​Professional development is essential in every field, but it’s especially beneficial in freelance writing work. After all, this industry is highly competitive, and you must prove to clients that your skills are one-of-a-kind. To hone your craft further, consider the following tips.

Take Classes About Freelance Writing Work

What’s the best way to learn? Taking a class! The digital age has made it easier than ever for people to freelance, and various courses have emerged to help them. You can find a class to strengthen specific skills or give you the basics if you’re breaking into the industry. 

Take a Copywriting Course

Copywriting is much different from other types of professional writing, and best practices are constantly shifting with the ever-changing world of the internet. A course can help you control your tone and improve grammar and spelling.

Learn How To Market Yourself

A significant part of freelance writing work is marketing yourself to potential clients. If you want to expand your client list, consider taking a seminar on practical marketing tools for the solo entrepreneur.

Develop Your Proofreading Skills

Every writer will tell you that no first draft is perfect. You must proofread every article and use revisions to polish each one to a high shine. Of course, no one is born a top-notch proofreader — you have to practice, as with any skill.

Study AP Style

AP Stylebook is the standard for online webpages and articles, so every copywriter should be familiar with it. However, it’s very different from the styles used in schools and can take some getting used to. To make things more complicated, the Associated Press releases yearly updates, so freelancers must stay on top of the most recent style guide.

Read, Read, Read

Reading is just as essential to freelance writing work as putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards). Take time to study popular articles and genre fiction. All writing has something to offer the avid reader, so don’t be afraid to consume scientific papers, news blogs and romance novels.

Write Guest Blog Posts

Are you getting bored with your current freelance digs? If so, you can spice things up with guest blog posts. These one-and-done projects let you flex your creative muscles and bring in extra cash. Of course, you can’t wait for these opportunities to fall into your lap — you must seek them out.

Join Job Boards

Job boards are an excellent resource for freelance writing work since they allow you to peruse hundreds of jobs in one place. Companies small and large post opportunities for copywriting, guest spots and more.

Talk To Colleagues

Does a friend or coworker keep a blog? Ask if you can write a guest post while they take a week off! Many writers keep blogs, so it doesn’t hurt to ask around.

Contact Editors

If you want to pursue freelance writing work, you have to be bold. Many online publications accept guest blogs, and pitching an idea is the only way to get on board. Emailing editors you don’t know can be intimidating, but think of it this way: The worst thing they can do is say no.

Start Your Own Blog

If you want to drum up business while experimenting with different topics, a blog is a perfect place to start. Launching a blog is incredibly easy with sites such as WordPress and Squarespace, and you’ll find opportunities to develop skills your freelancing work may neglect.

Write About Something You Love

Copywriting means adhering to your clients’ preferences and topics. While you may find most of them interesting, you probably don’t love every piece. Starting your own blog means you get to pick the subject matter, so you can write exclusively about what interests you. Doing so can help you break free of SEO ruts and experiment with new voices and rhetorical devices.

Post Regularly

Post on your blog regularly to build momentum for your freelance writing work. Search engine algorithms reward regularity, and it helps you keep a following. It’s also an excellent way to practice discipline, which freelancers need in abundance.

Join a Content Creation Company That Offers Freelance Writing Work

Finally, consider working with a content creation company such as BKA Content. These enterprises connect you with other freelancers who can teach you a thing or two, and most offer additional writing and editing training for those interested. The key is finding a company invested in your professional and creative growth.

When considering a content creation company for freelance work, look at the website. Does it provide helpful information for developing writers? If so, that’s a good sign the business values ongoing professional learning.

What are your tricks and tips for elevating your freelance writing work? Let us know in the comments below. If you’re interested in more freelance content creation opportunities, check out BKA Content today.

​Although content marketing has become standard practice for businesses big and small, not everyone with a content strategy feels as though their program is actually effective. According to one of Content Marketing Institute’s surveys, only 30 percent felt they were effective and had the right content marketing tools.

Some of the ways to improve efficacy include organization, a documented plan, understanding the program and frequent communication among team members. And sometimes, the best way to improve the effectiveness of a campaign is to know and become familiar with some of the best content marketing tools in the industry.

These tools, which most of them are completely free, are designed to help marketers organize and accomplish their content marketing goals. If you aren’t using these tools, you may be missing out on today’s top marketing strategies, helpful shortcuts and a lot of saved time.

 

What Are the Best Content Marketing Tools?

Whether you have a team of one or a team of 50, there are several paid and free content writing tools available online or through downloadable apps that make your job easier and reduce wasted time and money.

These are specific to content marketers and can make your job a lot easier. The following is a list of some of the best digital marketing tools currently available.

 

1. Grammarly

Grammarly is a content marketer’s best friend. This program is a grammar and spelling checker that catches much more than the spellchecker that comes standard with your word processing software.

You simply cut and paste your text into the online app to run a check. There is also a free browser extension for use on any web page, or you can download the app to use on both a PC and MAC. For those who have a PC, you also have the choice to integrate the app into Microsoft Word for editing as you write. This makes it so you have editing help no matter where you are typing.

For a fee, there is a premium version of this content writing tool that finds even more grammar mistakes, including problems with your sentence structure or word choice. It also has a plagiarism checker to ensure that you write clean, original copy.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

As a content marketer, you have a lot of content you are writing, reviewing or optimizing. Because quality content is so vital to any content writing strategy, you need all the editing help you can get. This app saves time on editing, and can also catch things that are hard to notice. Of course, make sure to use your best judgment when looking at Grammarly’s suggestions. Sometimes they may not be 100% accurate, and that’s up to you to determine.

 

2. Hemingway Editor

Most people skim-read blogs, so it is best to keep most of your content simple and easy to read. That is where the Hemingway editor comes into play. Rather than just checking your grammar and spelling, this content writing tool uses five different highlight colors to help you spot certain aspects of your writing that can be tightened, including overly complex sentences, passive voice and difficult words.

A big problem with written content is the readability of any given text. Readability is determined by the length of sentences, difficulty of vocabulary and the flow of phrases. When proofreading any content you write, you may notice some passages that are difficult to read, but you may not know how to fix them. Hemingway Editor is a great way to spot the problem areas of your content and learn why they aren’t working. With a few tweaks, you can fix any sentence and increase the readability of your content.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Part of creating quality content isn’t just the spelling errors or personality of your piece, it’s also the readability. This is a great way to quickly fix awkward sentences and check the overall difficulty of the content. As a marketer, this content marketing tool saves a lot of time on fixing content.

Also, it’s important to have quality content that your audience can understand. In general, your content should be easily readable by someone in the 6^th or 7^th grade. If you are writing an ebook or case study, the grade level will be higher. Hemingway editor can show you what grade level your reading is at, and you can lower or raise that reading level based on your needs.

 

3. Copyscape

Duplicate content negatively hurts your digital marketing campaign. Rather than risking that your content is 100 percent original, use CopyScape to make sure. This is a highly beneficial content marketing tool if your content creators often use other websites for resources when developing their content, which increases the chance for accidental plagiarism.

For free, you can compare your content with one other piece. There are also paid-for premium options that allow you to search the entire internet to find potential duplicate content. If you are producing a lot of content, using the premium version of this tool is likely worth it.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Google rankings are very important to content marketing strategies. Duplicate content can tank your rankings for an article, and may even affect your entire website. If you produce and publish content more than once a week, this tool is a great asset. If you work with an SEO copywriting agency, ask them if they use it in their editing process.

 

4. BuzzSumo

At first, it seems easy to come up with ideas for your blog posts and other components of your content marketing campaign. As time goes by, the well of ideas starts to dry up, leaving you at a loss.

Instead of desperately searching the bottom of the barrel of you and your team’s ideas, try Buzzsumo. This digital marketing tool allows you to search for the most talked about and shared topics on a particular subject to discover new topics. It also helps you avoid topics that are either too popular or not popular enough.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

If you are doing multiple things as part of your content marketing strategy, you likely don’t have time to sit down and think of a bunch of fresh topics to write about. Besides, some of those ideas might not fly. Go with a website that finds hot topics for you, thus increasing the chance of content getting viewed by readers.

 

5. Trendspottr

Another great content marketing tool to help you develop ideas for content is Trendspotter. With this marketing app, you discover emerging trends for a leg up on the competition. You have the chance to write content before the internet becomes oversaturated with posts about a particular topic. It also informs you of the emotions associated with the particular topic to help you determine whether or not it would be beneficial to cover it in your content development strategy.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Emerging trends are powerful, especially if you are one of the first to talk about them. If your strategies deal with a lot of attention-getter blog posts, this marketing tool is a must-have. It also helps you determine which topics would get the best reactions from customers and therefore helps you gauge whether or not certain topics will benefit your business.

 

6. Easel.ly

Infographics have become an increasingly popular content form for a variety of reasons, including the ability to easily go viral. Easel.ly is here to help you build infographics without having to pay the high cost of a graphic designer. To use this infographic content marketing tool, choose the template that works best, add the information you have found, and create your infographic to share across your social media platforms.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Digital marketers know that content is only one piece of the puzzle. Media is very important, especially in blog posts and website pages. Infographics are a great combination of both words and pictures, so they are much more visually appealing. They also can lead to more traffic and go viral, if the information you include is valuable.

 

7. Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer

The titles of your blog posts have significant power. A boring headline leads to little organic traffic, while a powerful one does the opposite. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer content writing tool helps you create the strongest titles to improve the number of people who click to read the post. To use the app, enter your headline and click to analyze it. The results inform you of the quality of your headline, including how it will affect organic traffic.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Your headlines are the hooks that catch the fish. Boring headlines will not do you any good, so using a digital marketing tool such as this can help you gauge the success of any headline you create.

 

8. Outbrain

Content marketing tools are not just about helping you to create the content; it is equally important to find some that make it easier to share the content. Outbrain is a paid-for service that helps you to publish your content on popular sites to bring in additional readers. You select your published articles on the Outbrain dashboard, then the Outbrain app lists your article as a related post under an article on a popular site. Readers see your post and click on it, finding their way to your site.

Popular sites that incorporate Outbrain articles include Time, CNN, People and ESPN.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

If you are looking for more ways to improve traffic on your website, Outbrain can help you find interested readers. Of course, you’ll want to make sure your content is readable and has a great headline (good thing there are a few content writing tools that can help you with both). You may also want to include a call to action on the blog posts you choose to put on the Outbrain dashboard.

 

9. Buffer

Social media is an important place for sharing your posts to attract more readers. Instead of switching from Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn to post to your accounts, Buffer allows you to do it from one place. You schedule a post and select which social media platform to use. The basic social media content marketing tool is free, and there are additional services at a cost.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

Because social media is so important, it never hurts to have a little help when sharing your blog posts on these platforms. Buffer can cut the time of publishing down to minutes. If you have a lot of blog posts and a lot of social media accounts, this digital marketing tool may be the best option for you.

 

10. Hootsuite

If you want to do more than just post across several social media accounts in one setting, then Hootsuite might be the right content marketing tool for you. Like Buffer, it allows you to schedule posts and messages across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. Within Hootsuite, you also have the ability to track mentions, analyze the traffic to your social media accounts and much more.

There is a free version as well as several paid-for plans from which to choose based on your needs.

 

Why Use This Content Marketing Tool?

In reality, social media marketing should be an important part of your marketing strategy. This app was designed to make a marketer’s life easier.

 

What Content Marketing Tools Do You Use?

These are just a few of the best content marketing tools available to improve your campaign. There are many other digital marketing tools that you can find that help in all aspects of your content marketing, from planning your content strategy all the way to creating, distributing and analyzing it. It is highly beneficial to utilize the apps that will strengthen areas where you might be weak and reduce the overall time you spend on your program for a more effective content marketing program.

What are some other great content marketing tools that you use? Which ones are the best? Let us know in the comments below!

Every good SEO knows that keyword research is an essential part of coming up with relevant and competitive topics for creating great content.

However, not all keyword research tools or methods are created equal. Some methods can point you in the right direction but lack the deep analytics that SEO’s can really benefit from.

SEMrush is one of the most well-known keyword research platforms in the industry. The world’s leading companies such as Disney, Amazon, Ebay, and more choose SEMrush for their keyword research.

Good tools often come at a higher price, but we have great news! BKA Content has partnered with SEMrush to offer customers 20% off of their annual plans!

When you consider all of the features you get with SEMrush, it’s easy to see that 20% off is an incredible deal. Here are a few features that we like to highlight as they relate to content creation:

Analyze Your Competitor’s Keywords

SEMrush has an advertising research feature which gives you access to your competitor’s top performing keywords. Why is this helpful? It’s helpful because it can show you which words are worth going after based on how competitive they are.

Too often companies try going after keywords that are unattainable in their content. This feature helps you to zero in on keywords that are much more realistic to win.

 

Keyword Research

SEMrush allows you greater insight into the keywords that you want to target and even keywords that you haven’t thought of targeting. The keyword research dashboard shows you CPC, volume, the number of results, trend, and ad copy information for each queried term.

The dashboard will also show you which of the biggest players on the web are targeting and using each keyword, which can be extremely helpful in deciding if it’s a keyword worth targeting in your content.

Our favorite feature is the ability to gather related keywords and phrase matches. The related words are ranked by Bing and Google as well as providing you with a list of different synonyms and variations relevant to the queried keyword to help you grow your keyword pool. These new ideas also help you to better know how to use keywords in your content.

 

Knowledge is Power

The amount of information that SEMrush puts together is pretty impressive. Don’t believe me? Put your domain into the box below to see just how powerful SEMrush is when it comes to data collecting and presentation.

Conclusion

If you are not using a keyword research tool, or if you are unhappy with your current keyword platform, BKA Content makes it easy to switch with our 20% discount on all SEMrush annual plans.

Using SEMrush can only improve your SEO efforts, so what are you waiting for?