5 Best Tools for Content Creation
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Creating engaging content is hard. That’s why it’s important for creators to use tools to help them research and create content that will resonate with their audience. Tools can help content creators be more effective and efficient communicators.
In this guide we’ll walk through 5 popular tools that help creators generate engaging content for any platform.
ahrefs
Ahrefs is a paid SEO service that also offers a suite of free tools for keyword research, backlink checking, and site traffic analysis . For content creators, the keyword generator lets you search keyword volume and difficulty across Google, Bing, and Youtube. The tool gives you insights into keywords and phrases you may want to use in your content topics or titles. It’s a helpful way to plan your content around what people are searching online.
For example, if you were going to create content around AI images, you would see that there’s high keyword difficulty for most of the AI image search terms, except “Bing AI Images.” This is a signal that people are searching these keywords on Google, but there is not a lot of competition for them. This is an opportunity to tailor your content for this term, instead of the other related terms that are already saturated with content.
vidIQ
Similar to ahrefs, vidIQ is designed to help you identify high-volume, low-competition keywords. vidIQ is a Youtube-specific browser plugin that gives you a score per search term and related channels for that term. It also includes the average number of subscribers and viewers for the term. Since it is specific to Youtube, there are deep insights into how you can expect a video to perform for certain keywords.
Good Youtube videos are notoriously hard to produce. They require a lot of planning, shooting, and editing. Of all the content creation platforms, Youtube is the most high-effort. This means that before you dive into producing any videos, you want to be sure they are designed to target high-volume, low-competition keywords, otherwise no one will ever see your content.
In the example below, the term “creator economy” returns a high score that makes it an attractive keyword for a content creator. It’s not a guarantee that the video will generate a certain number of views, but it does suggest the video will have a better chance of reaching an audience than targeting something like “get rich” which has very high competition and a vidIQ score of 38.
Desktop Docs
Desktop Docs helps content creators create and repurpose content. It lets users find images and videos easily by using descriptive, plain language. You can use search terms like “woman smiling” or “plane flying overhead” to track down videos or images in your assets without having to manually search for them.
Desktop Docs also offers basic video editing functions like image resizing, background removal, and video clipping. It’s made for video content creators who know what they want to create and want to do it without the overhead of DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. It’s not a full replacement for these tools, but for something simple, Desktop Docs is a great choice.
ChatGPT
Ever since late 2022 ChatGPT has grown in popularity. It’s OpenAI’s chatbot that let’s users ask questions, upload documents, and even generate images. There are many different use cases for it – from coding to generating written content – but for content creators it’s the perfect brainstorming tool.
You can ask ChatGPT to generate hundreds of content ideas, article titles, or write entire blog posts. I wouldn’t recommend using unedited ChatGPT content because it’s obvious when something is written by AI. There are usually a lot of adverbs, colons, and words that people don’t use in everyday speech.
However, I do recommend using ChatGPT to give you ideas on how to rephrase sentences or give you a large volume of themes and topics to work with for your content. Usually after you’ve decided on the topic you’d like to create for, you can use ChatGPT to create an outline for how to produce the content.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a powerful tool for discovering patterns on the Google search platform, the most popular search engine on Earth. What makes Google Trends so helpful is that it’s free and lets you analyze trends over time.
You can set custom time windows to check for certain topics or keywords. This can offer insights into terms that are just starting to become popular and give you an advantage to be one of the first creators to rank for a certain topic. Furthermore, it gives you geographic breakdowns of where the search term is popular. If you are creating content for a specific metro region, you can use Google Trends to drill down into that area’s interest in the keyword. No other tool offers this level of granularity in your planning research.
Like the other keyword research tools, Google Trends will help you identify keywords and topics that your audience might already be searching. No matter the type of content you create, if people are not able to discover it, your efforts might go to waste. That’s why it’s important to use available planning and creation tools to maximize your efforts.
