It used to be the case that if you wanted to make content you either needed a designated Content Creator or had an employee that made it for you. Nowadays, however, there are a ton of online tools and applications that can help kick-start your own in-house content creation team. In fact, there are hundreds of free tools that can help streamline your marketing efforts and get more traction on social media.
Content Creation Software is often used to create new content on the Internet and generate sales leads. Today we’re going to take a quick look at just some of the Free content creation software.
iMovie
iMovie is a free video-editing software exclusively for Mac and iOS users. This tool allows you to bundle different short clips together to make a longer video.
Not only that, but you can add soundtracks, text, and filters to your video to give it a more personalized feel. Also, iMovie allows you to render finished video projects in different formats and screen sizes.
WeVideo
Unlike iMovie, WeVideo supports different platforms like Mac, Windows, mobile, and the web.
The tool is ideal for both professionals and amateurs. This implies you can whip out professional-looking videos in no time irrespective of your skill set.
Magisto
Magisto is equipped with emotion-detecting technology. This technology uses artificial intelligence to automatically capture the emotional state you want to present in your video.
This implies you can create emotionally driven videos without doing any heavy editing. Instead, Magisto will add scenes, soundtracks, and effects that reflect the emotion you want to capture automatically.
Magisto is ideal for anyone who wants to create engaging videos but lacks the editing skill required to achieve this manually.
Wave.video
Wave.video is an online video maker you can use to create powerful and engaging videos for your audience.
It has an ample library of over 300 million short clips, pictures, and soundtracks. It also has a user-friendly editor that allows you to customize your videos with ease. You can add your own text, colors, and filters to make your videos unique.
Also, Wave.video lets you optimize your video aspect ratio to fit any social-media platform’s dimensions.
Vyond
Vyond is a cloud-based video creation platform for animated videos. It has a copious library of templates, props, and sounds to create rich visual content that increases engagement, retention, and conversion rate.
The video tool is ideal for content marketers, webinars, training, and all kinds of e-learning.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a web-monitoring tool that lets you monitor important internet discussions in your industry in real time. This tool will alert you via email or RSS whenever the topics you’re tracking pop up on the web.
Google Alerts gives you a lot of flexibility — meaning, you’re in total control of how often you want to receive notifications. It can be monthly, weekly, daily, or promptly.
It’s ideal for monitoring high-interest topics in your industry that you can leverage.
Frase
Frase is a powerful AI-powered software that helps you generate content briefs for your target keywords with few clicks.
Frase scans existing articles and identifies content gaps that your post will bridge to create a detailed content brief. This makes it a better alternative to spending hours on research and creating a content brief manually.
SEMrush Marketing Calendar
Once you have identified the content that you want to create, you need to map out a solid editorial calendar and stick to it.
Planning a content strategy around a calendar will help you be accountable and take the steps needed to regularly drive growth. It is a great way to motivate you to keep on top of a regular publishing schedule, and the SEMrush Marketing Calendar is the perfect tool to help you to do this.
Cost: From $99.95 per month
SparkToro
SparkToro positions itself as a way to “Instantly discover what your audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows.” When it comes to planning your content strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you know who you are targeting and what their interests are.
The more you can create your content around your target market’s needs and wants, the better success you will enjoy, and this tool crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to share the insights you need on your audience.
Cost: From FREE for 10 searches per month to $225 per month for 500 searches
Google Trends
Google Trends can help you to understand the popularity of a search term or topic amongst Google searchers (which, let’s face it, is the majority of web users).
Enter a query and see how interest has trended over time and use this insight to create content around topics that are quickly gaining traction (gaining a competitive advantage by being the first to jump on a trend) or, similarly, identify those that are likely losing interest.
Cost: FREE
AlsoAsked.com
Google is regularly referred to as an answer engine, and this means that we need to be considering the questions that are being asked by searchers.
And one of the most effective tools that you can use to help you to find the questions that you need to be optimizing your website for is AlsoAsked.com, a free tool that returns the “People Also Asked” data, giving you an insight into longtail searches and, importantly, defines the relationship between topics and questions.
Cost: FREE
Answer the Public
As we have already discussed, you should be optimizing for questions as part of your SEO strategy, and the more insight you have access to, the better responses you can give to the different questions that are being asked.
While AlsoAsked.com shows results from PAA, Answer the Public returns results from Suggest data, showing combinations of auto-complete searches.
Use the two tools together to supercharge your insights and research.
Cost: FREE
Unsplash
Images and photos can really help to make your blog content more engaging, and the reality is that not every marketer has access to a team who can take custom photos. While some have the luxury of a stock photo library at their disposal, not everyone does.
When you need a license-free image to use in your content, Unsplash’s library contains, as they claim, photos for everyone, something that we can confirm to be true!
Cost: FREE
Google Docs
Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor that allows you to seamlessly create, edit, save, and share your text documents.
Google Docs is preferred for many reasons:
- It allows you to collaborate with others in real-time.
- It’s totally free, and it won’t cost you a penny.
- Lastly, it backs up your word documents on Google Cloud Storage, and you can access them on any internet-enabled device.
Quip
Quip is a productivity software suite that allows effective team collaboration. Here, you can create and edit spreadsheets, documents, and checklists.
One of the perks of the writing tools is the commenting features. With this feature, you can edit documents, communicate on projects while you work on them. You can also mention a team member and give them specific instructions.
Evernote
Evernote is ideal for capturing content ideas. You can use it to take notes; create outlines; and save pictures, web clippings, or any other resources you need to create a piece of content.
You can also use it to create long-form content like articles or blog posts.
Evernote will give you 60MB cloud-storage space for free every month. Also, free usage is limited to two devices. Meaning, you can only access the notes in your cloud-storage on two devices.
To enjoy more flexibility, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan.
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one workspace to write, plan, manage projects, get organized, and collaborate.
You can use the software to brainstorm ideas, create content briefs and build a wiki page.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a writing assistant that helps you see grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in your writings. Not only that, it suggests suitable replacements for the errors detected.
Grammarly can be used to edit blog posts, web copy, newsletter, video scripts, webinars, etc.
Hemmingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is yet another writing assistant. While Grammarly checks for spelling and grammatical errors, Hemingway Editor aims at making your content clearer and more readable for your audience.
Hemmingway Editor will point out your excess usage of adverbs and passive voice. Also, it’ll suggest you substitute long words with short and punchy ones.
In general, the tool will help you prune your content — making it very easy for readers to understand.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark allows you to boycott the painstaking process of manually creating graphics for your online and offline content.
It has tons of preinstalled templates you can customize to create your own personalized visual designs.
In addition, it has an intuitive interface that simplifies graphic designing — even for a newbie.
Fotor
Fotor has a simple user interface that lets you edit pictures like a Photoshop expert — even if you’re a total novice. You can add frames, filters, and effects to enhance the quality of your pictures.
You can also use the tool to design stunning visuals to jazz up your blog posts and social-media posts.
Pixlr
Pixlr is a simplified version of Adobe Photoshop. It has almost every feature present in Adobe Photoshop.
Unlike Photoshop, it has a beginner-friendly user interface you can use to design professional-looking graphics, even if you’re not a design guru.
Stencil
Stencil has tons of preinstalled templates, font styles, and a library of over 2 million stock photos you can use to design beautiful visuals within minutes.
You can knock off your first ten visual designs for free. However, you’ll need to opt for a paid subscription to create more designs. Or you can wait for a month when you’ll get another ten free design slots.
CoSchedule’s headline analyzer
CoSchedule’s headline analyzer examines the structure, grammar, and readability of your headlines.
It will rate your headline 1-100 based on its word combinations, length, and how engaging it is.
Also, you can use the CoSchedule headline analyzer to test out different headlines to determine the one that’s the most compelling.
Conclusion
The Internet has changed the way we distribute and consume content. To this extent, there is a range of free content creation software tailored to both creators and consumers of digital content. For example, social media platforms are content-creation tools that users can customize and consume information directly from the site or via their mobile device. Other examples include online newsletters, blogs, wikis, video streaming and so on.