6 Useful Tools For Marketing Online
If you’re engaged in marketing online, no doubt you’ll already be using several time-saving tools. Nevertheless, no-one can know all the short cuts available. To help you out, we’ve listed six great tools we use every day to manage our workload.
Grammarly.com
You can’t have missed the recent adverts for Grammarly! So it’s safe to say there is little point explaining the benefits of the service. Other than to say, I use the writing tool every single day. It will help you write clear and concise copy. You can download the browser extension or use the desktop/online portal version. I use both. The browser extension is super useful when editing WordPress posts, and I use the desktop/portal version when writing long-form content.
You can sign-up for a free account, and it will perform critical grammar and spelling checks. The premium costs around $140 per year but gives you a lot more features, including; Sentance structure guidance, Vocabulary suggestions, Writing style checks and a Plagiarism Detector. I upgraded from the free version to the premium after a week. However, the free version is still excellent for catching those simple mistakes.
Answerthepublic.com
The second tool I’m recommending is a website called Answerthepublic.com, it sounds relatively dull, but this site is a goldmine of content ideas. If you’ve ever looked at a blank computer screen and wondered ‘What the hell shall I write?’ this website will become your new favourite homepage.
Go to the site and type in a keyword or phrase, and you’ll instantly get 1000s of questions and prepositions you can use to generate interesting and informative blog posts. For instance, enter the keyword ‘Football’, and you’ll get suggestions like… why are football tickets so expensive? Why is football better than Rugby? Football without the offside rule. Aim to answer these questions in your next blog post. Critically these suggestions have been collected from real search engines queries typed into google and bing. So you’re guaranteed to have an audience for the answers you give.
The service is free, but you’ll be limited to 1 request a day. For $99 per month, Premium users get unlimited access and tailor location reports.
Ahrefs.com
Another essential website for online marketeers is Ahrefs.com. This site allows you to track the performance of a website across multiple search engines. See how your site ranks on Google for specific keywords and phrases, monitor keyword movements and perform in-depth keyword research. You can even get Ahrefs to generate a full SEO audit or your website.
The pricing for Ahrefs is relatively steep, starting at $99 per month. However, right now, you can get 7 days access for $7 as a special offer. That’s a super deal, a full SEO site audit for $7! What’s more, you can use Ahrefs.com to do more than check your site; you can use it to spy on competitors too! Accurately see which keywords and pages are driving the most visitors for your competition.
Twittimer.com
Unlike Facebook, Twitter.com cannot schedule a tweet, what a pain in the ass for commercial users! If you wanted to tweet at midnight or on the weekend, the only solution was to do it manually or pay for a premium tool like Hootsuite ($25pm). For many users, the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t add up.
Thankfully, Twittimer.com can schedule a tweet for free! Sign-up for the service and start scheduling those tweets. You can also save time by posting to multiple social accounts at once. As a bonus, I’ve found it a great way to recycle tweets and Facebook posts; using the Twittimer achieve feature, you can easily repost older tweets and facebook updates with just one click.
Giphy.com
If you’re continually tweeting and blogging, you’ll need to pepper your content with eye-catching visuals. A quick, fun and free way to do this is by using animated gifs. Tweets which include a gif image get 3x more retweets than a tweet with a static photo and 6x more retweets than a text-only update!
You can create your own gifs, but this is time-consuming. It’s much quicker to head over to Giphy.com and search their enormous collection of animated gifs. You’ll find all the funny memes plus film and TV series gifs. You can even create your own by linking to Youtube videos or uploading a video.
LocaBrowser.com
Sometimes you’ll need to test your website from a different country location. You could use a VPN, but that will cost, and many office environments won’t let you add a VPN to your network. One quick way to see how your sites look in different countries is using LocaBrowser.com. You can quickly be browsing from multiple locations and various types of browser. See how your site looks on a Samsung Galaxy Tablet in Singapore? Check geotargeted ad delivery in Spain? No problem, LocaBrowser.com has you covered.
We hope the tools and websites above prove as useful to you as they do to us.
