Online Tools to Make Your Content Stand Out

by Startacus Admin

It’s becoming more and more difficult to make your content stand out among the countless other articles on similar subjects hosted on similar websites and written by similar businesses/entrepreneurs. We’ve already written a tips article for improving your business content and a follow up to that with even more tips, but are there any tools out there to help you? That’s rhetorical; yes there are.

In that first tips post we mentioned that it’s a very good idea to add images to your content, as it makes an article more pleasing to the eye, breaks up that wall of text, and engages the reader more. We are a visual species, after all. But finding good images that aren’t copyrighted can be tricky, and many people will find themselves preferring to go imageless than risk the legal ramifications of making a mistake with someone’s work.

Pexels is a source of high quality, free stock photos, and will link you to other stock photo sites if you can’t find what you are looking for. The images you can get here are very high quality, and don’t consist entirely of people pretending to be excited about their office stationery, as stock photos so often seem to.

Canva allows you to create images quickly and easily. Most importantly for this entry, infographics. There’s something pleasing about a nice, clean infographic, and by including one you could see an average of a 12% increase in traffic.

Embedded Tweets are along the same lines as imagery. Although the Tweet will have text to read, it still feels like a quick break from the bulk of text in an article. It’s also a more effective way to show a quote, for example, than simply copying the words. The writer’s mantra of ‘show don’t tell’ can be applied to business content too.

For some more ideas for visual tools, have a look at this quick list.

It isn’t just the aesthetics of your content that will determine its fate. If your content is riddled with mistakes, readers won’t feel compelled to return. There is also a link between poor grammar and a reader’s trust – they are less likely to find an article full of spelling mistakes, etc., trustworthy.

Grammarly is a useful tool for, they claim, eliminating most writing mistakes. As well as highlighting spelling mistakes, it picks up on bad grammar, gives synonym suggestions, and even explains why something is wrong. It can be added to your browser for free, working wherever you need to write something online, from your blog to Facebook.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a free tool on CoSchedule’s website that, you may have deduced, analyses your proposed headline. It breaks it down into structure, grammar, and readability, and gives you tips on its length, power words, and keywords.

But making your content stand out isn’t all about its creation. Once it has been written and formatted and image…ified, it has to actually be seen. Certainly, there will be a core readership that sees everything you put out, but you are a growing business – you want more and more readers with each piece of content you release.

Services like PRWeb will let you create a press release and then distribute it for you. PRWeb will get your news on popular search engines, put it in front of over 250,000 subscribers and thousands of websites that include big names such as the New York Times, CNN, and Amazon.

Tweriod is a free Twitter tool that analyses your Tweets and those of your followers, reporting back to you the best time for you, personally, to Tweet and enjoy the most exposure. Most businesses will have worked out trends in social media timing, so you’ll already know what a difference good timing can make; a free analysis can only improve this.

One last tool: the email signature. You will almost certainly already have a signature, and you will probably already have links in that signature. But if your website contains a blog, it’s a good idea to have another link specifically to that. Not every business has a blog, so don’t expect people will go to your main site and search for one. And plenty of people will be inclined to have a look at what articles you have on a blog, when they might otherwise have no interest in visiting your website.

Of course, these are just a handful of tools coverering a range of categories for you to consider, and there are many tools out there doing these same jobs. As always, it is best practice to do your research before settling on a tool, particularly for those that aren’t free.

• #online tools
• #digital content
• #content writing

Published on: 25th July 2016