- Hey guys, in this video we're gonna jump back into the
Blogger's Playbook and we're gonna rundown some of our
absolute favourite tools that make the bloggin'
and content creation process easier.
(pull whistle sound)
- Here's an interesting Andrew and Pete fact,
we've published our first blog on January the 8th, 2013.
- Does that class as interesting?
- It was created with title The 2013 Business Book Challenge
And it was horrendously terrible blog post.
- We thought people would be interested in the fact that we
were gonna read a lot of business books that year.
They weren't.
- Fast forward to now where we're approaching up to 600
pieces of content, including our blogs, words, and our
atomic content too.
And we've learned a thing or two, or 500 things,
about producing content better and quicker.
- So today we're gonna run through some of our favourite
tools that we use for our own content and our own blogging.
Some are free and some cost a bit of money,
but most of them speed up that content creation time.
And once implemented, actually using them
takes little to no time at all.
- And if this is your first time here, please do hit that
big read Subscribe button.
We create videos like this every week to
make marketing un-boring-ed.
- Oh yeah. - That's a word.
- Let's jump in!
- Starting with prewriting and research tools but before we
even put pen to paper or pixels to screen,
we wanna make sure that what we are actually creating
is being searched for.
Some businesses have the luxury of this not mattering
all that much but ours', we want to be found.
- So we use a mix of Google Keywords Planner
and Answer the Public dot com.
Which are both free tools that will give you keyword ideas
for you to write blogs all about.
We showed you how to Answer the Public not so long ago,
so click here to go check that out.
- We also couple those with a free Google Chrome plug-in
that we use call Keywords Everywhere.
Which roughly shows you how many searches that
topic is getting per month.
Now do not take this as gospel truth,
but do use that as a guide to make sure the keywords
that you're finding on the Google Keywords Planner or
on Answer the Public, actually have some popularity.
- Another cool tool that we use at this stage is the
Braintoss app, which is just a couple of quid
on the app store but you can also get it on Android as well.
What this does is allow us to capture ideas on the go.
So if at any moment during the day, if we have an idea
we'll Braintoss it.
- It basically emails yourself a note
that you can action later.
You can do a written note, images, and even voice notes
and integrate with Evernote and Trello too.
- The final tool that we use at this
Prewriting Stage is JotForm.
We use this for guest blogs, so rather than going back
and forth with email a tonne of times,
take out all the information we need, we'll send people to
a chat form link and they can just enter all
the information that we require for that guest blog.
And we're using the free version of that too.
- Next up we have our actual writing tools
and going back to that horrendous first blog,
it was horrendous because it was boring.
- Just because it is written word,
doesn't mean it should look boring either.
Back in the day, we created this video all about how to make
your blogs look sexy, so go check it out.
(laughs)
- The first is Google Docs and all of our ideas start here.
Even this video, we've freakin' love Google Docs.
It's basically Microsoft Word but online.
And we can both be editing the same document
at the same time and give access to whoever needs
access to that document too.
It's all stored online and it's saves as you go
and it's free and it's ad-free.
Google, we love you.
- Another cool tool we use is Rev.com.
Yes that's the tool that does video subtitles
for $1 a minute, but it also allows you to download
a transcript of your video.
So if struggle with writing or if you have
some video content already, you could just speak your blog
and get it transcribed by Rev.com.
It just takes a lot of titterating and tweaking
and you'll have your blog in no time, easy peasy.
- Lemon squeezy (laughs).
When you squeezing some lemons (laughs)
Squeezing some lemons.
- You're going to want to be including some images
in your blog too, so we could be using Photoshop or
Illustrator for this, both of which we have
but nine times out of 10, we are jumping into Canva
and creating something really easily.
And if we wanna add gifs into the blog,
we are jumping into Giphy.com
and we're either searching for a suitable gif
or using Giphy to create our own.
And again, we have another video on Giphy over there.
Pass Pete's head.
- Watch where your pointing that thing, Jesus Christ.
Also, if you wanna include Tweetables in your blog,
we love the tool that's free, clicktotweet.com.
We'll link to a blog below, it shows you exactly how to
set it all up and how it works.
But it's really easy and in a nutshell,
what it allows you to do is pre-populate a Tweet
and at the click of a button, people can Tweet that
pre-populated Tweet and share it with all of that audience.
Nice.
- Finally in this stage to make sure we have
all the SEO boxes ticked,
we are using the Yoast plug-in with Wordpress.
This is a really cool tool that tells us what we need to
work on from an SEO point of view to make sure the blog
is optimised and has a really nice red, amber, green
scoring system that even Pete can follow.
- Hey (mumbles).
- After we've pressed the pretty published button,
we got some tools to use to promote the damn thing.
- Starting with ConvertKit for email marketing
and ManyChat for Facebook Messenger.
Send your content to people who have opted in to receive it.
This is a really important step, and if you miss this step
then you deserve for your next cup of coffee to be cold.
- Yeah, we're that mean.
- And if you like cold coffee,
it's also going to taste of wee.
- We're also using social scheduling tools to promote
our content going forward.
Our favourite tool of the moment is SmarterPulseCal,
which is a mash up of Smarter Queue, agora pulse,
and ContentCal.
Our advise to you here is do not do this.
We just love them way too much to give any of them up.
Just choose one and make sure you use that to prepare
with your content going forward
and promote it more than once.
- And a cheeky bonus tool for you as well,
we use Disqus which is a free comments tool
that plugs right into Wordpress.
This allows people to log in, to leave a comment,
get notifications, they show some blogs
below the comments plug in, plug in (laughs)
- Plug in (laughs)
This allows people to log in and leave a comment,
it also shows them other blogs below the comments plug-in
and it does some other fancy stuff too.
- So if you have been paying attention,
you will now know that our toolbox includes
Google Keywords Planner, Answer the Public,
Keywords Everywhere, Braintoss, JotForm, Google Docs,
Rev, Canva, Giphy, clicktotweet, Yoast, ManyChat,
ConvertKit, Smarter Queue, agora pulse,
ContentCal, and Disqus.
Didn't edit that together at all.
- Whew. - No.
- Wow (mumbles).
- We're gonna link to all of those around this video
somewhere then we're also gonna link to some tutorials
that we have on some of these tools too.
So please do check them out, because they all rock.
- And if love this video and you want some more
marketing un-boring-ed, please do subscribe
and we'll love you forever and a day.
- We always want to add more tools to our toolbox too,
so if there's a tool that we haven't mentioned in this video
we wanna know your favourite ones that we can check out.
So, please let us know in the comments.
- He's been Andrew.
- He's been Pete.
- See you next time.
(electronic rock music)