Balancing multiple clients can be difficult, particularly if you aren’t familiar with their area of expertise – it can increase the time you need to devote to sourcing content for their social media and blogs, leaving you less time for other aspects of marketing and SEO. I’d like to share my favourite content sourcing tools, which help me come up with ideas for my clients. These tools give you access to information to share via social media, or inspiration for blog posts (please note, I am NOT advocating reproducing content verbatim).
- Scoopit. This is wonderful. You create a topic, input keywords and it gathers information from around the net. You ‘scoop’ interesting stories from the curation module, and can ‘scoop’ any interesting stories you come across online.
- Yahoo Answers. Seems odd, but you can input keywords and see what questions are being asked about your topic, from what a beginner should buy to whether the product has ever been used as a weapon.
- Content Strategy Generator Tool is a useful Google Docs tool that finds stories in the news related to your keywords. I personally find Scoopit more useful, but it has some great features.
- Keyword Questions – a paid tool from Wordtracker, but you get 20 free searches. Sources questions people are asking about a particular keyword.
- Google Analytics. Analyse the data available to you. What are people searching for when they find your site? What are your best performing products / pages? What are your old blog posts doing? Which blog posts / social media posts are getting the most clickthroughs / conversions? When you can see what’s working you can create similar useful content.
