Essential Tools Every Freelancer Must Have for Successful Content Marketing

Content marketing is making and sharing content that is relevant to attract and engage a specific audience. It is very useful for freelancers as the sector is quickly evolving. According to the World Bank, over 47% of the global workforce are freelancers, a number that is expected to grow in the coming years. 

If you are a freelancer, marketing will help you build a solid personal brand, attract new clients, and grow your business. By creating and distributing valuable content, you will establish yourself as an expert in your field and stand out from the competition. However, for successful content marketing, it's essential to use the right platforms that freelancers like. 

With the right tools and strategies, you will take your content marketing to the next level and achieve freelance success. Read on as we will show you what are more likely to be the most essential tools you must use to enhance your efforts and succeed in 2024.

1. Grammarly

Grammarly is a writing assistant tool that helps you improve the content you write by checking for grammar. You'll also be able to check for spelling and grammatical errors. That's to say, your writing will be more polished and professional with the tool. As a result, I think Grammarly is one of the best content marketing tools for freelancers and here's why:

• Error detection. Grammarly helps highlight writing errors like grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 
• Vocabulary enhancement. The tool suggests better words and phrases which will encourage you as a freelancer to diversify your vocabulary. In the end, this will make your content more engaging.
• Genre-specific writing style check.  There's also a feature in Grammarly that helps you check the style of different kinds of writing. If you use this feature, your content will adhere to industry-specific guidelines.
• Plagiarism check. The tool lets you know if your content matches any other sources. This will help you avoid plagiarism.
• Tone analysis. Grammarly's tone analysis feature goes through your content and then helps you maintain a consistent and appropriate tone throughout.

2. Canva

Canva is a free, easy to use visual content creation tool. Some of the contents you can create with Canva are: 

• Social media graphics.
• Presentations.
• Posters. 
• Other marketing materials. 

You can edit and use a lot of Canva's templates, graphics or fonts. You will be able to create professional looking visual effects with all these features without the need for a designer's skills.

I think Canva is one of the best content marketing tools for freelancers. I am saying this because with it, you can enhance your visual appeal and create a memorable online presence. Additionally, you can use it to design a unique logo, create website graphics, and customize visuals for your social media and marketing needs. Consequently, with all these, you stand out and attract many clients. The main features of Canva are:

• Customizable templates. Canva has many templates for different types of content. Freelancers can quickly create professional designs with these tools.
• Graphics and fonts. It also has many graphics, icons, and fonts to help enhance the visual appeal of your designs.
• Logo design. Canva offers a variety of editable logo designs. This allows freelancers to make a distinctive and easily identifiable logo for their brand.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics enables you to monitor and evaluate traffic to your site, user activity, and other variables. It also provides insight into how users engage with your website, allowing you to take decisions based on data to enhance your online advertising tactics. From what I've noticed while using it, this is one of the finest tools for content promotion for freelancers since it allows you to track how effective the content you create is. It can also help you find areas in which your website could be improved and optimized for a better user experience. Its key features are:

• Tag management. You can also use Google Analytics to oversee and set up advertising tags on your web page without changing the code. This makes it easy to monitor user activity.
• Smart goals. Google Analytics allows you to establish and track smart objectives that use machine learning techniques to improve sales.
• Data activation. This tool lets you import your first-party data and combine it with your Google Analytics data for a more comprehensive perspective.

4. Trello

Trello is an online project control tool that allows you and your team to collaborate, arrange, and handle tasks, duties, and ideas. It is one of the most effective marketing tools for freelancers, in my opinion, because it simplifies and standardizes the work process. As a result, this makes the process to be intuitive. 

With Trello, you can create boards to organize your projects. You can also add lists to break them down into manageable steps and use cards to track your tasks. The tool is very flexible and simple, which is what makes it valuable for freelancers. With Trello, you will stay on top of your projects and work more efficiently. The main features are:

• Boards. This is where you keep track of information, often for large projects, teams, or workflows.
• Lists. Lists help you break down your project into smaller, manageable processes.
• Cards. You can use this feature to track tasks and move between lists to show your progress.
• Board menu. This menu gives you options to customize your board and get access to extra features.
• Checklists. You can make subtasks within a card with checklists. This will help you break down tasks further and track completion.

5. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an online social media management application that allows you to manage your accounts and activity in one location. I truly appreciate it since it simplifies and standardizes the job. Hootsuite allows you to:

• Manage multiple social media accounts. Hootsuite allows you to link all of your social networking accounts and manage their activity.
• Schedule and publish posts. Hootsuite allows you to create, plan, and post content and adverts across many platforms.
• Monitor social media streams. You can track many social media streams in one spot. This will allow you to easily track significant keywords and terms.
• Inbox and message. Hootsuite allows you to handle private and public messaging, auto-responders, stored replies, and assignments.

6. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that includes a variety of functions that will help your site perform well in search engines like Google. It is one of the most excellent tools for advertising for freelancers since it allows you to:

• Analyze your content. Yoast has readability and SEO analysis for 20+ languages. It suggests ways to enhance your content and make it more appealing for your target audience.
• Preview your social sharing. Yoast SEO offers templates for promoting your content on several social media channels. This will help you generate more visually attractive content.
• Manage XML sitemaps. The plugin helps you generate and manage XML sitemaps for your website. This makes it easier for search engines to find and index your content.

7. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email advertising and automation tool that allows you to manage your promotional emails. You can also employ it to monitor performance and build your audience. Other things you can do using Mailchimp are:

• Create and send emails. Mailchimp provides a variety of email templates and features to assist you in creating visually beautiful and engaging emails, as well as scheduling and sending your campaigns.
• Integrate with other tools. Mailchimp integrates with many apps and services like Gmail and Google Docs to make it easy for you to connect your marketing moves with other aspects of your business.
• Manage e-commerce. Mailchimp helps you manage your e-commerce marketing, such as emailing customers about new products, promotions, and more if you have an online store.
• Collaborate with your team. With Mailchimp, you can collaborate with your team members, share updates, and assign tasks related to your email marketing campaigns.

8. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an online evaluation and performance analytics tool. It allows freelancers like you to explore popular subjects. You can also employ it to evaluate your content's success and find significant industry influencers. I enjoy this tool since it can be used to:

• Analyze content performance: You will know how specific content pieces perform. I am talking about social media engagement and backlinks. As a result, you will understand what resonates with your audience.
• Identify key influencers. You can find and connect with influential people in your niche to expand your content reach.
• Get content alerts. You can set up alerts to get notifications about new content related to your niche or specific keywords. This will help you stay updated and identify new opportunities.

9. Asana

Asana is another famous management platform that is widely used by freelancers and agencies across the globe. It helps you by managing your task-list and projects. You can also use this tool to collaborate with remote teams. You can use it for:

• Managing multiple projects. You can use it to start, assign, and track the progress of your tasks. It also tracks the time and allotment details which can be helpful in completing the work on time.
• Work with teams. With Asana, you can connect with team members, share updates, and assign tasks involved in your marketing strategies.
• Customize work assortment. Asana offers boards, calendars, and timelines which can be customized as per your needs. You can use it as an all-in-one project tracker to gain better insight into your workflow.
• Integrate with other tools. You can connect Asana with popular apps like Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Jira Cloud to combine your data and streamline your workflow.
• Track team goals and progress. You can use Asana to align your team with priorities. You can also use it to get fast results by planning and executing campaigns with its timeline view.
• Ensure data security and privacy. Asana takes physical, procedural, and technical safety standards to preserve the integrity and security of your information. With this, you can be sure that your data is always protected.

10. Buffer

Buffer is a social networking manager that allows you to organize your accounts and activities in one location. As a freelancer, I enjoy it since it allows me to save time and minimize stress. It also contributes to the growth of the social media audience and the achievement of outcomes. Additionally, Buffer provides you with:

• Collaboration tool. With Buffer, you can communicate with your team members, share updates, and assign tasks related to your social media marketing campaigns.
• Customized reports. You can use this tool to create customized reports. Using this tool, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and share them with your teams and clients.
• Social media strategizer. Buffer offers analytics for social networking which can assist you in optimizing your content. You can use this tool for implementing post schedules, and even improve your engagement styles.

11. Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking and organization app that helps you capture, organize, and share information on different platforms. I believe that it is one of the best content marketing tools for freelancers because it helps simplify content research. You can also use it to gather information and manage ideas. Other things you can do with this tool are:

• Capture ideas and information. You can save web pages, articles, images, and notes in one place. This will make it easy for you to collect and organize information for your content marketing.
• Organize notes and ideas. You can create custom notebooks for different projects with Evernote. You can also create topics, or content types, and use tags to categorize and filter your notes and retrieve it easily, just in case.
• Collaborate with your team. You can share notes and notebooks with your team members. This will help you all to contribute ideas and feedback which will lead to better collaboration.
• Sync across devices. Evernote has a mobile app and browser extension. This means you can get access to your notes on any device and update them in real-time.
• Clippings and screengrabs. You can save web clippings and screengrabs directly to your Evernote account. This will make it easy for you to capture inspiration and ideas from the web.
• Make an advanced search. Evernote has a powerful search feature which you can use to quickly find specific notes, information, or images. This will help you save time and improve the efficiency of your content marketing.
• Export notes. There is also an option to export your notes and ideas to different formats like Word or HTML. With this, it will be easy to share your work with clients or publishers.

12. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most widely used platforms which can be used to increase any website’s search engine rankings. As a freelancer, you can not only use it to track your content’s performance but also for learning about your competitions. Ahrefs provides you with a suit of practical statistics for optimizing your content, building backlinks, and increasing your internet visibility. You can use it for:

• Monitoring backlinks. You can use it to monitor and analyze inbound links to your web page. This allows you to create high-quality backlinks and boost your site's authority.
• Competing with competitors. You can also analyze your competitors' content, backlinks, and SEO strategies with this too. As a result, you will be able to identify opportunities and outperform them in search results.
• Integrating other tools. You can also connect Ahrefs with popular apps like Google Sheets, Slack, and Trello to streamline your SEO and improve your content marketing workflow.

13. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer is an app that assists freelancers build better headlines for their content by providing a grade based on the general quality and potential of the headlines. I enjoy this tool since it provides insights that I can utilize to enhance headline efficiency, boost engagement on social media, and raise SEO value. Additionally, the Headline Analyzer allows you to:

• Identify areas for improvement. The Headline Analyzer offers tips for improving your headlines. This makes it easy to tweak your material and achieve better outcomes.
• Track headline performance. You can monitor your headlines’ performance over time to find out trends and patterns. This will help you refine the strategies you use on your content marketing.
• Collaborate with your team. You can use the tool to share your headline scores and suggestions with your team for feedback and discussion. This will ensure you get better collaboration and content.

14. Piktochart

Piktochart is a content making tool that helps freelancers like me create attractive presentations, graphics, prints, and even videos for social media. It not only helps in making the design process easier but also offers many templates. Using this tool, you can:

• Start fresh or use templates. You can select a template from Piktochart's library or create your own design.
• Customize your visuals. You can use Piktochart's drag-and-drop editor to add elements, images, and text to your designs. This will make your content more visually appealing and engaging.
• Add charts and maps. You can use it to transform data into graphs, charts, and maps. With this, you will be able to convey complex information in an easy-to-understand format.
• Collaborate with your team. You can also share your designs with team members for feedback and editing. This will ensure you have better collaboration and content creation.
• Interlink with other tools. Piktochart can be linked with popular apps like Google Sheets, Slack, and Canva. Doing this will help in content creation by streamlining your content marketing workflow.
• SEO optimization. You can use Piktochart's built-in SEO tools to optimize your visuals for visibility and high search engine rankings.
• Resize your graphics. Lastly, you can use it to adjust the size of your visuals and make sure they fit optimally across different platforms, from social media to print.

15. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing platform that is made specifically for creators like bloggers, podcasters, and online coaches. As a freelancer, I like it because it has many features that will help you connect with your audience. With it, you can also grow your business and streamline your content creation. Other things you can do with ConvertKit are:

• Segment and organize your subscribers. The tags and segments help you categorize your subscribers. This means you can send targeted content to specific groups.
• Integrate with other tools. ConvertKit integrates with apps like Shopify, Stripe, and Teachable to make selling digital products and services easier.
• Get commerce functionality. You can sell digital products, courses, and coaching services directly from your email marketing campaigns with ConvertKit. That is without the need for a separate tool or platform.

Content Marketing Trends and Innovations for Freelancers in 2024

As a freelancer in 2024, you should be aware of the top content marketing trends going around in the market. Having such understanding will help you stay ahead of your competition. One of the most important trends is how almost everyone is using AI and automation to enhance their content marketing in new ways. Another trend is the optimization of content for voice search. It is also becoming more critical than ever. 

Additionally, memes and relatable content will drive engagement. So, it is crucial to develop niche content that caters to the exact demands of target audiences. UGC content will work wonders for eCommerce, so you must create strategic topic clusters to elevate your brand. According to a recent study by The Writing Cooperative, 75% of companies outsource living, breathing writers for their marketing and content needs. This makes it essential for you as a freelancer to stay up to date on what is happening. 

Other trends to watch out for are the rise of snack-sized content, easy-to-read content, and video content. I think you should also expect to see more employers becoming freelancers. Additionally, side hustles will continue to be the talk of the town, that is, the gig economy will keep trending. 

If you keep track of these trends and use these tools, you will be able to remain ahead of your competition. These tools not only help you develop high-performing content but also improve leads, sales, and the overall engagement. 

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