- Jun 30, 2007
- 1,725
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I'm always looking for new tools to improve my content marketing - I'm not a huge fan of staring at a blank page and trying to come up with full 500-2000+ word articles for my sites from scratch.
I used to just go to Google and look at top competitors by typing "[niche] blog" and looking at articles they published for inspiration, doing a bit of keyword research, and then trying to slap together decent content to publish.
Over time I've evolved my writing to utilize a handful of tools that makes it much easier to write more engaging and comprehensive content, much more quickly.
Now my tools/process goes something like this:
I look for keyword and topic ideas by running a few seed keywords through Ubersuggest & Keysearch. I generally try to target low-mid competition keywords with 500+ searches/mo, but am happy to try and piece together a few lower-volume longtail keywords that combine to add up to decent monthly searches. I take all these search volumes with a grain of salt anyways, but they're a decent indicator of potential performance. I know Ahrefs is the king, but I don't really care about exact metrics anyways, and I use MorningScore for backlink analysis - they're amazing. So I don't really feel the need to justify Ahrefs pricing on top of my other subscriptions.
If I can't think of any good topics I'll go to Google, search for competitor blogs to get ideas for content, grab some seed keywords from there and start digging.
I just started using Postpace & MarketMuse and have fallen in love with both. They work well together when utilized in a particular way:
Postpace
After I know what primary keywords I'm going to target (from Step 1), I fire up Postpace first and plug in my primary keyword.
It goes out and grabs the top 15 competitors for the keyword, and tells some important metrics such as average word count, keyword frequency, etc. It also creates outlines of each of the top-ranking articles to show you what topics are covered in the best-performing pieces.
The best part is its content brief editor. You can simply click each topic and it will add the content to a content brief/outline so you can figure out your topics and subtopics in the article.
MarketMuse
After I have my first round of content research and outlining done, I jump to MarketMuse and use the Research module to get more keyword ideas and variants. I plug in my primary keyword and it analyzes the top competitors to tell you what related keywords they're using, and variants of those keywords, along with frequencies.
I make note of the most relevant/useful related topics and variants and add them to the content brief to ensure I utilize these keywords/topics in the final result.
I then use the Compete module to get a bird's eye view of the top 20 competitors and a topical heatmap, which lets me get an idea of gaps in topical coverage. The more gaps I can fill, the more keywords I can rank for and the more authoritative and useful the article becomes.
I update the content brief in Postpace once again, rearrange everything, and finalize my outline for the article.
I bought Headlime a while back when it first launched for a one-off price. It was originally just a nifty little headline creation tool where you could plug in your product, the pains it solves and its benefits, your target audience, etc. and it would create headline ideas based on their templates.
Over the past several months the developer has massively expanded the functionality and incorporated GPT-3, allowing Headlime to write unique headlines with AI. However, they've also added all kinds of features like AI-assisted blog posts, emails, facebook ads, landing pages, product descriptions, etc.
The module important during this phase of my process is the Blog module in Headlime which uses AI to write content**.
You simply tell it what you want your blog to be about (feed it a general blog headline that incorporates your keyword) and give it a sentence or two, and it will start cranking out some extremely well-written content. After it writes a paragraph or two it stops. You can then edit the content, delete things you don't want, add content in, and set up the next sentence or two with where you want the AI to go, then click generate again. It will build on the article a bit more using the content you've added. Then just rinse and repeat.
If I can't think of a good few sentences to write, I'll feed the content into a nifty tool called Nichesss (not a typo), which also uses GPT-3 to write some content. It has a "Blog Post Intro" module that spits out some helpful intro sentences for a topic, which I can then add to the content in Headlime to keep things moving along with minimal brainpower.
I reference the content outline from Postpace and add in phrases and sentences after each generation to have the AI write a paragraph or two based on that.
After all is said and done, I quickly polish the article, rearrange things a bit as needed, and consult the Postpace brief and MarketMuse to sprinkle in some keywords that the AI didn't use and manually write a bit more to help the flow and cover any topics the AI didn't quite nail. Once I'm happy, I'm ready to check the optimization.
**Unfortunately the AI content isn't included in my lifetime plan for Headlime, but I can buy one-off credits that don't expire to use as needed, and they're very reasonably priced (it usually only takes about $1 worth of credits to crank out a long, well-written article with minimal effort). For their monthly plans, they include a generous amount of recurring credits as well.
Next I publish the article to my blog, as I need a URL to feed to MarketMuse's Optimize module. Once published I paste the primary keyword and the article URL into compete and let it run its analysis. It will return results showing me what topics the top competitors cover and how frequently these topics are mentioned, and how frequently my content mentions these same topics. It will make helpful suggestions such as "use this topic less," "you've covered/mentioned this topic the right amount of times," or "add this topic a few more times."
So I follow their guidelines to boost the overall content. The Optimize module has a few other nifty features, but that's the majority of how I use it.
Once the content has been checked and tweaked I save the updated content, add a few images from DepositPhotos, and finalize it so I can move on to the next.
I use the Pomodoro method to help me focus, and use brain.fm for background noise to help me focus.
NOTE: I am not affiliated with any of the above tools in any way, I just have quickly grown to love them. Also, at the time of writing this, I believe all the tools outlined above have lifetime deals (aside from Headlime), mostly on AppSumo. If you wind up purchasing MarketMuse, I highly suggest at least stacking 3 codes to unlock everything and have decent monthly limits. I also use a few of my own tools, but they aren't necessary to the core of my process - and I don't want to mention them as the purpose of this post is not to promote myself (please don't PM me asking about any as I won't respond - I apologize), but I want to find out:
What tools do you use? What process do you use to pump out as many high-quality articles as quickly as possible? I'm fairly happy with my tech stack, but I would love to find out about some other tools that I haven't seen or tried.
I used to just go to Google and look at top competitors by typing "[niche] blog" and looking at articles they published for inspiration, doing a bit of keyword research, and then trying to slap together decent content to publish.
Over time I've evolved my writing to utilize a handful of tools that makes it much easier to write more engaging and comprehensive content, much more quickly.
Now my tools/process goes something like this:
1) Keyword Research - Ubersuggest & Keysearch
I look for keyword and topic ideas by running a few seed keywords through Ubersuggest & Keysearch. I generally try to target low-mid competition keywords with 500+ searches/mo, but am happy to try and piece together a few lower-volume longtail keywords that combine to add up to decent monthly searches. I take all these search volumes with a grain of salt anyways, but they're a decent indicator of potential performance. I know Ahrefs is the king, but I don't really care about exact metrics anyways, and I use MorningScore for backlink analysis - they're amazing. So I don't really feel the need to justify Ahrefs pricing on top of my other subscriptions.
If I can't think of any good topics I'll go to Google, search for competitor blogs to get ideas for content, grab some seed keywords from there and start digging.
2) Content Brief / Outline - Postpace & MarketMuse
I just started using Postpace & MarketMuse and have fallen in love with both. They work well together when utilized in a particular way:
Postpace
After I know what primary keywords I'm going to target (from Step 1), I fire up Postpace first and plug in my primary keyword.
It goes out and grabs the top 15 competitors for the keyword, and tells some important metrics such as average word count, keyword frequency, etc. It also creates outlines of each of the top-ranking articles to show you what topics are covered in the best-performing pieces.
The best part is its content brief editor. You can simply click each topic and it will add the content to a content brief/outline so you can figure out your topics and subtopics in the article.
MarketMuse
After I have my first round of content research and outlining done, I jump to MarketMuse and use the Research module to get more keyword ideas and variants. I plug in my primary keyword and it analyzes the top competitors to tell you what related keywords they're using, and variants of those keywords, along with frequencies.
I make note of the most relevant/useful related topics and variants and add them to the content brief to ensure I utilize these keywords/topics in the final result.
I then use the Compete module to get a bird's eye view of the top 20 competitors and a topical heatmap, which lets me get an idea of gaps in topical coverage. The more gaps I can fill, the more keywords I can rank for and the more authoritative and useful the article becomes.
I update the content brief in Postpace once again, rearrange everything, and finalize my outline for the article.
3) Content Writing - Headlime (with some assistance from Nichesss)
I bought Headlime a while back when it first launched for a one-off price. It was originally just a nifty little headline creation tool where you could plug in your product, the pains it solves and its benefits, your target audience, etc. and it would create headline ideas based on their templates.
Over the past several months the developer has massively expanded the functionality and incorporated GPT-3, allowing Headlime to write unique headlines with AI. However, they've also added all kinds of features like AI-assisted blog posts, emails, facebook ads, landing pages, product descriptions, etc.
The module important during this phase of my process is the Blog module in Headlime which uses AI to write content**.
You simply tell it what you want your blog to be about (feed it a general blog headline that incorporates your keyword) and give it a sentence or two, and it will start cranking out some extremely well-written content. After it writes a paragraph or two it stops. You can then edit the content, delete things you don't want, add content in, and set up the next sentence or two with where you want the AI to go, then click generate again. It will build on the article a bit more using the content you've added. Then just rinse and repeat.
If I can't think of a good few sentences to write, I'll feed the content into a nifty tool called Nichesss (not a typo), which also uses GPT-3 to write some content. It has a "Blog Post Intro" module that spits out some helpful intro sentences for a topic, which I can then add to the content in Headlime to keep things moving along with minimal brainpower.
I reference the content outline from Postpace and add in phrases and sentences after each generation to have the AI write a paragraph or two based on that.
After all is said and done, I quickly polish the article, rearrange things a bit as needed, and consult the Postpace brief and MarketMuse to sprinkle in some keywords that the AI didn't use and manually write a bit more to help the flow and cover any topics the AI didn't quite nail. Once I'm happy, I'm ready to check the optimization.
**Unfortunately the AI content isn't included in my lifetime plan for Headlime, but I can buy one-off credits that don't expire to use as needed, and they're very reasonably priced (it usually only takes about $1 worth of credits to crank out a long, well-written article with minimal effort). For their monthly plans, they include a generous amount of recurring credits as well.
4) Content Optimization - MarketMuse
Next I publish the article to my blog, as I need a URL to feed to MarketMuse's Optimize module. Once published I paste the primary keyword and the article URL into compete and let it run its analysis. It will return results showing me what topics the top competitors cover and how frequently these topics are mentioned, and how frequently my content mentions these same topics. It will make helpful suggestions such as "use this topic less," "you've covered/mentioned this topic the right amount of times," or "add this topic a few more times."
So I follow their guidelines to boost the overall content. The Optimize module has a few other nifty features, but that's the majority of how I use it.
5) Finalize the Published Article & Repeat
Once the content has been checked and tweaked I save the updated content, add a few images from DepositPhotos, and finalize it so I can move on to the next.
I use the Pomodoro method to help me focus, and use brain.fm for background noise to help me focus.
NOTE: I am not affiliated with any of the above tools in any way, I just have quickly grown to love them. Also, at the time of writing this, I believe all the tools outlined above have lifetime deals (aside from Headlime), mostly on AppSumo. If you wind up purchasing MarketMuse, I highly suggest at least stacking 3 codes to unlock everything and have decent monthly limits. I also use a few of my own tools, but they aren't necessary to the core of my process - and I don't want to mention them as the purpose of this post is not to promote myself (please don't PM me asking about any as I won't respond - I apologize), but I want to find out:
What tools do you use? What process do you use to pump out as many high-quality articles as quickly as possible? I'm fairly happy with my tech stack, but I would love to find out about some other tools that I haven't seen or tried.
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