60+ Awesome Tools to Develop Super Awesome Contents

  SEO   18 Comments

 

In order to be successful in content marketing you need to develop high quality contents. High quality contents are not only very useful and unique but are also visually appealing.  To develop such contents you need tools. The tools which you can use or your content developers can use with ease and with minimum budget.  Following is a list of tools i have curated over years.  Through these tools you can create every possible type of content from graphics, illustrations, slide show to applications and videos.

Note: For a list of SEO Tools, check out the SEO Toolbox and Link  Building Toolbox

 

Content Ideas/Research Tools

  1. 30 resources to find the data you need
  2. Archive - rebuild contents which no longer exist on the web.
  3. Archive-it  - web archiving services for libraries.
  4. Barners and Nobels Auto Suggest - get an idea of what people like to read/buy
  5. Boing Boing
  6. Buzz Feed
  7. Clip Blast- allows you to find professional video on topics discussed by news stations, newspapers, podcasting, and commercials. Top sources include CNN, ESPN, E, Sundance, BBC etc
  8. Common Craft - It is a large library of educational videos and presentations.
  9. Creative Common Search - tool to find contents you can use for commercial purpose.
  10. Delicious
  11. Digg
  12. DocJax - Search for free e-books and other documents.
  13. Flickr Advanced Search - tool to find free images (Creative Commons licensed images) for your contents.
  14. Get free images for your website
  15. Google Public Data
  16. Google Advanced Book Search -  can help you find entire books published online that might be available to download via PDF (when in the public domain).
  17. Google Advanced Image Search - another tool to find free images (Creative Commons licensed images) for your contents.
  18. Google Scholar Advanced Search - tool to find articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions or other information provided by academic publishers, professional societies and university.
  19. Listverse
  20. Scribd- great tool to find content ideas/topics
  21. Slideshare - another great tool to find content ideas and topics
  22. TechRepublic - It is the largest directory of free technical IT white papers, web casts and case studies.
  23. Top Tenz
  24. Video Search - video search directory.
  25. World Government Data
  26. Zanran - a search engine which looks for articles related to data and statistics

 

Content Development Tools

  1. 2000 free Photoshop brushes
  2. Booklet - a jQuery plugin for displaying images and more in a book format with a turning page effect.
  3. CSS3 Generator, CSS 3.0 Maker - tools to generate CSS Code.
  4. CSS Text Wrapper - generates HTML/CSS code to wrap contents to any shape.
  5. CSS Type Set - hands-on typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their web content.
  6. Devdude - Generates CSS based buttons and text fields.
  7. Dipity - tool to create and share visualizing compelling free timelines online.
  8. Flickr - website to find and use free images.
  9. Font Gallery - download fonts for free.
  10. jQuery Letterings - This awesome little jQuery plugin creates eye catching fonts, typical called web typography!
  11. jQuery Scroll Slider - grab someones attention when they are reaching the end of a web page, essentially to keep them from closing it.
  12. HTML and CSS Table Border Style Wizard - Use this wizard to experiment with table border styles and generate style source code.
  13. Infogram App - free tool to create charts
  14. Listamatic - take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options
  15. Mappet - Image map generator
  16. Note Pad Plus Plus - best programming text editor for windows.
  17. Online Word to PDF Converter
  18. PasteHTML - tool to test HTML, CSS and Javascript Online
  19. Postable - This tool let you print HTML code on a web page.
  20. Quipol - free tool to create and embed visually appealing poll.
  21. SEOGadget Content Strategy Generator Tool
  22. Shutter Stock - you can purchase images from here. Buy monthly subscription and download up to 25 images/day.
  23. Slide Deck - Free Slide Show Software
  24. Snipt - tool to find code snippets which you can embed to enhance functionality of a web page.
  25. Speech Pad - This tool is used to record, transcribe and share an audio.
  26. Storify- tool used to create social stories. like create a story from twitter stream.
  27. Storybird - tool to create stories from images
  28. ToonDo - Free tool to create your own cartoons and comics strips.
  29. Top 10 List
  30. Ultimate collection of photoshop Custom shapes
  31. Wikimedia Commons has over 12 million files in their database of freely usable images, sound bites, and videos. Use the search box or browse by categories for different types of media.
  32. WhatTheFont - Seen a font in use and want to know what it is

 

Major Content Creation Service Provider

  1. 99Designs.com- For outsourcing graphics work (logo design, web design, icon design, word-press design)
  2. Amazon Mechanical Turk
  3. Crowd Content - provides content development services
  4. Elance
  5. Leveraging Mechanical Turk, oDesk, ELance & Craigslist for SEO
  6. Odesk.com - For outsourcing any type of work (web development, application development etc)
  7. People Per Hour
  8. RentACoder - Get a coder to develop an application for your website.
  9. Servio - provides content development service (content creation, product description)
  10. Student Gems - Use freelance graduates and students for one-off jobs & projects
  11. Text Broker - provides content development service at cheap price.

 

This post is very much a work in progress. If you know more cool tools then please share in the comment below.

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Himanshu Sharma About the Author: is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.

My business thrives on referrals, so I really appreciate recommendations to people who would benefit from my help. Please feel free to endorse/forward my LinkedIn Profile to your clients, colleagues, friends and others you feel would benefit from SEO, PPC or Web Analytics.

 

 

  • http://www.sepouk.co.uk/ Jim Watson – SEPo

    Awesome List Himanshu :)

    • http://www.seotakeaways.com/ Himanshu

      Thanks Jim.

  • http://www.gerardrathenau.nl Gerard Rathenau

    What do you think of Usabilla to test the visual appealing of your content?

    • http://www.seotakeaways.com/ Himanshu

      not sure about this tool.

  • http://www.annexcore.com Anand

    Definitely saving the content ideas portion into my personal list!

  • http://www.gerardrathenau.nl Gerard Rathenau

    Definetely worth testing with tools like Usabilla and Usabilityhub!

  • http://www.crowdcontent.com Clayton

    Himanshu — awesome list of resources. Thanks for putting it together and listing Crowdcontent!

    Full disclosure: I am the CEO and Founder at Crowdcontent. We focus on creating quality content at low prices. If anyone wants more info about how we can provide you with high quality, fresh content on a regular basis, feel free to contact me, or even post questions here and I will do my best to answer them.

    Thanks.

  • http://www.seoservicesgroup.com/ Chris Devlin

    Really a Huge list Himanshu, I have checked some sites only. Need to check all the remaining sites. Hope these tools will helps to create quality content.

  • http://sean.co sean

    hey can I add this list to my membership website?? ill link to this of course

    • http://www.seotakeaways.com/ Himanshu

      Ok

  • http://www.xcellentmedia.co.za Elizabeth Joss

    Absolutely love this list Himanshu! Very inspiring! Thanks for this.

  • http://www.hubspot.com/jonmehlman Jon Mehlman

    Stupendous list Himanshu, and thanks!

    Another content provider many of our customers are having success with is Zerys.

  • http://www.fininfocom.com Fininfocom

    It’s really awesome post. Thanks Himanshu. I found all the information in one place. Let me know another tools like SEO Content rewriting also.

    • http://twitter.com/RankWatch RankWatch

      pretty good information and description of different tools for the developers and site owners. Implementation could certainly add value to your site optimization and creation, but there should be a cap as to how much and what tools are to be used. Sometimes being too-dependent on the tools could lead you to lose out the plot of your site and subsequently lower SEO and traffic generation.

  • Alethea

    I have been surfing online more than three hours these days, yet I by no means discovered
    any attention-grabbing article like yours. It is lovely value enough for me.

    Personally, if all site owners and bloggers made excellent content as you
    probably did, the net will likely be a lot more useful than ever before.

  • http://crukz.com Crukz

    really awesome post .A complete reference to writing the quality content. These resources can make a quality output.

  • Philip

    Seriously, Himanshu…

    I am always impressed by the content you put out – even though I expect super stuff from you every time I visit, I’m still blown away. This post is no different! Thank You!

    I do have a request for one tool that you missed…

    Can you add to the list a tool that will automatically research, outline, write, and post to our blogs – content as good as the stuff you put out on a regular basis? :-) (Just kidding of course).

    • seohimanshu

      Glad you like the post. I wish there was such tool.