats from malware and hackers
  • Fixing broken links in the content
  • Redirecting visitors to other pages
  • Generating user, statistical, performance, and sales reports
  • Notifying management and administrators if there are any problems with the site
  • And more.

Depending on what your business wants to achieve online, WordPress can also easily add and automate the management of features and functionality like:

  • Setting up an e-commerce store (and automating areas like featured product information, online payment processing, emailing customers download links, product delivery information, emails to prevent cart abandonment, etc.)
  • Providing customer service tools, services, and information sections like a knowledgebase, support helpdesks, live chat, FAQs, etc.
  • Setting up business directories and advertising zones (and automating processes that allow users to buy, manage, and renew their listings and advertisements)
  • Running event and booking sites (and automating the management of event bookings and registrations, setting up appointments, scheduling deliveries of online course content or webinars, ticket printing, confirmations, etc.)
  • Setting up an affiliate program (and automating affiliate management tasks, commission reports, payments, etc.)
  • Setting up and automating many other tasks like scheduling and posting content to social media, adding subscribers to newsletters and customer lists, processing contact information, engaging users with customer surveys and user polls, and so much more.

Most Websites Are Powered By WordPress

Not only are millions of websites around the world built using WordPress, but if one in every three websites is powered by WordPress, the chances are that if your business has a website, it is probably also powered by WordPress!

To check if your website or blog is built using WordPress, go here: How To Tell If Your Website Is Powered By WordPress

Summary

A content management system (CMS) is a software application that allows users to create, manage, and publish digital content.

A CMS is an essential tool for businesses that want to easily manage and publish content on their website. It allows non-technical users to easily create, edit, and publish content, while also providing tools for collaboration, scalability, SEO, and security.

It’s important to research different CMS options and choose one that fits the specific needs of your business.

Some of the most popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Joomla is a popular open-source CMS, it is more complex than WordPress, but it is good for managing large and complex websites.

Drupal is also an open-source CMS, it is more powerful, and it is best used for creating complex, large-scale websites.

WordPress is the world’s most widely used content management system. It is free and open-source, and it has a wide variety of themes and plugins to choose from. It is also the platform used to power millions of professional websites and blogs around the world.

WordPress is:

  • 100% free open-source software
  • Highly flexible, scalable, and customizable (can be adapted for any use)
  • Supported by a community of tens of thousands of web developers (continually updated to improve security, add new features, and fix bugs & issues).

Resources

If you need help using WordPress, see the resources below:

WordPress User Tutorials

Here are the best resources for learning how to use your WordPress website and CMS effectively:

WPTrainingManual.com

WPTrainingManual.com - WordPress User Training
WPTrainingManual.com – WordPress User Training

WPTrainingManual.com provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date WordPress step-by-step tutorials for non-technical users and non-coders available.

These tutorials are 100% free to access (and download as a PDF, print, or share via email), and will help you learn how to use your WordPress site and CMS effectively.

WPTrainingManual.com - Free WordPress Tutorials
WPTrainingManual.com – Free WordPress Tutorials

Additionally, you can download The Complete WordPress Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual – a comprehensive, fully illustrated, and regularly updated 2,100+ page downloadable WordPress user manual for non-techies.

The Complete WordPress Step-By-Step User Manual
The Complete WordPress Step-By-Step User Manual

For more information and to access all the free WordPress tutorials, go here: WPTrainingManual.com

WPMasterclasses.com

WPMasterclasses.com - WordPress & Digital Business Skills Video Courses
WPMasterclasses.com – WordPress & Digital Business Skills Video Courses

WPMasterclasses.com is a WordPress and digital business video training site with dozens of video courses and 2,000+ video tutorials on using WordPress and covering essential digital business areas.

Here are some of the WordPress video courses available on WPMasterclasses.com (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):

WordPress Video Courses
Why Your Business Needs WordPress - WPMasterclasses.comWhy Your Business Needs WordPress

Learn about the unique features, benefits, and advantages of using WordPress to start or grow your business online.

More info: Why Your Business Needs WordPress

WordPress 101: How To Use WordPress - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress 101: How To Use WordPress

Learn how to unlock the power of the WordPress content management system (CMS) using the many powerful features inside your WordPress administration area.

More info: WordPress 101: How To Use WordPress

WordPress Gutenberg - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Gutenberg

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

More info: WordPress Gutenberg

WordPress Traffic & User Engagement - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Traffic & User Engagement

Learn how to drive more targeted traffic to your website and discover ways to improve user engagement with your business online.

More info: WordPress Traffic & User Engagement

WordPress SEOWordPress SEO - WPMasterclasses.com

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

WordPress Maintenance - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Maintenance

This video course takes you step-by-step through the WordPress Maintenance Process and shows you how to keep your WordPress site updated, protected, and error-free!

More info: WordPress Maintenance

How To Backup & Restore WordPress Sites - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Back Up & Restore WordPress Sites

Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.

More info: How To Back Up & Restore WordPress Sites

How To Optimize WordPress - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Optimize WordPress

Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and improve your page loading speed.

More info: How To Optimize WordPress

WordPress Security - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Security

Learn how to keep your WordPress site or blog secure and protected from malware, hackers, and brute-force attacks.

More info: WordPress Security

WordPress Plugins - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Plugins

Learn how WordPress plugins work, how to find, install, and update plugins on your site, and how to expand your WordPress site’s functionality in almost unlimited ways.

More info: WordPress Plugins

Digital Planning: How To Build A Profitable Website Or Blog - WPMasterclasses.comDigital Planning: How To Build A Profitable Website Or Blog

Learn how to plan and build a profitable website or blog using a proven and easy-to-follow strategy.

More info: Digital Planning: How To Build A Profitable Website Or Blog

Build A WordPress Site Fast - WPMasterclasses.comBuild A WordPress Site Fast

Need a new website or blog in a hurry? This video course shows you how to quickly install and configure a WordPress website or blog on your own domain name.

More info: Build A WordPress Site Fast

WordPress eCommerce - Learn How To Build An eCommerce Store With WordPressLearn How To Build An eCommerce Store With WordPress

Learn how to set up an e-commerce store on your WordPress site using e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

More info: Learn How To Build An eCommerce Store With WordPress

How To Set Up A Forum On WordPress - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Set Up A Forum On WordPress

Learn how to set up a forum for your visitors, prospects, customers, members, or affiliates using WordPress.

More info: How To Set Up A Forum On WordPress

How To Build A Membership Site With WordPress - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Build A Membership Site With WordPress

Learn how to plan, build, grow, and maintain a viable membership site using WordPress that can be easily scaled and automated to become a sustainable, cost-effective, and profitable asset for many years to come.

More info: How To Build A Membership Site With WordPress

All Access Pass: Unlimited Courses - WPMasterclasses.comYou can purchase access to individual courses for a one-time fee or purchase an ALL ACCESS PASS video training site membership for a low annual subscription.

The All Access Pass membership gives you 24/7 ongoing access to 60+ digital business skills and WordPress CMS video courses (over 2,100+ self-paced video lessons and 225+ hours of videos).

For more details of all available video courses, go here: WPMasterclasses.com

WordPress Site Management

The choice of managing and maintaining your WordPress site is completely up to you. You can outsource your site management to professionals or learn how to do it yourself.

Here are the best resources available if you choose to do it yourself:

WPCompendium.org

WPCompendium.org provides hundreds of FREE detailed step-by-step tutorials that will teach you everything you need to know to build and manage a WordPress site with no coding knowledge or technical skills required.

WPCompendium.org – Free WordPress Step-By-Step Tutorials For Non-Techies
WPCompendium.org – Free WordPress Step-By-Step Tutorials For Non-Techies

The tutorials on WPCompendium.org are fully interlinked for ease of navigation, allowing you to learn WordPress at your own pace, and organized into comprehensive training modules covering all areas of WordPress:

WPMU DEV

WPMU DEV
WPMU DEV – All-In-One WordPress Platform

WPMU DEV provides a complete WordPress site management and dedicated hosting platform with professional plugins covering everything from SEO, optimization, and security, to marketing, forms, analytics, and more, plus 24/7 expert support on all things related to WordPress.

While the site is aimed mostly at WordPress web developers, if you are an advanced WordPress user or DIY site manager, we recommend visiting the WPMU DEV Blog containing thousands of advanced and useful WordPress tutorials, and subscribing to their email newsletter for regular WordPress tips and information.

WPMU DEV Blog
WPMU DEV’s Blog is jampacked with useful WordPress tutorials.

Additionally, we recommend becoming a WPMU DEV member. A  WPMU DEV membership includes everything you need to manage unlimited WordPress sites effectively.

You can sign up for a free membership (no credit card required) and try out for yourself all the service offers.

To register for a free account, visit WPMU DEV.

Additional Resources

We recommend the following resources to help build your content management skills:

Also, visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for managing your content effectively.

Digital Business – Module Lessons

Below are all the lessons included in this module. Click on a link to go directly to the lesson:

The Role Of The Digital/Web Content Manager

The Role Of The Content Manager

Learn about the role of a content manager and what you need to know to manage content effectively in a digital business presence.
Digital Business Structure

Digital Business Structure

Learn what an effective digital business structure looks like and why this makes managing content challenging.
Content Management Mindset

Content Management Mindset

Develop the mindset needed to manage content effectively for any type of organization. 
Content Management Skills

Content Management Skills

Learn about the skills you will need to develop to manage content effectively in your business. 
Digital Business Setups

Digital Business Setups

Learn about different kinds of digital business setups and the challenges of managing content effectively in these. 
Digital Business Basics

Digital Business Basics

This lesson looks at some of the basic steps your business should complete before it can grow using content.
Digital Content Team

Digital Content Team

An overview of different digital team roles, responsibilities, and job descriptions.
Content Management Tools

Content Management Tools

Learn about many useful and time-saving tools and resources that will help you manage your content effectively.

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Images: WordPress logo, WordPress screen, Blackboard

Content Tools & Resources

Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.

Content Tools & Resources

Useful and cost-effective tools and resources to help make creating, promoting, and managing your content easier.

Content Management Course - Tools & ResourcesOn this resources page, you will find a comprehensive collection of tools and resources for creating, promoting, and managing your content effectively.

Whether you are a marketer, blogger, content creator, business owner, seasoned content creator, or just starting out, these resources will help you streamline your content creation process, reach a wider audience, and take your content to the next level.

We have compiled below a comprehensive (and growing) list of useful, time-saving, cost-effective, and essential tools and resources that will help you be more productive in the areas of digital content planning, content production, content marketing, and content management.

Most of the tools and resources recommended below are free, and some are paid. Hopefully, you will find these to be invaluable, helpful, and worth knowing about.

How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business - Free Video Course

Free Video Course: How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business

Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your business with this free 12-part video course.
File Transfer Tools

File Transfer Tools

Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.
Amazon S3

Using Amazon S3

Learn how to set up and use Amazon S3 to store, manage, and serve content on your website.
Content Research Tools

Content Research Tools

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

Headline Generating Tools

Create compelling headlines for your articles quickly and easily with headline-generating tools.
Password Management Tools

Password Management Tools

Password management tools let you easily store your login passwords and generate secure passwords.
Customer Surveys

Customer Surveys

Use feedback from customer surveys to create a more targeted content strategy and improve your content creation.
Content Production Tools

Content Production Tools

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

Content Editing Tools

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

Content Promotion Tools

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

Media Creation Tools

Use these media creation tools and resources to create different types of media for your content.
Logo Makers

Logo Makers

Logo makers let you create a unique and professional-looking logo for your business with no design experience.
Media Editing Tools

Media Editing Tools

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

Search Optimization Tools

Optimize your content for SEO and improve your content marketing results with these search optimization tools and resources.
Content Management System (CMS)

Content Management System (CMS)

Learn how a content management system (CMS) can help you manage your content more effectively.
WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins

Learn about many powerful and time-saving plugins you can use to manage content more effectively on your WordPress site.
WordPress User Manual

WordPress User Manual

The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual provides detailed and comprehensive WordPress training tutorials for non-technical users.
Free Content Ideas Course

Free Content Ideas Course

Learn how to never run out of great content ideas for your blog, website, or email newsletters.
Digital Business Video Courses

Digital Business Video Courses

Develop the skills you need to manage content effectively with these digital business video courses.
Content Troubleshooting Guide

Content Troubleshooting Guide

Use this content troubleshooting guide to help you identify and fix content-related issues in your business.
The Small Business Digital Manager

The Small Business Digital Manager

Learn how to take control of your business online to drive more traffic, leads, subscribers & sales to your website!
Learn Basic HTML

Learn Basic HTML

Learn how to edit web page content and website templates with these learn basic HTML resources!
Social Media Tools & Resources

Social Media Tools

Manage your content more effectively on your social media platforms with these social media tools and resources.
Free Membership Sites

Free Marketing Membership Sites

These membership sites are free to join and contain valuable resources and information on internet marketing and digital entrepreneurship.
Outsourcing

Outsourcing Resources

Here are useful resources to help you find people with the right talent and skills for outsourcing your content needs.
Link Tracking Management Tool

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.
Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcuts

Save time using these ALT key keyboard code shortcuts to add international accents and symbols to your content.
Content Management Glossary

Content Management Glossary

Useful terms and definitions related to the creation, management, and distribution of digital content.
Retired Resources

Retired Resources

A list of resources referred to in the course content that are either temporarily or permanently unavailable.

***

Image: Touchscreen

File Transfer Tools

Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.

File Transfer Tools

Learn about tools you can use to send files to other users and transfer files between devices, your web server, and cloud storage services.

File Transfer ToolsSending and receiving files to and from other users, transferring files between different devices, and uploading or downloading files or media from various computer devices to your website, server, or remote storage services are all essential aspects of managing your content effectively.

In other lessons, we’ve looked at setting up effective content storage systems and documenting these processes to manage your organization’s files, media, and content.

If you need help in those areas, refer to the following lessons:

In this lesson, we look at various file transfer tools and methods you can use to get your content and files quickly and easily to other users, devices, web servers, and cloud storage services.

We’ll cover:

  • Essential File Transfer Tools
  • Transferring Files To Your Server Or Remote Storage
  • Uploading Files To Your Website From Different Locations
  • Using CMS Features To Upload Files To Your Website

***

Essential File Transfer Tools

Being able to transfer files quickly and easily to other users is essential for areas like content production, so it’s important to organize your content management systems around tools like:

  • Email (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.)
  • Mobile Devices
  • Team Communication Tools (e.g. Zoom, Slack, etc.)

Email

You already know that you can send files via email as an attachment.

File Transfer Tools - Gmail
You can send files via email as an attachment…

But…did you know that with certain applications like Gmail, you can also send your files via email securely?

File Transfer Tools: Gmail - Confidential mode
Gmail also lets you send files over email securely using Confidential mode.

For example, Gmail offers a confidential mode that prevents your email recipients from forwarding, copying, printing, or downloading either the message or its attachments. This helps you protect sensitive information from being shared accidentally or without your consent.

Watch the video below for more information about this feature:

Source: Right Inbox

With Gmail, you can also insert a file from Google Drive as an attachment (we cover Google Drive further down)…

File Transfer Tools: Insert files using Google Drive
Use Gmail and Google Drive to upload, store, and send files online to other users.

Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are another great tool for sending media files like images, videos, audio recordings, notes, etc.

See the ‘References’ section at the end of this lesson for links to excellent articles covering different methods you can use to transfer files using your mobile devices.

Team Collaboration Tools

Applications like Slack, Zoom, and many other tools have built-in features for sharing files, so your team can use these to quickly send files to different team members and across to other users and departments.

For example, Slack lets you upload files like documents, videos, artwork, etc. from your computer and shared drives and share these with your team.

Slack - upload from your computer
Use Slack’s built-in features to upload and share files with your team.

Zoom also lets you upload and share file attachments, as the video below shows.

For additional collaboration tools, see this section: Content Production Tools

Transferring Files Between Your Computer And Your Web Server

Managing content effectively often requires uploading (and downloading) files between your computer or other devices and your web server.

Two popular methods used for transferring files between computers and web servers are:

  1. Using a Desktop FTP client
  2. Using a webhosting control panel application (e.g. cPanel’s File Manager.)

We’ll look at using these methods below, as they don’t require you to have advanced technical skills like other file transfer methods (e.g. SSH).

Follow the tutorials and the links provided below to learn how to use an FTP tool and File Manager to transfer files from your computer to your web server.

Always back up your website (files and data) before modifying any files on your server.

Desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

This section explains how to set up a desktop-based FTP application to transfer files directly from your computer or laptop.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an outdated way of sharing files and most web browsers no longer support it, as it is no longer considered to be secure.

Firefox FTP Browser
Browser FTP was once popular but most web browsers no longer support it.

Using SFTP or FTPS (and HTTPS) instead of FTP is highly recommended.

The most reliable alternative to browser FTP is a dedicated FTP/SFTP client installed on your computer, like Filezilla

Setting Up A Desktop FTP Client – How To FTP/SFTP Files To Your Server Using Filezilla

Filezilla is a popular free desktop FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. It is open-source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

You can download Filezilla for free here: http://filezilla-project.org/

Make sure to download the client version of Filezilla, not the server version.

Filezilla - Free FTP software
Filezilla is a free FTP software application.

FileZilla Client is also available in several editions, so choose the edition that best suits your needs.

File Tansfer Tools: Filezilla - Free FTP software options.
Select the Filezilla edition that best suits your needs.

For most users, the standard FileZilla edition is fine.

With FileZilla Pro edition, you can upload your files directly to cloud services like Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, and various other services.

Transferring files using a desktop FTP application like Filezilla is all done via the tool’s interface.

File Transfer Tools - Filezilla's interface
Filezilla interface

Filezilla’s interface looks complicated, but it’s really not. After connecting to your server, all you basically do is select files from a folder in your computer or hard drive (left panel) and drag these across to a folder on your server (right panel) and the tool will automatically begin to upload your files.

Similarly, you can download files by selecting and dragging these from a folder on your server (right panel) to a folder on your computer or hard drive (left panel).

tip

Filezilla provides a basic tutorial on its site. If you need more help using Filezilla, see this video course for beginners: How To Use FTP

When using FileZilla, we recommend selecting the SFTP- SSH File Transfer Protocol for transferring files from your computer to your server securely.

File Transfer Tools: FileZilla: Site Manager - SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol menu option.
Click on the General tab and select SFTP File Transfer Protocol.

For more information about SFTP, go here: SFTP vs FTPS – Secure File Transfer Protocols Explained

Transferring Files Using cPanel

cPanel is a popular web hosting control panel that offers an alternative to FTP for uploading files to your web server.

Here are some reasons why you may want to use cPanel to upload and download files to your server and local computer instead of using FTP:

  • Sometimes it can be faster to upload/download files using cPanel than using FTP.
  • cPanel makes it easy to upload zipped files and then extract all of the files to a directory inside your server.
  • cPanel makes it easy to zip and download compressed files to your computer.
  • If you experience difficulties uploading files using FTP (e.g. connection keeps interrupting), you can try doing it through cPanel.file

tip

If you need help using cPanel, see this tutorial or this video course for beginners: How To Use cPanel

Transferring Files Using cPanel’s File Manager: Step-By-Step Tutorial

Let’s show you how to use cPanel’s File Manager to upload files from your computer or external hard drive to your web server.

We’ll go through a step-by-step example on how to upload and extract a zipped file.

Note: Make sure your hosting uses cPanel for this tutorial. Otherwise, check with your hosting company to see what file transfer tools they provide.

First, log into cPanel…

cPanel login screen.
cPanel’s login screen.

File Manager is located in the Tools > Files section of your cPanel administration screen.

Click on File Manager

cPanel: Files - File Manager
cPanel: Files – File Manager

Your server files will be visible inside the File Manager screen.

File Manager screen
The File Manager screen.

Some of the main functions you will use inside File Manager to perform file transfer operations include:

  • Move File – allows you to select files and move them into another directory. This feature is useful if you upload files to the wrong folder and want to move these to another folder location.
  • Upload – allows you to upload files directly to your server. This feature is useful when performing manual software updates, and restoring or reinstalling website files.
  • Download – allows you to download files from your server to your local machine. This feature is useful when performing manual backups.
  • Delete – allows you to delete selected folders and files on your server.
  • Extract – allows you to unzip files inside your server directories. This feature is useful for uploading folders or multiple files (covered below).
  • Compress – allows you to compress (zip) folders inside your server directories. This feature is useful for downloading entire folders, large files, etc.
File Transfer Tools: cPanel File Manager - Functions
cPanel’s File Manager allows you to perform a range of useful functions by clicking buttons.

Additionally, you will find useful Directory Navigation Menu Buttons inside the File Manager area, including:

  • Up One Level – Moves files up one level inside the folder.
  • Reload – Refreshes your screen.
  • Select All – Selects all files.
  • Unselect All  – Unselects all files.
File Transfer Tools: cPanel File Manager - Navigation
Use the buttons in the navigation menu to perform additional functions.

Using File Manager To Upload And Extract Zipped Files

In this example, we’ll show you how to upload and extract a zipped plugin file to your server.

First, make sure to have your zipped file ready for upload.

Zipped file inside hard drive
A zipped file ready to upload to the server.

Next, log into cPanel and open up the File Manager panel.

File Manager screen
Log into cPanel’s File Manager.

You can drill down folder hierarchies to access nested folders and files by double-clicking on the upper directory folders.

File Transfer Tools: cPanel File Manager
Double-click folders to access nested folders and files

Next, locate the folder on your server where you will upload your file and click Upload.

In the screenshot below, we will upload the zipped plugin file into the plugins folder section of our WordPress site installation.

File manager - Upload button
Click on the Upload button to upload your file to your server.

A new screen called ‘Upload files’ will open up in your web browser. You can drag and drop files into the section with the dotted border to automatically begin uploading your files, or click on the ‘Select File’ button as shown below, then locate and select your zipped file to upload.

cPanel's File Manager: File Upload screen - Select File button
Click the Select File button to select and upload your file.

Select your file and click ‘Open’ to begin uploading the file to your server …

Browser window with zipped file selected and Open button highlighted.
Select your file and click the Open button to upload your file to your server.

File Manager will begin to upload your file to your server. Wait until the file has finished uploading.

Screen of File Manager's Upload screen showing files being uploaded.
Wait until your files have been uploaded…

Once your file has been uploaded, click on the “Go Back…” link to return to the folder inside your File Manager’s screen where you have uploaded the file to.

File Manager's upload screen with file uploaded.
Your file has now been uploaded. Click on the link to return to the File Manager’s folder screen.

You should see the file you have uploaded inside the folder on your server.

info

If you cannot see the file, then do the following:

  1. Check that you are in the correct folder, and
  2. Click the Reload button to refresh the screen.
File manager - Reload button
Click Reload to refresh the screen if you cannot see the file you have just uploaded.

Also, if you upload a file to the wrong directory, use the Move button to select the right destination folder for your file.

File manager - Move button
Have you uploaded a file to the wrong folder on your server? No problem, use the Move button to place it in the right folder.

After your zipped file has been uploaded, click on the ‘Extract’ button to decompress (unzip) your file.

File Manager - Extract Button
Let’s extract this zipped file inside your server.

A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm the location where you want to extract your files to. Click Extract File(s) to continue.

Extract pop-up windown
Click Extract Files to confirm and begin unzipping your file.

The ‘Extraction Results’ window displays all of your extracted files once the operation has been completed.

Click Close to return to the File Manager screen.

Extraction Results window.
All of your zipped files are now extracted. Go ahead and close the Extraction Results window.

Click the Reload button to refresh your screen.

File Manager - Reload Button
Click Reload to refresh your screen.

All uploaded files are now extracted and added to your server.

File Manager screen - New uploaded file extracted.
Your newly uploaded file…fully extracted and ready for use!

You can delete the original zip file from your server to save space and keep your folder free of unnecessary clutter.

To delete the zipped file, select it in your File Manager screen and click on the Delete button.

File Manager - Delete Zip file from server.
Select the original zipped file and click the Delete button to remove the file from your server and save space.

The above method for uploading files to your server is useful. Large files that normally take a long time to upload via FTP can upload in seconds or just a few minutes when transferred using cPanel’s File Manager.

Not all hosting companies offer cPanel. Many hosting companies, however, offer a file manager application, so check with your web host.

How To Configure Server File Permission Settings

Most software program installations nowadays will configure everything automatically for you. Sometimes, however,  you may need to manually set permissions to allow other users to read, write, modify, and/or access information after uploading some files or programs to your web server.

File permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your server files and folders or directories.

Server file permissions specify what can and can't be done to your files
Server file permissions specify what can and can’t be done to your files.

This is important because some applications need to upload or access files in some of your server directories to perform certain functions. If permissions for these files or directories are not enabled or set correctly, it can cause errors.

File permissions error
Errors can occur if file permissions on server directories are not set correctly.

For example, if your site runs on WordPress and permissions have not been automatically set or enabled for files in your wp-content directory, you may experience errors when uploading plugins or you may not be able to save changes made to plugin settings.

Refer to the short tutorial below to learn how to configure server file permission settings for files and directories on an open-source operating system like Linux.

Again, we recommend doing a full backup of your website’s files and data before modifying any files on your server.

How To Configure File Permission Settings On Your Server (Linux)

CHMOD

Chmod (abbreviated from change mode) is a command that lets a user tell the system (or server) how much or how little access it should permit a file or a file directory to be given.

It changes the file system modes of files and directories, including permissions and special modes.

How To Configure File Permission Settings On Your Server
If you experience issues you may need to configure file permission settings on your server.
Setting File Permission Settings Using ‘CHMOD’

If you use an FTP program like Filezilla, do the following to view and change security permission settings for your server files and folders:

  1. Access your server
  2. Locate the directory or file with the permissions you want to change
  3. Right-click on the file and select ‘Properties’
How To Configure File Permission Settings - Properties
File Properties

The CHMOD options should display in the menu. If not, access the help section of your FTP client and search for chmod, permissions, or change mode. Most FTP programs have this feature readily available.

To change or set permissions for your files, simply check or uncheck the permission boxes (for Owner, Group, or Public), or add the desired permission setting number in the Manual display field, then click OK to save.

CHMOD File Permissions
Setting CHMOD File Permissions

Common WordPress file and directory permissions include the following settings:

  • 777Everything for everyone. This command gives read, write, and execute permission to the owner, group, and public. chmod 777 is considered potentially dangerous because you are giving read, write, and execute permission on a file/directory to everyone on your system. Normally, this setting should be avoided.
  • 755Only the owner can write, read and execute for everyone. This command means that only the owner will be allowed to write to the file. The owner, group members, and everyone else will have read and execute permissions.
  • 644Everyone can read, only the owner can write. With this setting, the owner will have read and write permissions while the group and everyone else has read permission only.

Setting directory permissions to make your files writable depends on your web hosting environment. For example, to make a file or directory writable, you would normally set (i.e. chmod) file permissions either to 777 or 755.

Notes:

  • Only change file permission settings if your site installation or plugin requires it. Normally, this will either be specified in a user manual (e.g. a plugin manual or installation guide) or if changing file permissions is required while performing some kind of function on your site (e.g. installing or making changes to plugins or themes).
  • If you are performing installations using wizards, a notification message will usually appear on your screen asking you to make a particular file or directory writable, or specifying which permission settings you need to change.
  • Unless the change required to the file permission settings is permanent, you would normally restore the file to its original settings after making and saving the change for security purposes (e.g. changing a file from 644 to 755, then back to 644 again). This prevents hackers and unauthorized users from accessing and modifying the files on your server.
  • After making changes to files, refresh your site’s page in your browser to make sure that everything is working correctly.
  • Changing file permissions is not complicated. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you are concerned that you might do something that can cause errors, don’t modify any files. Instead, ask your web hosting provider or someone with more knowledge or experience to do this for you.
  • If you experience errors after changing permission settings, change the permission settings back to what they were and see if the error messages disappear. If errors persist after restoring file permissions, contact your web hosting provider for help.

Use this handy chmod calculator if you need help configuring different file or directory permissions.

Amazon S3

If you are hosting media files (e.g. an image) on Amazon S3 (covered in the next section) and the file is not displaying correctly on your browser, you may not have set the correct permissions for that file.

Typically, this is what you will see if a file has incorrect permissions…

S3 file error - This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it.
This is what you will see if you have not set the correct permissions for your file on Amazon S3.

To display images stored on Amazon S3 on your website’s pages, set your file permissions as shown below:

S3 Permissions
Set up your image file permission as shown here and click Apply Changes to display images stored on Amazon S3 to users on your website.

Full Control

  • Owner – Tick the checkbox
  • Any AWS Users – Leave the checkbox unticked
  • All Users – Leave the checkbox unticked

Read

  • Owner – Leave the checkbox unticked
  • Any AWS Users – Tick the checkbox
  • All Users – Tick the checkbox

After ticking the boxes as described above, click on Apply changes to set your file permissions.

The images should now display to your website users. The Amazon S3 section below shows you how to add media files from S3 to your web pages.

Transferring Files To Cloud Storage Services

Your website files can be stored on your web server or a cloud storage service.

Some of the most popular storage services for storing files remotely in the cloud include:

  • Amazon S3
  • Google Drive
  • Dropbox

Let’s take a brief look at each of these services and how to transfer cloud-hosted files to and from your devices and your website.

Amazon S3

Fie transfer Tools: Amazon S3
Store your files remotely using Amazon S3’s cloud storage service.

Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) is a scalable cloud storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon S3 is great for storing all kinds of files, especially media files, website backups, data archives, and more.

Amazon S3 storage folders are called buckets.

Amazon S3 buckets
With Amazon S3, you store your files in buckets (folders).

A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. You can store any number of objects in a bucket and can have up to 100 buckets in your account.

Many applications can connect directly with your Amazon S3 account, allowing you to quickly and easily upload and store files in your s3 buckets and serve these directly on your website.

For example, the image below is being hosted on Amazon S3.

Puppy image
This image of a cute puppy is hosted on Amazon S3.

To check this using Google’s Chrome browser, right-click on the image and choose Inspect.

Google Chrome Browser - Inspect
Right-click on the image and select Inspect (Chrome browser users).

You should see an Amazon S3 bucket address displayed for the image.

Chrome Browser - Inspect
This image is hosted on Amazon S3 as the Chrome Browser’s Inspect function shows.

Uploading files directly to Amazon buckets can be a little complicated, so we recommend using a tool like the one below to transfer files to and from your computer or hard drive and your Amazon S3 account…

S3 Browser

S3 Browser
We recommend using a tool like S3 Browser to upload files to your S3 account.

S3 Browser is a free Windows client for Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network, (CDN). We use and recommend installing the paid version of this tool as S3 Browser is free for personal use only.

Also, as this site is built using WordPress, media files stored on Amazon S3 can be inserted directly into the content, so here’s what we did to display the image above on this web page:

First, we uploaded the image to our Amazon s3 account…

Amazon S3 - Image uploaded to S3 bucket.
Image uploaded to S3 bucket.

After the image was uploaded, we then set file permissions as explained earlier, right-clicked on the file, and selected Generate Web URL…

File Transfer Tools: Amazon S3 Browser - Generate Web URL
Select Generate Web URL…

We then copied the URL of the image to our clipboard…

S3 Browser - Copy to clipboard.
Click the button to copy the file URL to your clipboard.

And pasted the URL into the content…

Paste image from Amazon S3 into content.
Paste…done!

That’s it! When you look at that image on our web page, it’s being served from Amazon S3, not from our web server.

tip

Remember to add an alt tag image and a caption to your image URL before publishing to improve your content SEO.

WordPress text tab showing Amazon S3 image URL pasted into content.
Easily add media files hosted on Amazon S3 to a WordPress site.

Amazon S3 also allows you to set up a “bucket policy” on your server that protects files stored in buckets from being hotlinked.

See this lesson for more details: How To Prevent Hotlinking

Google Drive

Google Drive screen
Store your files and documents on Google Drive.

Google Drive lets you store files on Google’s servers in the cloud. You can also share files and synchronize files across different devices.

Google Drive is great for storing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, forms, and other files created using Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. It also lets you collaborate with your content team to edit your documents.

Files created and edited through the Google Docs suite are automatically saved in Google Drive. You can also upload large files (up to 750 GB in size), and change privacy settings for individual files and folders, including enabling sharing with other users or making your content public.

Tutorial: How To Embed Files From Google Drive Into Your Website

You can easily embed files from Google Drive into your website.

In this example, we’ll embed an image stored on Google Drive into a WordPress site.

tip

Note: You can use the same method as shown in the tutorial below to embed other types of files into your site like videos, audios, etc.

After uploading your media file to Google Drive, right-click on the file and select Preview.

Google Drive file - Preview
Right-click on your file and select Preview.

Next, click on the vertical ellipsis icon (More Options) and select Open in new window

File Transfer Tools: Google Drive - Open in new window.
Select Open in new window.

Click on the vertical ellipsis icon again and select Embed item

File Transfer Tools: Google Drive -Embed item.
Select Embed item…

Copy the embed code to your clipboard…

File Transfer Tools: Google Drive - Embed item
Select and copy the embed code to your clipboard.

If you are using the WordPress classic editor, switch to the Text tab and paste the content from your clipboard into the location where you want your image (or video, or audio file, etc.) to display.

WordPress: Add New Post - Paste the embed code into your content.
Paste the embed code into your content.

Your embedded file should display when you publish and preview your content.

WordPress post displaying embedded image file from Amazon S3.
Your embedded image file from Amazon S3.

If you are using the WordPress block editor, select the Custom HTML block…

WordPress Block Editor - Custom HTML Block.
Select the Custom HTML Block if you are using the WordPress Block Editor.

Paste your S3 embed code into the block and publish or update your post.

Custom HTML Block - Pasted-in content.
Paste your embed code into the Custom HTML Block and publish or update your post.

Publish and view your content to see the embedded media file.

WordPress post with embedded file hosted on Amazon S3.
WordPress post with embedded file hosted on Amazon S3.

If you use WordPress, you can use a plugin like Google Drive Embedder to easily add files stored in Amazon S3 to your content.

Google Drive Embedder plugin for WordPress.
Google Drive Embedder plugin for WordPress.

Dropbox

Dropbox screen
The Dropbox screen.

Dropbox is a file hosting service that lets you store, share, and synchronize files in the cloud.

tip

Dropbox is excellent for transferring files between multiple devices, as it allows you to access your account from anywhere, on any device.

For example, let’s say that you have a home computer and a work laptop and your media editing tools are installed on both devices.

With Dropbox (and Google Drive too), you can upload files to your account while you are at work via your laptop…

File Transfer Tool: Dropbox - Uploading screen.
Upload files to Dropbox from one device (e.g. your work laptop)…

And download these files to your home computer when you get home to continue working…

Download files window
And download the files from Dropbox to another device (e.g. your home computer).

WordPress

The WordPress CMS has many powerful features for uploading and managing files to your website.

For example:

WordPress Media Library

The WordPress Media Library lets you upload all kinds of media files to your site and comes with many built-in features for managing your uploaded files.

The WordPress Media Library
You can use drag and drop or select files to upload media to your WordPress site.

For a comprehensive step-by-step tutorial on using this powerful feature of WordPress, go here: How To Use The WordPress Media Library

Additionally, see these tutorials:

WordPress Plugins

In addition to the Media Library, there are various WordPress Media Plugins you can use to transfer and manage files on your site from your computer and cloud storage services.

For example, S3 Media Maestro lets you display videos hosted on Amazon S3 securely on your site.

S3 Media Maestro
Use S3 Media Maestro to display content stored on Amazon S3 securely on your WordPress site.

If you store files on Google Drive, you can use a plugin like Google Drive Embedder to add files to your content.

Google Drive Embedder plugin for WordPress.
Google Drive Embedder plugin for WordPress.

You can also use a plugin like Dropr to easily access files from your Dropbox account and add them to your WordPress website.

Dropr - Dropbox plugin for WordPress
Dropr is a Dropbox plugin for WordPress.

For more plugins that can help you manage the transfer of files to your WordPress site, see this section: WordPress Media Plugins

WordPress Automatic Updates

WordPress has a built-in feature that automatically transfers data like new software updates, plugins, and themes from the main WordPress repository (WordPress.org) to the WordPress installation files in your server.

It also automatically uploads, extracts, and places all data directly into the correct folders inside your web server and database.

The WordPress auto-updating feature is useful for transferring files from your server when:

  • Updating WordPress via the dashboard
  • Uploading and installing WordPress plugins
  • Updating WordPress plugins
  • Uploading and installing WordPress themes
  • Updating WordPress themes

The ability to perform updates directly inside your WordPress dashboard is extremely convenient. However, keep the following in mind…

One-click updates work on most servers. If you have any problems, it is probably related to permissions issues on the filesystem.

(Source: WordPress Codex – Updating WordPress)

See the section earlier on configuring server file permissions if you run into any issues with WordPress (also refer to this WordPress Troubleshooting Guide if you experience other errors on your site).

Zapier

Zapier lets you connect and integrate your web applications and automate your workflows.

Essentially, Zapier allows thousands of different applications to communicate with each other and create all kinds of “when this happens…automatically do this” tasks (called “Zaps”), saving you a lot of time in the process.

Zapier also offers many integrations with WordPress.

For example, you can easily connect your Amazon S3 account with your WordPress website to create all kinds of automated actions like uploading files to buckets or media files to WordPress…

Zapier - Amazon S3 and WordPress Integrations
Connect and automate tasks between Amazon S3 and WordPress.

Similarly, you can connect your Google Drive account with your WordPress site

Zapier - Google Drive and WordPress Integrations
Automate tasks between Google Drive and WordPress.

And connect Dropbox with your WordPress site

Zapier - Dropbox and WordPress Integrations
Automate tasks between Dropbox and WordPress.

Zapier offers extensive help documentation, including detailed tutorials on how to integrate the tool with all kinds of services.

Video Courses For Beginners – Transferring Files

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

How To Use FTP - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Use FTP

Learn how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload, download, and transfer files between your computer and your web server.

More info: How To Use FTP

How To Use Amazon S3 - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Use Amazon S3

Learn how to set up and use Amazon S3 to upload, store, manage, and protect your site’s images, large media files, downloadable files, stream videos, and more.

More info: How To Use Amazon S3

How To Use cPanel - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Use cPanel

Learn how to use cPanel to easily manage your webhosting and email accounts.

More info: How To Use cPanel

How To Backup & Restore WordPress Sites - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Back Up & Restore WordPress Sites

Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.

More info: How To Back Up & Restore WordPress Sites

How To Set Up WordPress On LocalhostHow To Set Up WordPress On Localhost

Learn how to install, set up, and locally host a fully functioning WordPress site on your computer.

More info: How To Set Up WordPress On Localhost

How To Use Softaculous - WPMasterclasses.comHow To Use Softaculous

Learn how to install WordPress on your domain using Softaculous.

More info: How To Use Softaculous

***

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

Summary

Effective content management involves the continuous transfer of files between users, different devices, web servers, and remote storage services.

In this lesson, we have covered many different methods you can use to transfer files and share content in your organization.

Action Steps

Make an inventory of the file transfer tools, methods, and processes used in your organization and make sure there is workflow documentation for your content team on how to use these effectively.

Resources

  • WordPress User Manual – The most detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users available.

References

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Images: Cloud Computing, Blogging, Email Marketing, Flowers

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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.

Content Production ToolsAn 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.

***

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.

tip

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:

  1. Create columns for each workflow process you want to track
  2. Arrange columns in sequential order
  3. Add new projects to rows (one per row).
  4. Use color coding to highlight the status of your projects. For example:
    • Yellow = Work-in-progress
    • Green =  Completed (published)
    • Red = Needs attention
Content Production Workflow
Use spreadsheets to create simple content production workflows and colors to highlight your project status.

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

Google Sheets

Content Production Tools - Google Sheets
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

Content Production Tools - Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel

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

WPS Spreadsheet

Content Production Tools - WPS Spreadsheet
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

Content Production Tools - Smartsheet
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

Content Production Tools - Airtable
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

Content Production Tools - Google Calendar
Image source: 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
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
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
MarketMuse

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

Swimlane Diagram
Source: Smartsheet.com

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
TextExpander

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

Beeftext
Boost your writing efficiency with 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.

Trello

Trello
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
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
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:

More info: Asana

Monday

Monday
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
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
Optimizely’s Content Management Cloud CMS

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
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
ChatGPT is an impressive tool that uses advanced AI technology to create human-like text.

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.

More info: ChatGPT

Designrr

Designrr - Create, Design & Launch Stunning eBooks and Reports with Ease!
Designrr – Create, Design & Launch Stunning eBooks and Reports with Ease!

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
Content At Scale: Revolutionizing AI Copywriting

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
Quillbot – AI-powered content writing, paraphrasing, and grammar-checking tool.

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

SpinRewriter
SpinRewriter uses content spinning (spintax) to generate unique versions of your content.

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:

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 - AI powered text to voice generator
PlayHT – AI powered text to voice generator

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 - Text-To-Speech Software
Speechelo – Text-To-Speech Software

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

tip

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 - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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 - WPMasterclasses.comDigital 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 - WPMasterclasses.comDigital 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

Graphic Creation Tools - WPMasterclasses.comUsing 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 - WPMasterclasses.comPodcasting

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

More info: Podcasting

Using Webinars - WPMasterclasses.comUsing 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 - WPMasterclasses.comText-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

***

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

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.

Content Promotion ToolsAfter 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

Pingler
Use Pingler to ping search engines about your new posts and pages.

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
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:

Powered by AWeber

MailChimp

MailChimp
MailChimp – Email Marketing Service

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
Hunter – Email finding tool.

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
PhantomBuster – Email Extractor

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
Verifalia – email address validator.

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
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
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
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

Creator Studio
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
Wistia – video marketing platform.

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

Sprout Video
SproutVideo – video hosting for businesses.

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
Conviva – Streaming insights service.

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
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
Anchor – Podcast analytics from Spotify

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

Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing - Free Guide
Promote Your Podcast With Email Marketing – Free Guide

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

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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
RebranderPRO – Rebrandable PDF Reports

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)

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
Self-publish eBooks and guides with Amazon’s 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

tip

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.
  • tip

    See the resources below for more information on creating and promoting online courses and using learning management systems (LMS):

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
Beaconstac – Track QR code marketing performance.

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

tip

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
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
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
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
StoryChief – All-in-one content marketing platform.

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 - WPMasterclasses.comDigital 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 - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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 - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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 - WPMasterclasses.comOnline 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 - WPMasterclasses.comLead Generation

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

More info: Lead Generation

Social Media Marketing - WPMasterclasses.comSocial 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 - WPMasterclasses.comContent Marketing

Learn how to grow your business using content marketing.

More info: Content Marketing

Affiliate Marketing - WPMasterclasses.comAffiliate Marketing

Learn how to generate an income with affiliate marketing.

More info: Affiliate Marketing

Email Marketing - WPMasterclasses.comEmail Marketing

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

More info: Email Marketing

Video Marketing - WPMasterclasses.comVideo 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 - WPMasterclasses.comYouTube 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 - WPMasterclasses.comFacebook 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 - WPMasterclasses.comTwitter Marketing

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

More info: Twitter Marketing

QR Code MarketingQR Code Marketing

Learn how to promote your business better using QR codes.

More info: QR Code Marketing

How To Use Aweber - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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 & CustomersNews 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

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

References

***

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Email Marketing Newsletter

***

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.

Content Research Tools

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.

***

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:

Google

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

Content Research Tools - Google Search screen
Just 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.

tip

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.

Chrome extension confirmation popup.
Confirm if you want to install the extension.

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

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

Content Research Tools - Google Trends
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.

Google Trends
Use Google Trends to compare search activity between topics.

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.

Google Trends Datastore
Download datasets from Google Trends at the Google Trends Datastore.

More info: Google Trends

Google Alerts

Google Alerts
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
Google Lens lets you do ‘real world’ content research.

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
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.

Google Scholar results
Google Scholar results

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
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.

Looker Studio
Looker Studio demo.

For tutorials on using Looker Studio, go here:

More info: Looker Studio

tip

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.

Search Intent Keyword Classifier
Use the Search Intent Keyword Classifier dashboard template to research search-intent-based content ideas. Source: 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
Exploding Topics – discover trending topics before they take off.

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
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.

Infographiqs search results
Infographiqs search results

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

Infographic Directory
Source: Infographic Directory

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

More info: Infographiqs.com

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo
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
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
Scoop.it – Content curation tool for individuals and businesses.

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
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

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.

Feedspot

Feedspot
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

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).

LinkedIn's content suggestions feature.
Use LinkedIn’s content suggestions feature to explore new content ideas.

More info: LinkedIn

Twitter

Twitter
Find and follow subject experts on 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
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
Use Twitter Polls to gain insights from Twitter users for your content.

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
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

Reddit
Reddit

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
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
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
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
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
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

Chrome Bookmarks
Chrome Bookmarks

tip

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

Content Research Tools - Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote

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

Content Research Tools - Simplenote
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
MyInfo – organizer application for Windows.

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

tip

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

Copy and paste text from images
You can copy and paste text from images using image capture tools to speed up your content research.

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

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 - WPMasterclasses.comKeyword Research Tools

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

More info: Keyword Research Tools

Google Tools - WPMasterclasses.comGoogle Tools

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

More info: Google Tools

Using Password Managers - WPMasterclasses.comUsing 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

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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

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.

Content Editing ToolsDepending 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

Content Editing Tools - Grammarly
Grammarly – Free grammar-checking software

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.

Install Grammarly on your web browser
Install Grammarly on your web browser.

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.
Check your posts for errors before publishing.

Important

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

Make sure that Grammarly is enabled.
Make sure that Grammarly is enabled.

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

Make sure that you're logged into your account
Make sure that you’re logged into your account and that Grammarly is enabled.

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

Grammarly Dashboard
Grammarly Dashboard

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
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.

Grammarly scan results
Grammarly scan results.

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
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.).

Fix punctuation errors
Fix punctuation errors.

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.

Delete duplicate words
Delete duplicate words.

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

Fix mistakes in your sentences
Fix mistakes in your sentences.

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.

Click on suggestions to correct errors
Click on suggestions to correct errors

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
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: AI Writing Assistant Software
ProWritingAid: AI Writing Assistant Software

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

Content Editing Tools - Hemingway Editor
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

Content Editing Tools - The Associated Press Stylebook
The AP 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 Online
The Chicago Manual Of Style Online

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

Yahoo! Style Guide
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

Content Editing Tools - TitleCase.com
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…

TitleCase convertors.
Select different TitleCase convertors.

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.net
WordCounter.net

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
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 - WPMasterclasses.comText-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

WordPress Gutenberg - WPMasterclasses.comWordPress Gutenberg

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

More info: WordPress Gutenberg

How To Use CSS - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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! 

Media Editing ToolsBest 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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Media Conversion Tools

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

CloudConvert

CloudConvert
CloudConvert – Online File Convert

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
Ezgif – Online GIF maker and image editor.

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.

EZGif.com - Animated GIF Resizer.
Upload your file.

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

EZGif.com - Animated GIF Resizer.
Resize your file’s dimensions.

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

EZGif.com - Animated GIF Resizer.
Click the Save icon button.

Save the resized image to your computer.

EZGif.com - Animated GIF Resizer.
Save the resized GIF file 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.com
GifGifs.com

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 - Video Resizer
Adobe Express – Video Resizer

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):

Graphic Creation Tools - WPMasterclasses.comUsing 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

How To Create Engaging Presentations - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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 - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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

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.

Video Creation Tools - Image of laptop with video editing software.

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
Camtasia – Screen recording and video editing tool.

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 - AI video creation software
Synthesia – AI video creation software

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
Toonly – Drag-and-drop explainer video creation tool.

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…

Toonly login screen
Toonly login screen

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

Toonly dashboard
The Toonly dashboard

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 keyboard shortcuts
Toonly keyboard shortcuts

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
Create Cartoon Explainer Videos Easily With Toonly

Explaindio

Explaindio - Video creation tool
Explaindio – Animated video creation tool

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
Viddyoze live-action video animation tool.

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 - Doodle Video Creator
Doodly – Doodle video creation tool

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 - Social Media Video Marketing Creation ToolKlippyo 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 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
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
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
Animoto – Drag and drop video maker.

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
Lumen5 – AI video content creation tool.

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

Motion Objects - Powerful Animated Objects For Video Marketing
Motion Objects – Powerful Animated Objects For Video Marketing

Motion Objects - Video Marketing Animated ObjectsOne 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
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(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 - WPMasterclasses.comVideo 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 - WPMasterclasses.comYouTube 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

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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.

Image Tools - Photoshop.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

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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

Image Tools: Snagit - Screen Capture and Recording Software
Snagit – Screen Capture and Recording Software

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

Image Tools: Screenrec - Free Screen Recorder
Screenrec – Free Screen Recorder

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

Image Tools: Photoshop
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

Image Tools: GIMP
GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program

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

Image Tools: Colorcinch
Colorcinch is an easy-to-use photo editor and cartoonizer.

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.

Digital Products

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

Image Tools: CoverActionPRO
CoverActionPRO – Create stunning 3D graphics for eBooks and product covers with one click.

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…

eBook Covers
CoverActionPRO softcover eBook templates.

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

eBook Covers
CoverActionPRO binder and report cover templates.

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

eBook Covers
CoverActionPRO software box templates.

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

info

For more eBook cover creation tools and tutorials, go here:

Infographic Creation Tools

Use the tools below to create infographics.

Venngage

Image Tools: Venngage
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

Image Tools: Adobe Express
Create infographics with 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

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For more infographic creation tools, visit these sites:

Biteable

Image Tools: Biteable
Biteable – Animated infographic creator.

More info: Biteable

Canva

Image Tools: Canva
Canva – Free online infographic maker.

More info: Canva

DesignCap

Image Tools: DesignCap
DesignCap – free infographic maker.

More info: DesignCap

Infogram

Image Tools: Infogram: Create Infographics, Reports and Maps.
Infogram: Create Infographics, Reports, and Maps.

More info: Infogram

Mural

Image Tools: Mural - visual collaboration software.
Mural – visual collaboration software.

More info: Mural

Piktochart

Image Tools: Piktochart - Free infographic maker
Piktochart – Free infographic maker.

More info: Piktochart

Snappa

Image Tools: Snappa - Online Infographic Maker
Snappa – Online infographic maker.

More info: Snappa

Visme

Image Tools: Visme - Free infographic maker
Visme – Free infographic maker.

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

Image Tools: Google Drawings
Create flowcharts, diagrams, concept maps, storyboards, and more with 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

Image Tools: Google Charts
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.

Google Chart Gallery
Google Chart Gallery

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.

More info: Google Charts

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft PowerPoint
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

Image Tools: yED Graph Editor
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

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Here are some additional flowcharting tools you may want to look at:

Cacoo

Cacoo
Cacoo – Online flowchart software with real-time team collaboration.

More info: Cacoo

ConceptDraw Diagram

ConceptDraw Diagram
ConceptDraw Diagram – Flowchart software

More info: ConceptDraw Diagram

Edraw Max

Edraw Max
Edraw Max – All-purpose diagramming software

More info: Edraw Max

Gliffy

Gliffy
Gliffy – Flowchart tool for Confluence & Jira

More info: Gliffy

Lucidchart

Lucidchart – Create flowcharts with collaboration and data import features

More info: Lucidchart

Microsoft Visio

Microsoft Visio
Microsoft Visio – Windows flowchart software

More info: Microsoft Visio

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft Powerpoint
Microsoft Powerpoint includes built-in flowcharting and diagramming tools.

More info: Microsoft Powerpoint

Miro

Miro
Miro’s flowchart maker includes built-in communication features.

More info: Miro

Terrastruct

Terrastruct
Terrastruct is a great flowchart tool for software development.

More info: Terrastruct

VisualParadigm Online

VisualParadigm Online
VisualParadigm Online – Flowchart software for agile software development & data analytics.

More info: VisualParadigm Online

Whimsical

Whimsical
Whimsical – Fast Flowchart-making tool

More info: Whimsical

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):

Graphic Creation Tools - WPMasterclasses.comUsing 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

How To Create Engaging Presentations - WPMasterclasses.comHow 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

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

Return To The Main Tools And Resources Section

Image: Photoshop