The Content Creation Tools Medium is a digital content toolkit, and examples of digital content creation tools and some content creation techniques.
The Content Creation Tools bundle includes a variety of tools, templates and techniques to help you to plan, create and publish your content. Using the Material Design specification to craft your markup, you’ll always be sure that your content is consistent with the rest of your site.
PowToon
Video is the most popular medium on social media networks. The problem is, many companies rely on expensive external agencies to create these videos. The finished product can look too contrived, miss the message mark, and really drain the budget.
A tool like PowToon means you don’t have to be a video master to create engaging videos, especially for presentation purposes. The platform allows you to choose from several templates and customize them according to your business. You can simply plug and play your content and share across your social media networks. Free and paid versions are available from $19 to $99 per month.
Animoto
Animoto is another great video platform that allows non-experts to create captivating multimedia. Animoto allows you to turn existing video clips and images into video slideshows with little effort. You can either use one of their existing storyboard templates or build a video from scratch depending on how much time you have and your ambition!
Animoto does offer a free version, if you don’t mind having their branding on your videos. Other plans are at €28 or €69 per month based on your business’s needs. Annual subscriptions offer significant discounts.
How to Create Quick Videos with Animoto:
- Use one of the many storyboards provided by Animoto to speed up your video creation process. Each comes with a song, a style, and a particular structure.
- Replace the existing template content with your own text, video clips, and photos.
After you create your video, you can download it in various formats and levels of quality and upload it directly to your social media platforms. There are many ways to use video in your social media marketing, so make sure you do some research to find out the best route for you.
Knowing how to create a great video is one thing but understanding how to create good marketing videos is another. Consider a social media and marketing course to use video to its full potential!
Placeit
One more video tool in this list is PlaceIt. This image and video tool allows brands to showcase their products and digital designs in realistic web/video environments. It can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on externally sourced product videos and images.
A one-time purchase on the platform costs a few dollars, or you can choose to pay $14.95 per month, or $89.69 yearly, depending on your brand’s needs.
How to Create Video mock-ups with Placeit:
- Search for your desired environment. Tip: include your preferred device (e.g. iPhone or Mac) and background (e.g. office or cafe).
- Upload your image or enter a URL to grab a screenshot. Placeit will automatically place your image in your selected environment.
Once you have your product images, you have the tools you need to promote your products on social media via organic or paid posts.
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
SEMrush SEO Content Template
If you are creating content to help you rank on the SERPs, you shouldn’t be writing blind. You need to know what is helping the top results to rank and take this into consideration when creating your own content.
The SEMrush content template can help you analyze the content that is ranking top for your target keywords and help you understand what you need to include in your own pages to compete.
Cost: From $99.95 per month
Grammarly
It might sound simple but creating mistake-free content is harder than it sounds.
Grammarly can help you check for spelling and grammatical errors in your content while writing, as well as helping you to focus the tone of your content and check for plagiarism. The browser add on also makes sure you avoid typos in social shares.
Think of it as your helping hand to make sure your content reads well and is free from errors.
Cost: Free version and Premium $139.95 a year
Hemingway App
In their own words, “Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear” and helps you make your content more readable and also shorten sentences.
Run your written copy through the web app, and in seconds you will see the opportunities to make it better for your readers.
Cost: FREE
Izitext.io
Izitext is a transcription service that’s used by transcribers, podcasters, journalists, and more. You can sign up for a demo today and learn more about their services!
Cost: FREE DEMO and further pricing may apply
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is another content creation tool that is helpful in generating content ideas. This tool pulls popular posts based on keywords. It comes with a bunch of filters to narrow down the results based on language, location, journalist, date, and more.
The results can be sorted based on their total reach in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can also set custom filters to further narrow down the results.
BuzzSumo has a free Chrome extension as well.
Pricing: Free for 10 searches a month. Paid plans start at $99/mo.
CoSchedule Headline Studio
This one is another one of my favorite content creation tools. CoSchedule’s Headline Studio analyzes your content’s headline and gives a score to it based on different factors like SEO, emotional words, uncommon words, word count, clarity, and more.
You can use it to optimize your headlines and craft the best-performing ones to rank higher on search engines and drive organic traffic to your site. In short, it is a simple yet powerful tool for your content creation process.
Headline Studio has a Chrome extension as well.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $9/mo.
Copy.ai
This one is for lazy content creators (guilty as charged 😬) or whenever you feel lazy to write everything from scratch. Copy.ai leverages artificial intelligence to reduce the time and effort you spend on copywriting. Essentially, this tool writes your copy for you.
It makes sure the copy it generates sounds as authentic as possible. You can tweak the content you like among the choices it provides. What can Copy.ai write for you?
- Product descriptions
- Blog posts
- Social ads
- Startup copies: brand voice, motto, value proposition, etc.
- Email copy
- Sales Copy
- Social media captions
Pricing: Free trial available. Premium plans start at $35 per month.
If you haven’t tried this tool yet, I suggest you go and test it out on its free trial. An alternative to this tool that is also worth mentioning is Ryter. It is relatively cheaper for $29/m with a yearly plan. But copy.ai excels in many ways compared to Ryter.
Audacity
If you have recorded your voice for a podcast or a video and it sounded like a dying frog, Audacity is the right tool for you. Audacity is a free, open-source, multi-track audio editing and recording software.
You can use it to record live audio, edit it (reduce noise, adjust speed, etc.), and export it.
Pricing: Free.
Alitu
Editing is often the most tiresome part of podcast creation. You will probably want to spend your time on recording rather than editing. However, you also need to make sure the sound quality is the best.
You can use Alitu to record, edit, and publish your podcasts without any audio editing skills. It automatically cleans your audio and makes editing easy as pie.
Conclusion
Create customized digital content for collaborative learning with this free, downloadable toolkit. This toolkit provides the foundation you need to develop your own digital content and integrate it into your online educational program. The toolkit includes an introduction to content creation, an overview of some of the main types of digital content available today, and many examples of tools, templates, images, and instructional strategies to use while creating this content.