20+ Best Content Marketing Resources To Improve Your Skills

Are you a beginner in the world of content marketing trying to find your place in a highly competitive marketplace? Don’t worry, I’ve got your back!

All you need is a little patience to go through these content marketing resources and start writing your content.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the right track.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• Which content marketing resources to consult if you’re a freshman in the digital marketing world?
• How to fill your content calendar with killer content marketing ideas?
• What are the best actionable tips on how to create better content?
• Which content marketing tools you should use?

Let’s roll!

Content Marketing Resources for Beginners

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Remarkable Content

If you’re feeling a little low and getting into the world of content marketing feels too complicated, dive into this website to get some inspiration. Aside from useful content marketing tricks and strategies, the best part about this content resource is the motivational interviews with industry leaders.

Neil Patel, Brian Dean, and Mark Manson are just some of the content masters that offer concise and straightforward lessons on how they unlock their creativity and discipline themselves to regularly write valuable content.

How To Conduct a Content Marketing Audit (Infographic + Downloadable Template)

Starting any marketing campaign without analyzing your current content marketing activities and your competitors can easily lead to wasted time and resources.

Study this guide by Brafton to learn the repeatable content marketing audit process from start to finish.

How to Develop a Content Strategy: A Start-to-Finish-Guide

If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to content marketing, there’s no better place to start than HubSpot. This guide can teach you all about why every content marketer needs a content strategy in order to write better content.

You’ll also find all types of content marketing explained – including blog posts, social media posts, and engaging podcasts. These explanations can help you understand what type of content marketing is most suitable for your industry or niche and ultimately give you a direction for which types of content you can specialize in.

15 Types of Content That Will Drive More Traffic

After you’ve checked out HubSpot’s piece on content strategy, content types, and their various benefits and uses, you can delve a little bit into QuickSprout’s article on content creation. Once you’ve determined what types of content you want to create, the next thing you should learn is how to use content to drive traffic.

Whether it’s product reviews, blog posts, or case studies, Quick Sprout gives you succinct lessons in how to transform every type of content into an SEO machine.

The Periodic Table of Content

This article is part of an amazing book on content marketing called “Content Chemistry.” In a unique way, the author explains how content is made of pieces that can be combined like the elements in the Periodic Table.

As you go through this visually stunning article, you’ll learn how to atomize any type of content into a social post. You’ll learn what type of links you should include in your content and on which platforms you should promote and distribute your articles in order to create a chain reaction of clicks and shares.

14 Checklists, Scorecards, and Worksheets to Set Up Content Marketing Success

Content Marketing Institute is a great platform where you can find useful resources, statistics, and up-to-date industry news which will come handy once you’re past your beginner’s phase. In this article, they explain why having a documented content marketing strategy is essential for being an effective content writer.

They link to a number of useful articles where you can find checklists, scorecards, and templates. These are valuable tools that will help you maintain a sense of direction if you have a lot of projects on your plate.

Content Marketing Ideas

The Digital Marketing Template Library

A great collection of quality digital marketing templates to help you speed up your process and increase traffic, subscribers and sales to your website.

This library consists of ready-to-use templates covering SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, email marketing, social media, freelancing, and more.

27 Strategies for Brainstorming Blog Post Ideas

In this content marketing resource, Jeff Bullas, the famous industry leader, explores the topic of regularly generating great content ideas.

These 27 strategies will teach you that content marketers don’t just do keyword research and fill up pages with words. Instead, the best among them are those who are open to trying new marketing strategies, but most important of all, they remain lifelong learners.

Word association, free writing, and making a mind map are just a few of the strategies that the article suggests you should try to create better content.

10 Ways to Never Run Out of Blog Ideas Again

Are you reading industry news? Have you considered the ways in which you can repurpose content?

Great content ideas don’t necessarily come from sitting in front of your desktop. What’s more, blog ideas can come from unexpected places, such as running, taking a bath, or reading a novel.

The article also explores the idea of scanning other bloggers’ content as a useful strategy to come up with new perspectives.

95 Creative Marketing Ideas (with Details, Examples, and Links)

When it comes to content marketing ideas, this article is a true gem. It helps you unlock your creativity by giving you concrete ways in which you can develop your content. “Share a Must-Do List,” “Create Weekly-Links Roundups,” and “Predict Future Trends” are just 3 of the 95 strategies that will help you create new content.

The article also explains how to leverage your content marketing efforts by transforming older articles into new formats. Why not turn your blog posts into a SlideShare presentation or make your guides easy to download by posting them in PDF format?

16 Killer Content Marketing Ideas (with Detailed Examples)

Looking for some of the best creative content examples? This article shows you some great marketing campaigns divided into 5 sections: videos, blogs, social media, infographics, and print media.

Staying informed about what types of content the best marketing teams are producing is always a great way to come up with new content ideas. ActiveCampaign shows you how a great content marketing campaign is created, what you can learn from the best content marketers, and which of their tricks you can implement in your own content.

Content Marketing Tips & Tricks

26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts

Are you using an editorial calendar? Do you know the basic principles of heading structures? With these actionable tips, you’ll learn how to stay organized and create SEO-friendly content.

Aside from that, the article gives you guidance on creating lead-generating blog posts. Adding a social share button and a call to action to your blog post are just 2 of the many details you need to learn about if you want to generate more traffic to your website.

30 Actionable Content Marketing Tips for Digital Marketers

Once you find that blogging and regularly creating new content isn’t a hard task for you, finding ways to leverage your content marketing efforts is the next important milestone.

This article will give you some tips and guidance on how to successfully distribute your content. Do you capitalize on the potential of email marketing? Why not offer some exclusive content to your email list?

This resource also suggests that successfully promoting your content always comes as a result of having a good understanding of your target audience and buyer personas.

The Ultimate Round-Up of Content Marketing Tips

This is another HubSpot content marketing resource, but I couldn’t leave it out. The article suggests that content marketers need to follow emerging trends to stay ahead of competitors.

According to HubSpot, if you want to keep on generating website traffic using Google Analytics and other tools to track your performance is a must.

The article also explains why having a clear and measurable business goal is so important and why increasing website traffic is not a business goal that will push you forward.

Instead, you need to focus on your buyer personas and how to bring value to your readers.

5 Essential Tips for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

In this handy resource, you’ll learn the importance of understanding the buyer’s journey. Understanding all steps of the sales funnel – the awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage – is what will help you create content that will boost your conversion rate.

Additionally, you will learn that the job of content marketers is to meticulously monitor where their traffic is coming from in order to learn how to refine and adjust content strategy.

Free Content Marketing Tools

Google Trends

As a content marketer, you need to be aware of which search terms are on the rise. Google Trends shows you how often a term is searched on Google and how its search volume fluctuates over time, for different locations.

You can also use the tool to conduct comparative keyword research and discover demographic insights and related topics, as well as discover similar queries to help you better understand what is currently trending on Google.

Ubersuggest

If you’re stuck in your keyword research, turn to Ubersuggest for some inspiration.

This amazing free tool can help you find long-tail keywords in just a few clicks. Ubersuggest aggregates data from Google Suggest, helping you find keywords related to your searches on Google.

Every result is in alphabetical order and the tool also lets you download your newly discovered keywords as a text file.

SEOmofo

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you should write your metadata. Writing great metadata is complicated, as you need to optimize your target keyword, mention your brand name, and include a call to action while working within a specific character limit.

At the same time, you need to make sure that you’ve crafted fun and engaging sentences that will entice readers to click on your SERP snippet.

Sounds overwhelming?

In the image, you can see what the metadata for this article will look like on search engines. Image source: SEOmofo.

To make sure your SERP snippet looks good, just use SEOmofo. It’s a free tool that instantly shows you how your metadata will look on search engines.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a search query data-visualization tool. All you need to do is enter a keyword and this amazing tool will generate questions, prepositions, and alphabetical lists related to your query.

Image source: AnswerThePublic.

For example, I performed a search for “content marketing tool” and got these results:

• What are content marketing tools?
• How to choose content marketing tools?
• What is the best content marketing tool?

If you lack content ideas, this tool will give you a direction on how to start thinking on a particular subject.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

If you can’t find a good blog idea, turn to HubSpot’s blog ideas generator for some inspiration. This free tool is very easy to use. All you need to do is just add 5 different nouns and the tool will generate interesting blog ideas on which you can write.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator. Image source: HubSpot.

For example, I just typed in: content, marketing, tools, resources, and ideas. One of the blog ideas the tool has suggested for me is: “The Next Big Thing in Content.”

That will make one hell of an article, right?

Headline Analyzer

The team at Advanced Marketing Institute has created an amazing free tool that measures the EMV (Emotional Marketing Value) of your headlines. Never thought about this?

Well, these folks suggest the number of EMV words in your title is what will determine whether you drive prospects to read your content.

Use this tool to find out if your headline impacts your readers on an intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual level.

Google Keyword Planner

If you want your on-page SEO to be impeccable, it all starts with the right keywords. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will provide you with data on monthly trends and search volume for the search terms in your niche. This tool can help you find out how your list of keywords will perform by analyzing your data.

Over to You

Hope you find these content marketing tools and resources useful.