7 Content Marketing Tools You’ve Probably Never Heard About

Content marketing is a very effective system so we invited Benjamin Brandall, the content writer for Process Street to tell us of some clever tools that make it easier. Find him on Twitter here.

If you’re looking to run a self-marketing company, there are few things that require less continued effort than content.
At Process Street, some of our content that’s almost 2 years old still brings in tens of thousands of visitors per month for just a few hours of work.
While content can sometimes feel like playing the lottery – and you don’t always know when you’ll hit a home-run and ride the wave of social shares and backlinks – it is definitely a scalable tactic and the benefits of blogging are huge.
After about a year as a full-time blogger who does little else apart from writing, I thought I’d heard it all.
You hear the big names ALL the time: Buffer, CoSchedule, Evernote, etc… But you don’t often hear new names.
I want to write this post to change that, and introduce you to some of the lesser known tools you can use to streamline your content marketing efforts.

1. Beegit

Beegit is a collaborative blog post writing app that helps you structure content marketing projects. I have a two projects in Beegit made up of a lot files each – one is for guest posts, one for posts on the Process Street blog.
While I draft my posts in WorkFlowy (more on that later), I grab them straight out and format them in Beegit. Why? Because it uses markdown.
Markdown is a language made for bloggers that makes it easy to format text into headers, bold, italics, etc, as well as link, insert images, etc.

Getting out of WordPress’ text editor is truly the best thing I’ve ever done.

2. Cronycle

The way that Cronycle was explained to me was that it is a mix of Feedly and Pocket, but way more collaborative.
Basically, Cronycle is a great tool for content marketers because it means you can get to know the authors and preferences of the outlets you’re going to start pitching guest posts to.
When you sign up for Cronycle, you’ll be introduced to your new blank slate and then given a list of over 200 popular sources of content you can subscribe to.
You can create small lists of publications you want to closely monitor, or you can use it to get inspiration from a wide range of places.
If you have others on your content marketing team, you can invite them to read and annotate existing content to perfectly devise your master PR plan going forward or brainstorm around great articles.

3. Process Street

Yes, I might be a little biased since I work for Process Street, but, the thing is: we use it religiously at our company, and I can say for certain that it works.
What does it work for? Well. Anything you want to systemize. On my side of things, we use Process Street mainly for content promotion.

Process Street is software for recurring checklists, so that means that every time a new post comes out and you want to promote it, you can run a checklist, work through the steps, track progress with your team and make sure that things get done the way you specify.
For an example checklist you can use right away, check our Advanced Content Promotion Checklist.

4. WorkFlowy

If you’ve got a problem with the sincerity of typing directly into the WordPress editor, then WorkFlowy could be the tool for you.
For bloggers facing the mysterious writers block, it’s a comforting tool because it’s not possible to draft a blog post properly in.
This sounds strange, so hear me out: WorkFlowy is essentially bullet-point only text-editor. Whenever you make a new bullet point by pressing ‘Enter’, you create a new list which you can zoom into and create more bullet points inside.
This makes it great for titles (one list) subheadings (another list), then paragraph summaries (a third list).
I’ll explain with a gif:

5. Buzzstream

While Buzzstream is arguably a lot more famous than some others on this list, I have personally only heard about it recently. Buzzstream is for organizing outreach.
This could be those quick emails you sent to people saying “hey, I mentioned you in a post” up to full-on pitches to major media outlets.
Buzzstream doesn’t just offer a way to automatically fill in email templates and mass-email your targets, it actually helps you find the email addresses and names of the people you should pitch with its database of influencers, matched to your keyword based on their Twitter and RSS activity.
In the past, I’ve ran several pretty good outreach campaigns with Buzzstream, including surveying 14 SaaS companies about how they ensure customer success.

6. Hemingway Editor

Ernest Hemingway is famous for his concise writing, and most famous 6-word short story ever written: ‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.’

This clarity and no-BS attitude has been carried over to the modern era where we can trim the fat from our writing and make it just as concise as Hemingway himself.
The Hemingway Editor highlights sentences that are too long, filler words, passive phrases, and other indications of poor style.
I’m not saying I run everything I write through it, but if I can’t work out why a sentence is awkward then I turn to it to tell me why.

7. Quuu

While I really wanted to talk about Buffer in this post, I’m not a fan of being misleading and I’d rather write quality headlines.
So, Quuu isn’t Buffer, but a service that integrates with Buffer to add great, relevant content to your Twitter feed every day.
Even with a free account you get 2 hand-picked posts per day. But that’s not all!
Quuu isn’t just for sharing other people’s content, you can also use it to promote your own content.
It does cost $5 and up per article, but can get you hundreds of views and shares by real people who actually read your content.

Conclusion

I hope this post has put some new content marketing tools on your radar and shown you there’s a lot more out there than the first 7 things that pop into your head.
There are great tools here for the writing stage (Beegit, WorkFlowy), for editing (Hemingway), for research (Cronycle) and for promotion (Quuu, Process Street).
Whichever area of content marketing you’re struggling with, using an exciting new tool can really spur you on and even promote new ways of thinking, so, go sign up for a few of these products and let me know in the comments what you think!
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