Marketing work steps right in as you are done with researching and writing your content. Skip it and you will see little to no engagement on your newly minted content, making you think about where it all went wrong.
With the numerous social media and other marketing networks out there on the web, marketing on the internet now is way more complicated than the billboard and print ads which were the traditional modes of marketing in the past. Being active and engaging with your readers is a little too much to ask for both new and veteran bloggers. But what the veteran blogger has figured out pretty well is how to leverage the use of available tools at hand to save his time on marketing and fragment it to research his articles much better. Big data is influencing online marketing in 2015 and keeping ahead of it is a must.
Having quality articles is one thing, and the right tools to get it into the hands of readers are something more. To spiral up your online marketing efforts, you will need the right tools to make things easy for you on the promotional fronts.
51 Terrific Marketing Tools for Bloggers
Having the right marketing tools for your blog is essential to power your efforts to hit the viral jackpot. Ignore these marketing tools to get yourself hard time achieving all that you’ve been working towards. There are tools for all sorts of your online marketing endeavours, including the ones to research better for your content, to measure your performance and to spy on your competitors!
Marketing tools make up an important part of all major publications to provide the maximum value to their audience, and the same applies to bloggers. Here are 50 of the top marketing tools you ought to make the most of as a blogger to get things done in a smart way.
Content Discovery and Research
Buzzsumo is one of the most sought content research tool. Using BuzzSumo, you can find top performing articles from anyone blog, or you can also find most shared posts under any topic. If you are looking for something more, you can always find top influencer, titles that are most shared to get started with. They do have a pro program, but you are good to start with their free version. You should check out these videos by Harsh & Ileane on how to use BuzzSumo.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a great, little-known free tool from Google to research deeper on topics related to science and technology. Enter your keyword and it will pull up article links from major publications, theses, books, abstracts and from universities worldwide. You can choose to create alerts from this tool and get them delivered right into your inbox. Wondering how to harness the power of Google Scholar? Check out detailed guide.
Feedly has taken over the RSS reader scenario with the shutting down of Google Reader a couple of years back. With over 7 million users under its belt, Feedly is a great tool to discover great content from all around the world, under a wide range of genres. Add your favourite blogs to it and discover new ones by adding their feeds into this little tool. Feedly is available for all the platform (The web and mobile) so you will never miss out your content.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator is a fun and creative blog title idea generator. Just enter your keyword and watch the tool emblazon your day with some of its irreverent and cheeky suggestions. Though not very much of a useful tool, it is worth giving a shot if you are having a bad day getting title ideas to write upon.
Blog Topic Generator
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is a great nifty tool to get relevant blog title suggestions based on your entered keyword. If you are stumped for blog title ideas, give this free tool a go to get some fresher perspective on your intended topic.
Upon entering three nouns, which are your keywords, you will get five suggestions of blog titles to start working upon.
Email Marketing Tools
One of the best marketing tools that you can use and have complete control is via Email marketing. I know many bloggers who are still limited to free Feedburner, but my recommendation is to get a paid Email marketing tool (If you are serious about your blog), because when you have a double-opt in email list, you own your readers. Where as on the social media platform or search engine, you don’t own your readers.
Aweber is one of the most popular Email marketing tools on the web. With over of hundreds of ready-to-use Email marketing templates, building your subscriber list has never been this easy. Some of the features that Aweber provides include Responsive Email templates, advanced HTML and auto-responders functionality. Here is a video tutorial to learn to create your first email list:
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used Email marketing tool to get your content delivered directly to your subscriber list. With even support for creating and building an Email list, this free tool has got you covered on all fronts when it comes to Email Marketing.
Gain more new subscribers to your blog and increase your list by making use of MailChimp’s services.
Marketo
Marketo is an innovative engagement marketing tool. Reduce the turnaround time for your marketing campaigns with easy setting up of Email marketing campaigns and the landing pages to increase your subscriber list.
With marketing automation and real-time personalization, Marketo is the complete tool for all your marketing necessities.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor makes it easy for anyone to get started instantly with Email marketing and create, send and optimize Email marketing campaigns. Its reports provide a detailed breakdown of the demographics of your subscribers based on browser, location and so forth.
With easy A/B campaign tests set up, and the integration with ‘Canvas’ helped them create beautiful, responsive and drag-and-drop facility for your templates.
Litmus
Litmus is a great tool to preview all your Email marketing efforts. This tool allows testing and tracking of your Emails across different users based on different browsers and locations. Litmus provides Email previews, analytics and spam testing for all your Email marketing campaigns.
GetResponse is another top-notch alternative to Aweber with its beautiful and custom-made Email marketing templates.
Create attractive newsletters to increase your subscriber list with over 1000 iStock images for your Email marketing campaigns.
Social Media Marketing
Tweetdeck is my personal favourite tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts and staying adrift of all the activity in a single dashboard.
Now a part of Twitter, Tweetdeck is your best bet of managing your Twitter activity for as many number of accounts you possess on this 140-characters network. This tool also lets you schedule your tweets to your chosen time of the day.
Bit.ly
Bit.ly is a cult classic in the field of link shortening services. Using Bit.ly you can not only shorten down your lengthy URL’s for sharing across social media, but you can also integrate it with Google Analytics or Hubspot to track your links and conversions. None the less, using Bit.ly you can use the domain name of your choice for URL shortener. (This is free)
Use Bit.ly in harmony with other link tracking tools to track how your links and performing on social media and the demographics of the resulting hits.
Sprout Social
Must Be Present is a free tool from Sprout Social that lets you learn more about your social media response time, i.e. how quickly you respond to activity on your social networks compared to the average response time on the internet.
Social communications gauge your brand’s responsiveness, and this free tool measures those statistics in real-time, comparing them with industry benchmarks.
Sysomos
Sysomos is a paid tool to keep track of your brands’ social media campaigns and pitch them up against your competitors.
This tool measures your brand’s social media activity and engagement to compare them to see how your competitors are performing in the similar domains.
Performance Monitoring and Analytics
Qualaroo
Qualaroo previously known as KISSinsights is a tool to interact with your visitors and get the insights first hand from your customers. Qualaroo offers the answers as to why your visitors are behaving certain fashion on your website.
These answers could help you resolve the issues preventing your visitors from taking your desired action.
Crazy egg is a paid tool worth your investment if you are inclined to find out the behaviour of your visitors. With real-time analysis and insights ranging from heat maps to scroll maps, Crazy egg’s tool is widely trusted by hundreds of major industry brands.
If you are on the mission of improving your websites’ conversion rates, this tool is worth your time and money.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google, and although it isn’t comparable to other premium tools, given that it is free and offers just the basic insights for everyone makes it worth your time. Almost every website owner holds access to Google Analytics, and if you don’t, getting one wouldn’t hurt your case.
With custom variables, conversion tracking and filters, it has all your basic performance monitoring and insights covered.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides both Free and paid Pro services for competitive analytics monitoring. The tool also provides insights for mobile applications, in addition to websites.
You can get detailed insights on traffic sources, conversions, social activity and top performing content among a host of other insight reports with this tool.
Marketing Grader
This free tool from Hubspot, Marketing Grader, provides a complete analysis of your website and your competitors to provide you insights on what is not working in your favour. You can get a complete report of your website by just submitting your website URL and your Email address.
The free report addresses on a variety of issues like social media activity, SEO, lead conversions, et.
Olark
Olark is a customer engagement tool that offers a free chat client for communication with your existing clients and potential customers.
Solving your client’s issues and helping them out is the primary agenda of any business and this tool will help you achieve the same.
Advertising Monitoring
Adbeat
Adbeat is an enterprise-level tool starting at $99/month to monitor advertisers and where they are advertising. There’s a free 30-day trial and you can only monitor Google ads with this tool.
Find how your competitors are advertising and use A/B and split testing to find out the advertising strategy that works best for you.
Ad Gooroo
Ad Gooroo provides insights on paid and organic search traffic and provides advertisers with insights of different advertising campaigns and use that as a benchmark to creating ones’ own campaign.
This tool provides A/B testing of ads to help you in your campaigns by simultaneously monitoring your competitors and finding other options to make it work for you.
WhatRunsWhere
What Runs Where is a comprehensive ad intelligence tool that lets you track top brands, their advertising campaigns and strategies. This tool also helps you extract ad campaign messages used in these advertisings.
Leverage the powerful insights on where your competitors are advertising and arrive at better decisions for finding your potential customers.
SocialAdNinja
SocialAdNinja is one of the most powerful social PPC advertising tools with more than 400,000 advertisements in its database arsenal. You have access to every single one of them and every detail including how those ads are performing, the time they have been live for and other such information.
This is powerful insights to scan through them and duplicate the best ones and A/B test them to find the best campaign that works for you.
Moat
Moat is a tool that lets you keep an eye on different brands and their advertising campaigns and strategies. The report provides information about the advertising campaigns of the entered brand like the ad size and the ad displayed location.
Use this tool to get a good idea about where to get started on your advertising endeavours.
Keyword Research and Monitoring
SEMRush
SEMRush helps you on your keyword researching task by providing you insights on the competitors’ long tail keywords, PPC advertising campaigns and more. A tool widely used by SEO and SMM professionals, an upgrade to the professional service will bag you deeper queries and search results. This is one SEO tool that I would recommend you to use always. Here is a video guide on using SEMRUSH by Harsh.
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Google Keyword planner
Google’s Keyword planner tool, a part of Google Adwords is a great free tool to begin on your keyword researching activities. Use the information on keywords from this tool to frame your headlines of articles accordingly. Gain more insights into what keywords bring up a lot of competition and conversions and choose your headlines accordingly.
SpyFu
SpyFu lets you download up to six years of your competitors’ keywords for a price of $79/month. The tool provides in-depth advertising and keyword analysis of your competitor, which you can use to drive more targeted traffic to your website.
A complete SEO, Adwords and Keyword research tool, SpyFu is the best tool for insightful reports and analysis of your competitors.
The search monitor
The search monitor is a comprehensive affiliate marketing and keyword tracking tool. The tool monitors paid and organic traffic of your website and compare it against benchmark industry standards or your competitors.
This tool provides you with comprehensive ad monitoring, search engine monitoring and affiliate marketing insights
iSpionage
iSpionage can be a great spy tool to track your competitors’ keywords and ad campaigns.
Search by keywords or domain name to get an analysis of the ad campaigns of your competitors and also keep track of their ad spending.
Word Tracker
Word Tracker is a great tool to find the best keywords related to the entered search term. Find high performing keywords and the volume of traffic each keyword gets, to target the ones that fit your plans.
You can also study the competition that you face with these keywords to research on the high volume, low competition ones.
Backlink and Link Research
Monitor Backlinks
Monitor backlinks is a must have tool for SEO and Web marketers. You can monitor your own and your competitors’ backlinks and analyse the highest and least value domains. You can also view if those links are nofollow or dofollow. For managing two domains, the price is only $19/month. Monitoring your backlinks has never been easier than this! You can check out thecomplete review here.
Open site explorer
Open site explorer is the search engine for links. You can analyse and get free reports on your website with insights on page and domain authority, linking domains, keyword tracking, anchor links used and more.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a must have tool for every internet marketer. Knowing more about your external links matters a lot on the web and Ahrefs helps you monitor those painlessly.
Its Backlink checker provides in-depth analysis of your links like referring domains, their IP addresses, top pages, linked domains, etc. Subscribe to their paid services to get in-depth analysis and more reports.
Majestic Site explorer
Majestic Site explorer is a free tool to track links to any domain. Its vast historical index can also be used to track domain linking over a period of time.
External backlinks, referring domains, referring IP’s, anchor text are some of the insights this tool provides its users.
Ontolo
Ontolo is a tool that provides content marketing in addition to backlink tracking. Ontolo improves your content marketing efforts by collecting and organizing content similar to yours.
It also helps you identify link building opportunities and authoritative people who link to you.
Link Prospector
Link prospector helps you uncover links that will help you rank better. The best links are automatically targeted by its algorithm and help you improve your rankings.
It also helps in finding opportunities like guest blogging, content promoters, giveaways, reviews and more.
Mentions Monitoring
Social mention
Social mention offers real-time reporting on brand mentions on different social media networks. It also provides sentiment analysis of a brand on different social networks.
The tool monitors mentions of a brand on different networks including blogs, social bookmarking sites, micro-blogs, image and video networks.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great free tool to monitor your brand’s mentions on the web.
You can set alerts for certain keywords and have them delivered to your inbox every time your brand gets mentioned on the web.
Topsy
Topsy is a great Twitter monitoring tool that lets you search tweets based on a keyword. It provides information such as links, images, videos and influencers on twitter, related to the entered keyword.
For real-time monitoring and more detailed reports, Topsy’s pro reports will ease your efforts.
Mention
Mention provides real-time monitoring of your one free keyword across different web pages, blogs, forums, images, videos and social media across 42 different languages.
You can also make the most of its mobile app, to stay updated while on the move.
Organizing tools
Evernote
Evernote is one of the best tools for organizing your marketing campaigns. Use Evernote to keep both your personal and professional life organized.
Content ideas, editorial calender, to-do lists, doodling, everything is possible with this nifty app.
Trello
Trello is a free tool that helps you get organized with neatly arranged cards. Content ideas and media could be streamlined to this tool to organize your personal and professional life.
You can also collaborate with fellow users to vote on content idea cards and work collectively.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is one of the most useful tools in the arsenal of Google.
You can effectively use this tool to organize your marketing efforts and editorial calendar. The ability to sync with all other Google tools makes it very useful.
Instapaper
Instapaper is a simple little tool that lets you save web pages to read them later on. You can read these saved pages later on your computer, mobile, tablet or your kindle.
Add a bookmarklet to keep all your content organized.
IFTTT
IFTTT (If this than that) is one of my most favourite personal organizing app. With the release of the android version recently, you can now access this tool from any device. Create custom ‘recipes’ that put the internet to work for you. A sample recipe is, ‘Upload my images posted to Instagram directly to my Facebook and Twitter’. Use custom made recipes like this to trigger an event upon a preceding event.
So, here we come to an end of the extensive list of 51 Marketing tools for Bloggers. Have we missed out on something of your great likening? Shout out your thoughts and comments below.
