41 Content Marketing Tools & Resources All Entrepreneurs Need

There are tons of resources available for content marketers. Some are good and others, well…many of them didn’t make the list. So I’ll get right to it, here are just some of the killer content marketing resources you’ll need to grow your business.

Content Marketing Tools and Resources for Entrepreneurs

• Content Marketing Tools
• Content Marketing Blogs
• Content Marketing Articles
• Content Marketing Experts to Follow

Want to learn how to put these resources to use? Join our 10-day content marketing ecourse now.

Content Marketing Tools

Oh my, the tools we content marketers use to get the job done. Seriously, there’s a tool to help you do everything from  getting more social shares for an article to creating interactive content without designers or developers. And you’ll need every tool you can get your hands on to win in the competitive content marketing game.

1. InboundWriter – How would you like to predict the traffic you get from an article before you publish it? How would you like to optimize it for even more traffic before you press publish? Sounds like a content marketers dream, right? If so, you need InboundWriter.
2. Contentmarketer.io – Every good content marketer knows the work begins after you finish the article. That’s why outreach has become such a huge, important part of a good content marketer’s job. And ContentMarketer.io is the tool can put the hard work on autopilot. ContentMarketer crawls your article and finds every person or product mentioned in the post. Once it finds each mention, it scours the Internet to find their contact information and automatically helps you connect with them to tell them they were mentioned in the article. If you’ve ever spent hours doing this yourself after writing your own articles, you’ll know how powerful this tool is.
3. Contentools – Editorial calendar. Check. Analytics for your content marketing performance. Check. Contentools is an all-in-one tool that helps you collaborate with your content marketing team on everything from strategy to marketing.
4. Publicate.it – Let’s be honest. The reason we all use content marketing is to get more leads and drive more sales. Publicate helps you get those leads by giving you a place to share all of your PDFs, videos, and documents in one resource hub and making it accessible to potential customers only if they share their contact information.
5. Narrow.io – Want to grow your Twitter following so every article you publish can get more eyeballs on it? If so, you’ll need Narrow. Narrow is a tool that helps you automatically find influencers and VIPs in your space and helps you engage with them to increase the number of Twitter followers you have.
6. Filament.io – A big part of content marketing is guessing. Filament takes a big part of the guesswork out. Filament uses the data on your website to give you a good overview of what’s working on your website and what’s not. If one article isn’t getting many shares, Filament not only tells you about it, but tells you which social network you should share it on, and how to get the most out of those shares.
7. Curated.co – Content marketers don’t just write articles. Sometimes we’re responsible for putting together an interesting email newsletter. If you want to cut the time in half that takes you to find interesting content to put in your newsletter to curate. Curated helps you save links that you find interesting and collect them into an easy, beautiful email newsletter you can share with your list. It’s perfect for the times you don’t have new content on your website, but need to stay in touch with your list.
8. Feedreader –  If you’re still looking for a quality Google reader alternative, you may want to check out Feedreader. It not only helps you pull in the content from your favorite websites, but also helps you find new websites to check out. It’s a great way to discover new content to share a new articles to include in your content.
9. Revive Old Post – Don’t you hate it when you write an amazing blog post, it gets a ton of shares for about a week, and then it’s forgotten and relegated to your blog’s archive section for the rest of it’s life? The fact is, this is the life of the average blog post on most blogs. But never again. The free awesome WordPress plugin “Revive Old Post” helps you shine a light on your old blog posts. This helps extend the life of each post and brings in more traffic to older posts as your site content ages.
10. Snip and Share – Sometimes, you don’t necessarily want to share an entire article, just a bit of the article will do. Snip and Share helps you pick your favorite bit from an article on any website and share only your favorite part on Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and email.
11. Quuu – Quuu provides hand-picked content for you to share across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn via your Buffer.com account. Simply pick interest categories that matter to you and your audience and Quuu will automatically send highly relevant and engaging posts which then fall in line with your existing Buffer schedule.

Content Marketing Blogs to Follow

Content marketing blogs are easy to find, it’s the good ones we’re looking for. You know, the ones filled with information and techniques you thought people would keep to themselves.  I tried to put a list of content marketing blogs together for every experience level. I also tried to include great blogs you don’t always hear about.

1. CoSchedule – Besides being a beautiful blog, CoSchedule’s is filled with great beginner articles that teach you how to do everything from creating an editorial content calendar to getting eyeballs on your work. It’s a must for content marketing beginners to check out.
2. Startupmoon – This blog is specifically for people in the startup space. If you’re doing any kind of content marketing for startups and want to learn how to use all kinds of content – beyond blog posts – to acquire users, Startupmoon is the blog for you.
3. SteamFeed – SteamFeed is not a dedicated content marketing blog, but it has an amazing content marketing section filled with blogs teaching everything from how to blog about your product without bias to how to mine blog content ideas from your coworkers.
4. Outbrain – You’re probably familiar with Outbrain as the guys that put those amazing pieces of content at the end of articles on your favorite websites. But they also have a great blog that talks about the strategy of content marketing.
5. Roojoom Blog – Although not a well-known blog, Roojoom’s blog is filled with content marketing gold. Some of the best posts teach you how to get the most out of your site content and how to measure the ROI of your content marketing.
6. Mark Schaefer – Most content marketers use social media to drive traffic to their content. One of the best ways to learn how to do that is by reading Mark Schaefer’s blog. Mark is a social media specialist who covers topics like how to use Tumblr to get more traffic to your blog. It’s good stuff.
7. Contently – The Contently blog is hands-down the best blog to teach you about content marketing strategy. If you want to learn how to handle the big picture content marketing issues likes paid distribution and measuring ROI, this blog is the place to start.

Content Marketing Articles

As you may have noticed, there are tons of articles out there on content marketing. But, only a few of them are actually good, helpful, or actionable. Here are a few of my favorites that fit the bill as content marketing must-reads.

1. 11 Unusual Visual Content Marketing Tips to Drive Traffic – If you’re still only relying on articles as your main content marketing, you’re doing it wrong. And these people agree. The fact is, humans are visual and if you aren’t creating engaging visuals, your message will be relegated to the virtual trash bin.
2. SEO is Content Marketing – Most content marketers know SEO and content marketing are one in the same. This article just hits that home and shows us how they’re connected and how to use them together.
3. Facebook Instant Articles – What Does It Mean For SEO? – As any good content marketer knows, the space is always changing. And when big changes like Facebook Instant happen can cut the amount of traffic that gets to your site, it’s important to read an article like this to help get the most of the changes.
4. How to Get the Most Out of User-Generated Content – You don’t have to always be the one creating content. Believe it or not, your customers are willing to, and probably already are, creating better content than you do, so use it. This article teaches you how to make the most of your customers’ work and how to pick the best stuff. It’s another great way to share the burden of generating content.
5. How to Increase Relevant Social Media Shares for Your Content – Many experts in the SEO and social media marketing field have suggested that social media signals affect your ranking in the SERPS. If they don’t, getting your content seen more across social networks is the key to getting quality traffic to your site. This article teaches you how to get more MEANINGFUL shares, from your content.
6. Unique Ways to Get High Quality Backlinks  – As almost any honest and smart content marketer will tell you, in 2016 it’s still about quality backlinks. This article shares some ways you can earn them and get more traffic.

Content Marketing Experts to Follow

No matter your level of content marketing expertise, we all appreciate an expert’s help sometimes. Although we can’t personally get the time of the top level content marketers in the space, we surely can follow them and grab the tidbits they share on Twitter. Here are some of the worthwhile content marketing experts you should follow.

1. Rob Wormley – Besides being the co-author of two amazing marketing books, Rob Wormley also shares amazing advice about creating epic content and tips to boost your traffic, engagement, and social shares.
2. Brian Dean – What can’t I say about Brian Dean that hasn’t already been said? If you want straight-to-the-point, practical, step-by-step content marketing hotness, he’s your guy.
3. Michael Brenner – If you’re looking for large scale content marketing advice, the former VP of Content Marketing at SAP and current CEO of Marketing Insiders should do the trick.
4. Jason Burrows – Jason tweets about all things marketing, but his content marketing tweets are some of the best. If you want to read things like all the SEO rankings content marketers need to know about, Jason is a must-follow.
5. Gerry Moran – Gerry runs MarketingThink, which discusses everything marketing with a section dedicated to content marketing. He’s also the head of social media and content marketing at Cognizant, and shares great content like the breakdown of a perfect blog post and how to make your content more newsworthy.
6. Juntae DeLane – If you want to know how to personalize your content marketing and how to create an awesome customer case study that’s well integrated into your content marketing plan, follow Juntae DeLane.
7. Dio Favatas – This growth hacker and content marketing experts shares great all-around marketing advice on Twitter. His best content marketing tweets help you build a content calendar.
8. Sam Hurley – This U.K.-based content marketer and growth hacker shares SEO insider secrets nobody’s sharing. Follow Sam if you want interesting reads that aren’t overshared on content marketing.
9. Ryan Hodgson – Ryan is head of content marketing, social media, and paid media at Yesler. He mostly shares information about social media and content marketing. He’s a good follow if you want to get better at using social media to get more traffic to your content.
10. Larry Kim – Larry is the founder of the popular SEO tool Wordstream, and is a must-follow because he shares all his secrets about using SEO to make your content win.
11. Jason Quey – Every content marketer needs to know how to tell a story. Jason is awesome at teaching you how to craft stories to create awesome content.
12. AJ Ghergich – AJ is an SEO and content marketing expert that shares awesome content on all things marketing. Heck, he has the amazing Twitter handle “SEO,” so he’s got to be a good follow, right?
13. Sujan Patel –  Ok, this is me. But seriously, if you want more walkthroughs on how to not only produce amazing content, but market the s$%t out of it, follow me on twitter.

So there you have it. A lot of great resources to help become content marketing guru of the century (or at least a content marketer that gets better results). 😉
What are some your favorites? What did I miss that you think you should be added to the list? Tell me in the comments section below.

Need more help with your content marketing strategy?