Can Burak Sofyalioglu

Posted on Sep 19, 2021 • Updated on Jan 25 • Originally published at cbsofyalioglu.com

Awesome Content Creation Tools

#tooling #design #webdev #productivity

(Note: This post was updated on 15 December 2021)

Creating quality content is a demanding and complex process. It is better to have a wide range of applications in your toolbox. Even though there is no one solution to fix it all, one can increase your productivity and save you time. Considering this, I will share my favorite content creation tools. These are both written content and visual content.

You can also check the original post for updated resources: Content creation tools

Great Content Creation Tools

Using the appropriate tools can make content creation so much easier and more successful. After the introduction, it is time to share the useful content marketers tools. I hope those tools will make you more productive during your content creation process. Here are the super-useful content development tools. You may also want to check the ultimate list of blogging sites which includes more than 50 publishing sites.

Content Research Tools

Research plays a huge role in what your readers think of your business, products, services, and website. Content creation can be as easy as digging up information or digging around on the internet.

In this section, I’ll take you through some of the most useful tools out there so that you can get started on creating great content for your blog or website.

Content research tools are essential when creating content because the internet is vast, and there’s hardly any limit to what you can find out about a subject matter.

Carrot: The short demo you watched above is from Carrot. It organizes your search results into topics. It clusters, categorizes and show them in different formats.
Occamm: Occam is another SERP organizer. It refines your search result and allows you to select based on the tags.
Entity Explorer: Entity explorer finds related entities in a graph map. It makes easier to see connections between entities.
Research Rabbit: This is one of my favorite research tools. A research and relationship visualization tool.
Semantic Scholar: A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature.
Paper Panda and
Unpaywall: They both allow you to access millions of academic papers and researches for free.
Google Trends: You probably know this tool. Google Trends shows the popularity of a term among Google Searchers.
Answer The Public: Another useful tool to research people’s questions.
Miro: Miro is actually a whiteboard app. It allows collaboratively working on your content ideas. There are plenty of project management frameworks that make your ideation process easier.

Content Management Tools

You need comprehensive document and knowledge management tools to get the most out of your content research. You can clip, capture, and annotate the content with these creation tools. There are a bunch of apps that you can use for this purpose. Most of those tools have browser extensions.

Annotating is an excellent way to get your creative juices flowing. It allows you to take notes on what you’re reading or thinking, making it easy to revise later.

I love using various notes apps or knowledge-saving tools and would recommend them to anyone looking to improve their writing skills.

These content creation tools allow anyone to collect ideas, quotes, share knowledge and other content in an easy and intuitive way. These content saving/management tools save you time looking for relevant information while creating your blog posts and videos.

Free Blogging Platforms: An article that mentions the best free blogging platforms.
Polar: You can manage and save your content from PDFs, EPUBs, and web pages in one place. It allows tagging, shows reading progress, and shows detailed document information.
Weava: You can highlight, annotate, and organize the content in one place.
Memex: It is a bookmark manager. It is an open-source tool that allows you to annotate, organize and share.
JustClip: A tool for collecting content that is suitable for individuals and teams. You can capture information and annotate content. You can easily build your knowledge connections and stay organized.
Wakelet: Wakelet is a tool for collecting and curating content. It is particularly used by the education industry.It is one of my favorite tools. You can create a Wakelet profile and a collection and publish your curated lists in various formats.
Liner: Liner is another productivity tool that helps you find and learn reliable information faster. You can highlight web pages and PDF files. It suggests trusted content from other Liner users.
Obsidian MD: It is also my favorite tool that I dumped every piece of note into it. It is offline-first meaning that your notes stay on your PC. It is a markdown editor and has a wiki-style backlink feature with built-in graph view options. There are other popular options for an alternative to Obsidian are Notion, Nimbus Note, and Roam Research and Notesnook.
Raindrop: Raindrop is one of the best bookmark manager in the market. It has cross-platform apps/extensions, intuitive user-interface and a generous plan.

Readability Score Tools

Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.

It is an essential parameter for the user as well as for SEO.

It is also known that artificial intelligence, and thus the Google crawler, is better at distinguishing short sentences than long ones.

As a result, short sentences are easier to understand for both the reader and the Googlebot. Of course, you have to consider your readers.

There will be no problem for them in writing complex articles on relatively tricky subjects if your readers are experts on your case.

The content creation software in this section are applications that measure at least which age group can understand your articles. It is called the readability score.

There are some popular formulas and metrics calculating the readability score of your text.

However, creating short and concise content can be hard to create. With the tools below, you can make your copy more readable and quickly shorten sentences. Run your written copy through the web app and you’ll see the opportunities to make it better for your readers in seconds.

It should also be noted that most of them are either free or freemium with a generous plan.

Hemingway Editor: It is one of the most well-known content readability improvers. This popular readability tool judges the “grade level” of your text using the Automated Readability Index.
Typewipe: This helpful content creation program offers both readability analysis and helps you improve your content according to your keyword.
Twinword Writer: Twinword Writer is a tool that analyzes the tone of your content. It highlights the words that have negative and positive impacts on the tone of your text.

Grammar and Punctuation Checker Tools

The content creation tools in this section are handy for creating content in English. Those can be classified as grammar correction and punctuation checker tools. Using these tools will help you write better content about topics that matter to you.
The tools in this section are awesome grammar and punctuation checker tools. Those will help you finish your sentences, spot typos, and get the words right no matter how much time you have.
The most popular grammar tool on this list is Grammarly. It offers a good user experience along with rich suggestions.

However, it should also be noted that Grammarly doesn’t improve its tool and features. There are various alternatives to that provide different writing features that Grammarly doesn’t provide.

You can also read The Best Grammar Tools article, which reviews different tools for this purpose.

Here are the best grammar and punctuation checker tools.

Grammarly: It is one of the most well-known grammar tools. Grammarly is the best tool for this task. It has a really intuitive interface and a lot of fun features. It has a desktop and mobile application. Those apps exist both for macOS and Windows.
Linguix: Another Grammarly alternative, this English content creation assistant also stands out with its paraphrase feature.
ProWritingAid: Although this content creation software does not offer as good a user experience as Grammarly and Linguix, it has much more advanced features.
Atomic Editor: It is an AI-assisted editor that boosts your writing productivity.
SlickWrite: A tool that shows grammatical corrections and useful statistics.
Ludwig: A search engine for sentences. You can find your sentence in the best contexts, get definitions, synonyms, and examples. Also, you can paraphrase your sentence.
Ginger: Another Grammarly alternative tool that helps you correct grammar and punctuation.
Writer: I just discovered the app. First, it has a great design. Moreover, Writer provides many useful features comparing its competitors like a more customizable style guide and a bunch of many other things. It also has a free plan. You can use its web app, browser extension, or outlook app.

Search Engine Optimized Content Creation Tools

It is not easy to find both budget-friendly and skilled tools. Of course, I’m speaking particularly about marketing tools. Anyway, I’ll share my relatively budget-friendly and search-engine-optimized content creation tools.

SEO Content Analyzer: It has a bunch of tools for copywriting.
Frase: This is one of my favorite tools. An AI-based content creation tool. Moreover, advanced paraphrasing and question-based features.
CanIRank: My other favorite SEO content tool that optimizes your content for search engines. When the first analysis is complete, it shows pretty useful keyword opportunities.
Ink: Another SEO web content writing editing tool that you can download.

Visual Content Creation Tools

I don’t remember who said it but it is true: “If content is king, then design is queen”. Whether you are creating visual content or written content, visually appealing content is preferable to the other. You can easily find the visual content creation tools you need such as:

Image Creation Tools/ Social Media Tools
Video Creation Tools
Infographic Creation Tools
Presentation Creation Tools

If you are more interested in visual design resources, you can check my other curated list:

Free design resources.

Let’s start our list of digital content creation with some tools focused on creating and editing visual content elements.

Image creation/editing tools

There are a lot of free image editing tools out there. Some offer advanced editing features and others are more casual apps. But if you’re looking for a basic set of image editing tools that can help you get your job done, then here are some of our favorites.

Figma: Oh great Figma. It is one of the greatest apps of the decade.
Canva: Canva is the most popular and the most used image creation tool. It has both free and premium plans. If you need quick visual content for your social media marketing operations, Canva is one of the best design tools.

There are also many image tools similar to Canva. Those are- Crello,- Artify,- Projector,- Taler,- Design AI, etc.

Photopea is one of my favorite tools. It is a minified version of photoshop and it is working on a browser.
Remove.bg and- Erase.bg: A well-known background remover. You can extract people from an image.

Presentation tools

Presentations are the core engine of any persuasive speaker. They establish credibility, inspire others, and move audiences emotionally. That’s why the first step in any persuasive presentation is to select the right tools.

Presentations are a fundamental tool for any professional, whether they want to build a reputation or just sell products.

Pitch: This presentation creation tool allows you to collaboratively create your design asset.
Ludus: It is a collaborative presentation tool for creative teams
Premast Plus: You can use its professional templates to design better presentations and with a faster way. Even if you don’t have any design experience.

Infographic tools

A well-designed infographic can go a long way towards convincing people to click through from a website or social media channel. Infographics are powerful, flexible, and can be used to achieve a wide range of results.

They’re an effective tool for getting immediate attention – without creating an overwhelming feeling. If it is done correctly, infographics can be a backlink magnet.

Visme: Visme is an online tool that allows you to easily create infographics. Those are very useful for visual explanations and building backlinks.
Infogram: Infogram is a visual creation tool that allows you to create infographics and visual stories with data.
Piktochart: Piktochart is another super functional tool for the visual content creation process. It helps you to make gorgeous infographics, presentations, and reports.
Venngage: An infographic design solution.
Graficto: Graficto is an infographic maker tool that is recently launched

Video creation tools

Video content is consumed super-fast compared to written one. Therefore, it is widely popular among the mass. Having a useful instrument will definitely make your life easier.

Animoto: Animoto is a video creation tool with a drag-and-drop interface. It has templates that allows you start with pre-made graphics.
Biteable: One of the favorite video creation tools of content marketers. Express any concept. Personalize colors to match your brand.
RenderForest: Another tools for creating video content.
Runway ML: This tool is literally amazing. However, it has a steep learning curve because Runway has many features that use machine learning.
Powtoon: A suit of video creation tools. You can crop, rotate your videos. Powtoon also has a unique feature that removes watermarks from videos.

Miscellaneous Tools

Buyer Persona: You should know who you are speaking if you have an intention to make your reader comfortable. This tool allows you to create a buyer persona.
Otter: A tool for generating notes from audio records.
Giphy: Who doesn’t love GIFs. You can search and use millions of GIFs.

As I said before, this post is a growing list of content creation tools. I’m trying to add great content development and content creation tools to here. Therefore, it is better to bookmark and come back later.