8 Free Content Marketing Tools (that are actually free and useful)

Human beings love free things. Especially freebies that are really free and are actually useful.

It is why I thought to gather the free tools I've found useful in my content marketing career and share them with you. Whether you're a content marketer or a business that hired one, you'll find this article very useful.

For many businesses, blogging is a huge part of the content marketing strategy. For blogging to be effective, however, your blog posts need to be visible to the audience you wrote them for.

To understand more about finding your target audience, check out this detailed guide I wrote for you here.

So back to the issue. After putting so much effort into understanding your content marketing goals and creating content that fits these goals, how do you get your content to the audience you created it for?

Are there basic principles you should know? Free tools you can use?

In this article, I’ll be sharing 8 free tools I have found helpful in my content marketing journey.

Before we get into it, read what Daniel Adeyemi, a seasoned writer at TechCabal, has to say about some of these tools:

"Google trends have been very in the content ideation process. It is a great tool for discovering what people are talking about and identifying topics readers will find helpful. Grammarly is another lifesaver. It helps with the little things; like pointing out where a missed punctuation mark should be and rescuing me from misusing my ‘its’ and ‘it’s’."

8 Free Tools Every Content Marketer Needs.

Keyword Search

A good way to start is to ensure your content is really about what people want to read. So do your homework, research commonly searched terms in your field and then build your work around that. Answer people’s questions and watch them look for your content.

AnswerThePublic and Google Trends are free tools for this. In the free version of AnswerThePublic, you get about 3 searches per day. It isn't much, but the value from one search is pretty solid.

Grammar & Readability

No matter how valuable your content is, if it has terrible grammatical blunders, it will turn your readers off before they even see how valuable your content is.

This is why you should take advantage of tools that help you detect common errors the best writers make. Grammarly is a good option especially because it has free and paid features.

Also, what is the point of writing a great article that gets dropped in the first paragraph because it was too difficult to read? Big grammar doesn’t equal a great writer.

The proof that you understand the subject matter is in how easily you can communicate it. The general rule is a 9th grader should be able to read and understand your work, then it’s readable.

Hemmingway Editor is a free online tool for assessing ease or difficulty in reading. It is programmed to detect and assist in correcting passive voice, unnecessary adverbs and run-on sentences that turn readers off. The best part, it is free.

SEO

SEO may sound like it is all about getting your page to show on the first page of Google, but there are lots of factors involved in getting results.

While most SEO tools are paid, there are also free versions. Screaming Frog and Rank Math are SEO plugins that help with on-page and technical SEO.

Screaming Frog is one of the most popular tools available for analyzing and auditing technical and on-page SEO issues. With the free version, you can crawl up to 500 URLs.

Rank Math also helps with adding titles, meta descriptions, OG tags, and other meta tags to posts and pages; adding structured data markup for rich snippets and redirecting URLs.

SEMRush, AHrefs and MOZ Pro are very good comprehensive tools that will provide all the insights you need.

Domain Authority

These tools help you monitor your domain authority. The higher your domain authority, the more likely it is your blog posts will show up on Google’s first page.

To check your domain ranking, try Alexa or Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is available for free and Alexa has free features that allow you to get free, automated website analysis to quickly gain insights into your site’s strengths, weaknesses, and digital marketing opportunities.

Well done for reading this far. Have you had difficulty making the best use of these tools in your content marketing journey? Feel free to reach out.

Folasade Daini is known for helping businesses tell better stories. She spends her time creating the type of content that positions brands as thought leaders.