15 Essential Content Creation Apps You Need Right Now

Writing is your drawcard.

It’s the number one tool you have at your fingertips for marketing an online business.

So it needs to be good.

You need to write compelling copy that engages readers, gets them to listen up and encourages them to buy.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create content faster without giving up on quality?

Today I’m going to introduce you to 15 content creation apps that will make your job (and life) easier. From coming up with new content ideas, to writing content and eventually promoting it.

Let’s get straight into it.

Coming up with content ideas

This is often the most difficult step for a content creator.

What should I write about?

And frankly, a blank page is not helping at all.

Readers are tired of the same old topics and tips. They are always expecting something out of the ordinary, life changing and breath taking. Without these catchy topics, people won’t come back for more.

So here are some sources of inspiration.

1. Feedly

Feedly offers a daily inspiration of great content ideas.

Things happen all the time, in absolutely every field. But as a writer, you can’t afford to browse tons of websites to look for interesting news. This takes too much time.

This is why Feedly exists! This web app gathers news from different websites all in one place.

Users can select the sources and sort the news by topics. After this, you only have to log in and bam – News comes to you!

Now pick up the catchiest topic one and start writing.

2. Mindnote

Sometimes, people expect to find material solutions to the problems they read about. So a good idea for coming up with an appealing topic is to first find a new and innovative product.

Then, the rest is simple as pie – start the article with the issue, suggest the solution and introduce the product that can actually sort things out. MindNote is the best place to apply this method.

3. ContentGems

ContentGems puts together particular kinds of news in one daily e-mail. You can choose the topics of interest and a list of articles comes straight to your inbox.

This is a great method for coming up with a writing topics every day.

4. FAQ Fox

This is a great place for finding out what topics people are looking for online.

FAQ Fox gathers information from a large variety of websites.

Here is how it works – users type in a term, hit search and select the websites they want to track down. Next, the platform displays questions and answers related to that particular term.

Writers can spot the unsatisfactory answers and create a qualitative article on that topic.

This method guarantees readership!

5. Creativity Portal

Creativity Portal is famous for helping writers and other artists guide their creativity. It provides inspirational materials – e-journals, articles, posts, and so on.

How can you take advantage of this platform?

Read about the topics you are interested in and use them for inspiration, information, writing style, etc.

Just remember not to plagiarize!

Creating better content

Sure, marketing is kind of on auto pilot these days. But writing still requires a human mind. And yes, I know how exhausting this can be!

Fortunately, smart IT guys have invented several content creation apps to help us research, write, edit, and design content.

Below, I have chosen some of the top picks.

6. Papersgear

Proofreading takes some time and energy. Wouldn’t it be better to start writing the next article rather than edit the already completed one?

In this case, you just need some professional editors willing to verify and improve the content. Papersgear has a great team with experienced employers who can help you publish nothing less than perfect articles.

Also, if you need help with writing something, count on this website. Writers cover all niches and deliver pretty impressive work.

7. Hemingway App

The famous writer, Ernest Hemingway, was well known for his style – simple, short sentences. As a consequence, this is exactly the purpose of this platform – to guide writers to create easy to understand phrases and texts. After all, this is the main requirement for online content.

The app is really easy to use – you just copy and paste text and see the evaluation.

At first, I was happy to learn that our articles were at college level or higher. But guess what? This is the opposite of what you should aim for!

Online readers need to grasp the meaning of an article as fast as possible. The tool also spots passive voice. This is something to be avoided, because it makes sentences long and harder to understand.

8. InboundWriter

Ok, you already have the topic of your next article. But now, it is vital to know how to write it and what to include in it.

The solution is to use InboundWriter. This tool allows you to monitor certain topics and spot the improvements you will need to make to resonate with your readers.

9. Creately

This tool is amazing when it comes to organizing and structuring a future article.

Your life becomes easier when things are clearly sitting in front of you. So use this platform to create diagrams, charts, infographics, and so on.

It works on the basic principle of drag and drop, and it even accepts photos. However, it has a major downside – every project is public, unless users pay for it.

10. Glipho

Glipho allows writers to publish their content and users from all around the world can come up with ideas for the sequel. What better method to find out what people want to read about?

Submit a part of an article, and wait for reactions. Then choose the best idea and finish the text.

Content targeting and optimization

After the content is done, it is time to check its effectiveness. Marketers bet on emotional keywords and SEO. These methods are great to ensure readership.

There are online tools that can evaluate content from this point of view. They will tell you if a title is too long, or not strong enough; if the content is redundant or it has way too many SEO terms.

In this way, you will know what exactly to do in order to improve the content and make it more “commercial”.

11. Headline Analyzer

Did you know that only 62% of readers go beyond the headline of an article?

As a direct consequence, this one is vital for attracting and keeping readership interested. Learn how to boost your headlines by using this online tool.

The Headline Analyzer, created by CoSchedule, is more than useful. It says what kind of words the title contains (common, uncommon, emotional, powerful); the headline type (if you got “generic”, keep trying); it analyzes the length; it even offers a Google search preview and an e-mail subject line preview; it shows you the keywords and the sentiment caused by the titled (you need positive emotions).

12. Zmags

The team at Zmags can create digital materials meant to capture your audiences attention and bring in more and more views. The website owns several products that help writers create and publish content.

13. PRWeb

Attract readers by letting them know you exist.

Use PRWeb to send search-engine-optimized press releases. These ones will promote the articles to everybody interested on that particular topic – subscribers, visitors of the website, and even journalists.

14. Scribe content

This is a valuable tool for every writer and marketer. Scribe analyzes the readers’ preferences and tells you if the content is optimized for sharing.

How does it do that?

Well, it collects conversations from Twitter and Google+, regarding the term introduced by the user.

Then, it also guides users towards creating content that will be better ranked by search engines. In the end, the result will be an easier and more effective marketing campaign.

15. Test My Marketing (TMM)

TMM offers a professional opinion regarding any kind of marketing and advertising materials. The team is made up of professionals in the field who can tell you from one look if the campaign is going to be successful or not.

Or course, after all this criticizing, the marketers will also offer you some guidelines for improving the content. Take advantage of these precious indications and use them for future campaigns.

What do you think…

Which one is your favorite?

What content creation apps would you add to this list?

Guest Author: Melinda Osteen is a dedicated marketing manager, social media guru and lifelong travel fanatic.

The post 15 Essential Content Creation Apps You Need Right Now appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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How I Increased My Email Conversions by 344%

If you’re trying to build an audience, you need a laser-like focus on one thing:

Increasing email conversions from your blog content.

Someone’s inbox is sacred. You can talk to them away from the noise of the internet, in a place they are comfortable.

A place where they trust you.

Email marketing is the single most effective way to get repeat traffic, build a loyal fanbase, and get your readers to take action.

It blows social media out of the water in engagement and is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for attention on Google and Facebook.

So the question is – What’s the most effective way to boost your email conversions?

The answer is content upgrades.

Today I’m going to walk through a step-by-step case study of implementing 4 content upgrades over the past 2 months on JeffBullas.com.

I’ll show you:

• What a content upgrade is
• How to make an irresistible content upgrade
• How well they worked on this blog (conversion rates before and after)
• How we chose which articles to prioritize
• Why you’re in a better position than Jeff to take advantage of this technique.

Ready? Let’s get started.

What is a content upgrade?

A content upgrade, coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko, is a post-specific bonus given away in exchange for an email address in the post itself.

Before you say, “Oh, I already give away a free ebook/report/video/course/thing-a-ma-bob”, note the words I italicized: this is not a sitewide, generic opt-in bribe.

For example on the sidebar of this blog, Jeff is offering his ’8 key steps to blogging mastery book’. That’s not a content upgrade, because it’s offered site-wide and is not post-specific.

Instead, here’s one of the posts we added a content upgrade to, the 2015 digital marketing strategy:

Right at the end of the intro, you see this note, formatted slightly differently to stand out from the main text:

When you click on the link, a LeadBox from LeadPages pops up:

When a reader opts-in, they’re sent the content upgrade for this post and added to the list.

That’s it!

But the magic is in what the bonus is.

How to make an irresistible content upgrade

Everything magical about content upgrades is in the specificity.

Let’s look at exactly what we offered in this 2015 strategy post.

First, we turned the post into a checklist of the 15 steps, so it’s easy to actually use the strategies in the post and start ticking off action items one by one.

Checklists are a great way to make posts actionable, so they’re useful for your readers. And for you, the blogger, they don’t require coming up with new content.

Just reduce your posts down into specific action steps.

Here’s the first page of the checklist:

Next, we noticed a few of the tips in the post were about Facebook marketing.

So a bonus on Facebook marketing makes sense. But instead of coming up with brand new content, we knew Jeff had a ton of content on Facebook already, so we found a way to leverage it.

We took his post 10 Powerful Tips to Increase Fan Engagement on Facebook, and turned that into a checklist, and added it to the bonus for this post:

Honestly, that would probably have been enough.

But we added one more bonus in because we already had it made: a checklist of how to rank higher in Google (It’s still relevant because one of the tips in the post was about SEO).

So if you’re the reader, you’re reading a post on 15 tips for a digital marketing strategy in 2015, that includes 3 tips on Facebook marketing and one tip on SEO. You see an offer for a free checklist of action steps for all 15 strategies, and how to increase engagement on Facebook, and rank higher in Google.

How compelling is that?

Certainly a lot more compelling than a generic ask to “subscribe to my newsletter” and still more compelling than an ebook that is offered sitewide.

Like I said, it’s all in how specific the bonus is to the post.

That’s what makes the email conversions so high.

How high? Let’s take a look…

Actual conversion rates from Jeff’s Blog

In total, we implemented 4 content upgrades in the past 2 months.

Here’s how well they converted compared to the other top “regular” 20 posts that didn’t have a content upgrade:

Note: For the conversion optimization nerds out there, although this wasn’t a formal A/B test (we are comparing conversions across different posts), the results had 99.99% significance (p value <0.0001), with 106,000 sessions for the baseline and 17,000 sessions for the “variation”.

Let’s stop and think about how much a 344% increase in email conversions is.

If you’re trying to grow your email list to say, 10,000, and you’re on track to hit that in 2 years (very achievable), if you improved your rate by 344%, you’d reduce that 2 years down to…

… 7 months!

That’s almost a year and a half of time saved to reach your goal.

So, it’s a big deal.

How to pick the perfect articles for high converting content upgrades

If you’re starting a new blog, listen up. You can use this section to craft the perfect articles for high converting upgrades.

If you already have a blog with articles that are getting decent traffic, use this section to prioritize which articles to make upgrades for.

I use a two step process to decide which posts to upgrade:

Step 1: Prioritize high traffic posts

Step 2: Prioritize in-depth posts

Step 2 is more important than Step 1. But let’s discuss both:

Step 1: Prioritize high traffic posts

This is obvious, so don’t forget it. If some posts started ranking in Google or exploding on social media and are getting a ton of traffic, of course it makes sense to turn those into email capturing machines.

To find your highest traffic posts, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics.

It should already organize your top pages by page views. Just be careful to select 3 or 6 months instead of 30 days so it doesn’t give too much weight to recent posts with a temporary traffic spike.

JeffBullas.com is obviously popular, so when we did this for Jeff there were a bunch of options of posts with a ton of traffic.

Choosing which to upgrade requires Step 2.

Step 2: Prioritize in-depth posts

Content upgrades work best on really in depth posts. The more depth the better. And, in my experience, how-to posts  — the ones that teach people a process or technique — are the best.

That’s because there’s really no reason to opt-in to get more information if the information you already got was basic, or worse, trite.

You know those “top 10 diet tips of the spring” articles on the front page of Yahoo? Would you really opt-in to get 10 more tips like “Eat avocados! They’re delicious and healthy!”

I wouldn’t.

On the other hand, if you’re reading an in depth guide on the Paleo diet with step by step diet and workout plans, and the author is offering recipes and printable take-to-the-gym cheatsheets, would you opt-in? Probably!

We saw this trend play out in our 4 content upgrades on Jeff’s blog.

Here are their email conversion rates:

The two highest converting posts were the ones with the most how-to advice: building your marketing strategy for 2015 and ranking higher in Google.

They helped readers achieve a goal.

The two lowest converting posts were lists of facts (or photos) for reference, and, unsurprisingly, they didn’t do as well.

So, if you already have a bunch of posts: focus on building upgrades for your most in depth posts first. 

New blogs: Why you’re at an advantage for email conversions

What about new blogs? What if you’re just starting and don’t have a lot of posts with decent traffic.

Well, you’re actually at an advantage in terms of creating extremely high converting posts:

Focus your time writing in depth how-to style posts in your niche. 

Not only will that help get shares and links for traffic (because the content will be naturally better), but it’ll help you create obscenely high converting content upgrades.

Make content upgrades in 5 minutes (Checklists)

“This all sounds great, but I don’t have the time to make more content after I’ve written my blog post.”

I hear this all the time.

In fact, you might be thinking that right now. Don’t stress. You don’t need to make super elaborate content to get the benefit of content upgrades.

You just need to think of small items of value that help your readers take the first step on the advice you’re giving.

That can be a short screencast, links with more info, 10 example ideas, or, one of my favorites: A checklist of the advice in the post.

Checklists are a huge win-win for content upgrades.

Win for the reader: The reader wants to take action, but isn’t sure where to start. A checklist helps them with super clear, actionable steps.

Win for you: You don’t have to write a ton more content, simply summarize your content into a step by step list.

To help you quickly make checklists that look good, I’ve assembled a bonus area where I’m giving away 3 checklist templates, in PowerPoint, so you can customize them as much as you like.

Click on the images to get to the bonus area:

In addition, I’m also including my 5 top favorite resources on the internet on content upgrades: articles that show you how to implement content upgrades technically, ideas for what to give your readers, and multiple case studies to get your creativity flowing.

Click here to get the bonuses. 

Questions about how to apply this to your blog? Ask below and I’ll do my best to answer each one.

Guest Author: Devesh Khanal is a conversion optimization consultant. He and his team focus on growing email lists and A/B testing high traffic pages. He writes about his successes and failures at DeveshDesign.com.

The post How I Increased My Email Conversions by 344% appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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30 Eye-Popping Web Designs to Inspire Digital Marketers

Three seconds…if you’re lucky.

Then they’re gone.

This is about how long we have to catch people’s attention, and get them to stay on our website.

So first impressions count and design is instrumental.

How do we standout, pop off the page and make a lasting impression on new website visitors?

One of the quickest ways to answer this question is to learn from others.

At Crayon we have collated over 13 million web design examples that marketers can use for inspiration.

We ran our usage data between May and June to bring the most recent statistics on what thousands of marketers agree are the most useful web designs.

I’m about to share the top 30 with you.

They are broken up into three separate categories:

• Top 10 Most Viewed Web Design Examples
• Top 10 Most Liked Web Design Examples
• Top 10 Most Saved Web Design Examples

Top 10 most viewed web design examples

The following web designs represent the most viewed pages by users over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Campaign Monitor

View This Page!

2. Patreon

View This Page!

3. Health Equity Labs

View This Page!

4. Quartz

View This Page!

5. Purch

View This Page!

6. Wildcraft

View This Page!

7. Telerik

View This Page!

8. Lexalytics

View This Page!

9. Promo Jam

View This Page!

10. Chegg

View This Page!

Top 10 most liked web design examples

The following designs represent the most “liked” pages by users over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Whole Foods

View This Page!

2. Campaign Monitor

View This Page!

3. Celery

View This Page!

4. WebDAM

View This Page!

5. Brandwatch

View This Page!

6. Tydy

View This Page!

7. Fresh Service

View This Page!

8. Rival IQ

View This Page!

9. NextView Ventures

View This Page!

10. HubSpot

View This Page!

Top 10 most saved web design examples

The following designs represent the most “saved” pages by users to their profile on Crayon over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Campaign Monitor

View This Page!

2. Health Equity Labs

View This Page!

3. Patreon

View This Page!

4. Purch

View This Page!

5. Telerik

View This Page!

6. Promo Jam

View This Page!

7. Shopify

View This Page!

8. Quartz

View This Page!

9. Lexalytics

View This Page!

10. Chartbeat

View This Page!

A break down of all 30 web design examples

Most Viewed Designs	Most Liked Designs	Most Saved Designs
Campaign Monitor	Whole Foods	Campaign Monitor
Patreon	Campaign Monitor	Healthy Equity Labs
Health Equity Labs	Celery	Patreon
Quartz	WebDam	Purch
Purch	Brandwatch	Telerik
Wildcraft	Tydy	Promo Jam
Telerik	Fresh Service	Shopify
Lexalytics	Rival IQ	Quartz
Promo Jam	NextView Ventures	Lexalytics
Chegg	HubSpot	Chartbeat

 

What’s interesting about this list of companies is the variety of company size, industry and inception.

While it’s great (and somewhat expected) to see brands like Whole Foods, Shopify and HubSpot, it’s just as encouraging to see marketers learning from lesser known and/or more niche companies as well.

What’s also interesting to note about the data is that just because a design is viewed, it’s not always liked or saved. The only brand to make the top 10 across views, likes and saves is Campaign Monitor.

Most popular page types

Now that we’ve seen the most popular designs, the nest step is to learn what page types are most interesting to marketers.

To do this, we examined all of the designs on each of our top 10 lists. The design page types include home pages, landing pages, press pages…etc.

According to our data as seen below, marketers are most interested in seeing examples of home pages which represents 52% of the most popular designs.

After home pages, marketers are most interested in seeing landing pages, which is understandable considering the success of companies like Unbounce and Optimizely.

Interior site pages generating the most interest from design marketers include press pages, team pages, jobs pages and about pages.

Company type

Do marketers gravitate towards a certain type of company when looking for design inspiration?

We had to get to the bottom of this question to determine if users were mostly looking at big brands, or certain industries or new companies that are being featured in tech publications across the globe.

The results are as follows:

While users engage with designs from the software industry most often at 43%, there is then a fairly even distribution comprised of marketing/advertising, media, consumer goods and technology.

IT & services and private equity round out the group, each representing a 5% share.

Company size

According to our data, it doesn’t matter if a company has 10 employees or 10,000; good design is good design as the usage distribution is shown below:

Years in business

Interesting to note that the companies whose designs are interacted with the most have been around for an average of 9 years.

While 9 years isn’t considered a legacy company by any stretch, it’s certainly enough time to get out of the “start-up” world and operate as an established and thriving company.

Years in Business Statistics	# Of Years
Average Years in Business	9 years
Oldest Company	35 years
Newest Company	2 years
Range	33 years

 

Color palettes

Curious how your brand colors match up against the most popular designs?

Below you’ll see color distribution for over 20 of the most popular designs on Crayon. See anything you like?

While Blue is the most consistent theme, what you’ll find is that most of these palettes are unique.

Some of the color palettes displayed above clash while others blend perfectly together, but most look different than the others.

Find your own style!

Go off and find your inspiration

As marketers, we often hear that inspiration can and should come from all around us. What’s great to see about the data highlighted in this article is the diversity amongst the most popular designs.

Just because a company has a well-known brand, that doesn’t mean you should do as they do. Similarly, there’s a lot marketers can learn by discovering designs from unrelated industries and companies of all shapes and sizes.

So stop waiting, get outside of your comfort zone and go explore the world of design!

Guest Author: Dan Slagen from Crayon. Crayon is the most comprehensive marketing design search engine on the web. It’s the new way for marketers to get inspired and get great ideas about what to build.

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