10 Useful Marketing Tools for Freelance Writers
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With a freelance writing career, you get the absence of the usual office routine, no daily commute, and the freedom to work from anywhere. However, if we look deeper into the world of freelance writing, it’s not that easy. We have to generate ideas, research topics, create compelling messages, manage our businesses, and produce quality writing.
It’s hard hard, don’t you think?
Well, to make your life easier, you can add marketing tools for freelance writers to your daily routine. Improve the visibility of your writing agency or promote your freelance writing services while making your working life less complicated. Using online marketing tools for freelance writers will also help you measure your key performance indicators, optimize the management of your social networks, know what content to create, and monitor your brand on the internet.
Marketing tools for freelance writers will give you a lot of benefits, so here are 10 useful tools that can save you time, improve your content, and help you scale your writing business quickly.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform created for boosting interaction and analyzing your results on several social networks at the same time.
In fact, this platform is perfect for posting and advertising on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter because it allows you to write one post and link it to all your social media. This means you’re sending consistent messaging to your audience, whichever social media tool they prefer. You’ll even have the chance to track the effectiveness of your posts with Hootsuite’s analytics tools.
Additionally, the free version of Hootsuite is quite effective since you can link three social networks, and schedule up to 50 posts using its calendar. If this isn’t enough, you also have the option of a 30-day free trial for the paid version.
Hootsuite is also accessible from your laptop and smartphone so you can operate from anywhere, anytime to keep up with the dynamic world of social media.
Finally, Hootsuite integrates with other well-known tools that you probably already use, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, and Adobe. The efficiency that these integrations give you leaves you more time to plan and create your posts, and write more content for your clients or social networks.
2. HubSpot Blog Topic Generator
HubSpot blog topic generator is a simple marketing tool for freelance writers that allows you to create content regularly even when you have blocks in your creativity. You just need to fill in one to three words that you want to write about and press enter. In a flash, you’ll get a list of possible blog topics based on your words. You can type more than three words but if you do the tool won’t give you appropriate topic suggestions.
Of course, when you review the results, you’ll need to manually select a topic and rearrange the words to match your exact needs. But if you’re stuck it’ll give you a handful of topics to get your writing process going.
This is not the best tool if you’re looking for a dozen new topics, but it’s perfect for getting post topic ideas when you’re in a hurry.
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer
Today, content marketing is the cornerstone of SEO and this tool allows you to easily find keywords and key phrases to include in your content, helping you to rank better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
Ahrefs Site Explorer is a handy online tool for analyzing websites and improving SEO positioning, and in case your job is writing web content, this tool helps you grow your customer’s business. Particularly, it will help you get:
- Organic Traffic Research. Find out why your competitors rank highly and which pages receive the most organic traffic from search engines.
- Link Checker. It will constantly check for broken links, both internal and external, before they have a negative impact on your SEO.
- Paid Traffic Research. Find out if your competitors are doing paid search engine advertising.
Consequently, knowing the tools other writers use to get a good ranking will help you create similar content and increase the relevance of your writing. But, remember that if your content offers a lot of value, by solving problems and doubts, training, or entertaining readers; it will end up being linked naturally anyway.
4. CoSchedule Headline Studio
CoSchedule Headline Studio offer checks your headlines and gives them a score by analyzing word balance, capitalization, clarity, skimmability, reading grade level, and the type of emotion it would convey to your audience. In fact, it will tell you how many common, unusual, powerful, and emotional words are in your headline. Also, it will show you how your headline will look on Google with some tips for improving it.
Actually, if you spend your time writing powerful blog posts, why not write a killer headline too? This headline analyzer combines several metrics to increase your social shares, SEO value, and traffic. You just have to type your headline and click “Analyze Now”, and the tool will give you a report. Specifically, it will:
- Help you add emotional value and rank better in search engines.
- Rate your headlines according to their emotional value to determine if they are potentially engaging. Emotional headlines drive more interactions.
- Find the best length for your headlines when using them for search engines, email subject lines, and social networks.
Every time you’re going to publish an article or write an advertisement, you could check the suggestions of this tool. Improving SEO and the effectiveness of your headlines can be the difference between creating content that no one reads and having an article with thousands of views.
5. Streak
How much time do you spend checking your email each day? And specifically sending and answering emails from clients, especially if you work remotely? A lot, right? This is why it’s crucial to get even more productivity from Gmail.
Streak is a Gmail extension that allows you to track sent messages, get a notification when the recipient opens your emails, schedule emails to be sent at a later date, create snippets, and add shortcuts. So, these automated actions will give you more freedom in your day, while allowing you to maintain communication with your clients.
If you love to organize, store or search, Streak also lets you:
- Schedule mailings. If you forget to send messages during the day because you’re busy, with Streak you can use the scheduling tool and send your email whenever you want.
- Create your CRM. Streak transforms Gmail into a humble CRM from which you can centrally manage all your clients’ information. It groups your emails in different “boxes”, and in a single glance, you’ll know the commercial status of a certain contact: if it has accepted your budget, if it is in the process of negotiation, or if it is a closed sale.
- Use automated templates. To save time, Streak allows you to create templates from those texts that you are tired of writing. This way, when you open the window to send an email, you only have to select the template you need and enter the recipient.
- Track the emails you send. When you send an email with Streak and activate the tracking, the application will alert you if the recipient has read it or not. It also informs you of the location, the device they have accessed it with, and the number of times they have looked at it.
In summary, for keeping up with your clients as a freelance writer or writing agency, this marketing tool is pure gold.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a digital tool to design, send, and calculate the impact of an email marketing campaign.
In fact, for copywriters, it is essential to have a tool like Mailchimp that will save you time and increase your reach. And the best thing about it is that you’ll see the results and the persuasiveness of your writing quickly because it gives you statistics about your campaign such as open rates or how many subscribers left your newsletters.
And you can try Mailchimp for free. Its free version allows you to register 2,000 recipients and send up to 12,000 messages per month, plenty for a business in its early stages.
But if its free version isn’t enough for your needs, you can use the paid version, which allows you to register more users (starting at 50,000 contacts) and send more emails per month. So, Mailchimp would be a great investment for writers who want to boost their email marketing capabilities. Or you can try a Mailchimp alternative like Moosend.
7. Feedly
Feedly is a great tool for subscribing to news from leading blogs. You can search for a specific blog or topic to subscribe to or organize your feed to find what you need. You can also set alerts to know when someone mentions the name of your blog or brand anywhere on the internet.
If you’re wondering where you’re going to get your next writing idea, follow as many blogs as you can on your chosen topic and gather all the information in just one place… and with the millions of blogs available, it’s unlikely to fall short of ideas.
8. Canva
Canva is a great online tool that helps you create eye-catching visual elements such as images for blogs, presentations, Instagram and Facebook ads, book covers, resumes, letters, and much more.
With Canva even “non-designers” can create good designs. It has a lot of free templates in an intuitive interface that lets you mix visual elements and text.
Being able to customize ready-made templates makes Canva an essential tool for writers, bloggers, and small business owners. In fact, many writers around the world use Canva to add personalized images to their writing and increase interest in their readers – pretty important when the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.
9. Google Trends
There’s no point in writing something good if no one reads it. So, before starting your writing, use Google Trends to ensure you’ve picked a hot topic.
But Google Trends does more than just tell you the popularity of certain topics. You can find out the search trends of users, detect the seasonality of certain topics, carry out market studies by geographical areas, find new keywords and see their evolution, etc. And by knowing how many times a particular topic was “googled”, you can discard or keep a subject to capture a bigger audience.
10. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free keyword combination tool, which makes it essential for SEM or SEO campaigns. The platform is capable of quickly suggesting various keyword combinations according to the keyword you entered.
As a result, Ubersuggest has become a powerful tool that allows you to:
- Get an overview of the keyword you’re looking for: volume, temporality, traffic, and cost.
- See keyword suggestions that you can incorporate into your SEO or SEM strategy.
- Create long-tail keywords.
- Perform analysis of SERPs and competition.
- Know the difficulty of positioning a keyword, as well as its cost.
- Export keywords in a CSV or copy them to the clipboard.
As a writer, you’ll know the keywords of each topic before planning your publication. This means you can position your articles or blog posts in Google searches knowing that thousands of readers will benefit from your content.
Reach a Larger Audience with These Marketing Tools for Freelance Writers
Tools like Google Trends and Canva are well-known in the world of marketing. But for freelance writers, too, it’s fundamental to use marketing tools to develop your business.
Even using just a couple of these tools will give you the opportunity to reach a much larger audience with your writing. Most marketing tools for freelance writers are free or have free trials, so explore each of them a little bit before deciding which ones you’ll integrate into your day-to-day processes.
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