Tools to Improve your Conversion Rate with Better Content Marketing Tools

Internet is flooded with analytics and conversion rate optimization tools, most of which do the measuring part and tells you the performance of your campaign. Unfortunately most of these measure the bottom of the funnel metrics. In this article I will be talking about how you can optimize for the top of the funnel i.e. content to have better conversion rate.

So What is Conversion Rate anyway ?

Conversion rate is how many leads are converting into sales or if the input is X, what percentage of that X is converting into your target goals. Conversion rate goals can be anything, say out of X page views, how many converted into leads, how many of Y leads converted into Sales and how many of Z sales converted into repeat customers etc. Qualaroo has a really good article on what is conversion rate which you should check.

What is Conversion rate optimization ?

Now after getting the X (views or leads) input, you do want to get the maximum output from it, right ? you want to optimize that return based on insights and this is called Conversion rate optimization or CRO. Ideally you want to start your CRO from top of the funnel (TOFU) which is often content marketing. In this post, I will be listing list of tools and services which you can use to have better and optimized content. I have categorized the list into 5 sub categories (I am skipping list of analytics software since most of the current products in the market are not meant for small businesses and most of the all-in-one content marketing platforms do offer analytics as part of the software anyway)

1. Content Discovery
2. Content Creation
3. Content Promotion and Distribution
4. Content curation and planning
5. How to find quality writers and list of market places

1. Content Discovery

Following tools can be used to source content from all over the web as they will help you discovering content in various niches which will be your starting point of writing optimized content.

1. Feedly – Simple RSS reader, ideal for subscribing rss feeds of news and blogs
2. Google Alerts – track events and recent news
3. Google trends – find recent events and what is hot on the web
4. Trendspottr – similar to Google trends,
5. Bottlenose – Enterprise solution to find trends
6. Google+ communities -
7. Facebook groups -
8. LinkedIn groups- find relevant content from people in your industry
9. Google consumer barometer
10. Quora – quora can be amazing source of content if you can properly dig into it
11. Reddit.com – look at relevant subreddits
12. Soovle -
13. Newsle – news aggregation site, ideal for current events with viral touch to it
14. Zemanta – content discovery and distribution for larger business

2. Content Creation

These tools are most useful in helping you visualize digital content without outsourcing to designers.

1. visual.ly
2. prezi.com
3. Timeline JS – Create timeline with your content which can be embedded into various media.
4. ThingLink – Make interactive images
5. Piktochart – Easy infographic maker
6. Infogr.am – tool to make infographics with spreadsheets,.
7. Storify – create mash-ups of twitter, instagram, youtube etc content
8. PinWords – nice tool to create infographics for pinterest
9. iPiccy – another tool for creating images and edit them

3. Content promotion and distribution

Having great content isn’t enough if it’s not distributed to a wide or target audience. These tools aid in making sure your content is seen and clicked.

1. bufferapp.com – makes distribution of content on social media easier.
2. contentblvd.com – marketplace where you can give your content to others to publish
3. onespot.com – hybrid platform of content marketing and content ad network
4. slideshare – slideshare sharing platform
5. docstoc – document sharing website
6. scribd – another document sharing website with social features

here is list of pdf and ebook sites which you can upload your documents.

4. Content Curation and Planning tools

1. Scoop.it – Content aggregator which can be used for content curation
2. Shareist – Shareist is a content marketing platform for SMBs using which you can manage social media, blogs and newsletters etc. You can capture various media content and embed into your content and publish it.
3. NewsCred – NewsCred allows you to source the content,publish it, promote it and measure it through its analytics platform.
4. Kapost.com – Kapost is another all-in-one content management, promotion and analytics platform..
5. Compendium – Compendium is enterprise level solution for content planning and management ideally suited for large organizations.

5. Where to find quality content writers

– Ideally you want to do the content writing but still if you don’t have time, you can always hire high quality copywriters. Here are some websites for this -

1. Textbroker – Textbroker is a marketplace and service provider of content writers.
2. oDesk – Good place to find writers from other countries, make sure you are hiring native speakers only if you quality conscious.
3. elance.com – Good place to find much larger organizations to get bulk work done.
4. guru.com – Most of the freelance writers are US-based so you can find native speakers in your niche.
5. scripted.com – scripted offers content writing services to various businesses and marketing agencies.
6. zerys.com – It is a marketplace for freelance writers where companies and agencies can post their titles and these freelance writers upload the finished articles.
7. writeraccess.com – Another marketplace for finding writers
8. Contently – ContentlyA platform that allows businesses to work with high-quality freelance writers that also handles the payment and management of the editorial process.

Source: http://www.inboundio.com/blog