The Best Content Marketing Tools and Resources (Part I)

If you are a content marketer at an expansion-stage company, you’re often a one-man show. It can be a lonely position if you don’t feel like you have the support you need to get the job done. Fortunately, there are a ton of content marketing tools and resources out there that you can leverage to not only gain access to a community of peers, but also learn how to do your job better while getting new ideas and inspiration.
In this new blog series, I’m going to be currating what I consider to be the best resources online to help you do your job better. I consult and/or use each of the websites, tools, and blogs listed below on a regular basis to make my job easier. I hope that you will find them equally helpful and, at a minimum, will consider checking them all out.

Let’s Start with the Basics: 5 Content Marketing Tools and Resources You Can’t Miss

The Content Marketing Institute is the granddaddy of content marketing resources. It’s got a great community blog where a variety of noteworthy contributors regularly submit informative posts on all aspects content marketing. What I like most about this site, however, are some of the really valuable, proprietary research reports it makes available, such as the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Research Report. If you need help make a compelling case to your boss about why content marketing is so important, reports like these give you the industry data to back up your argument.
HubSpot provides a seemingly endless supply of great free content marketing resources. I’m a big fan of their eBooks, which break down various aspects of content creation, distribution, and promotion into easy to understand digestible bites. Their Marketing Grader tool is also worth a look. Simply enter your company’s website and it spits out a custom assessment that analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of your online marketing efforts and provides actionable suggestions to improve it. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

SEOmoz Pro is a complete set of software, tools, and resources that help you maximize your search engine optimization. While the tool itself is great and hugely helpful — we literally use this every day — I also like all of the other free resources that SEOmoz provides, including its Beginner’s Guide to SEO (a must-read for anyone new to SEO) as well as a variety of how-to videos and webinars. Plus, SEOmoz has a great online community for all of your search needs.
Copyblogger is another personal favorite. It not only has a great blog, but also a number of really useful tutorials ranging in topics from copywriting 101 to keyword research, and e-mail marketing.
OpenView also has some really great resources. I know that may come across as disingenuous (I do work for OpenView after all), but it’s true. Between this blog, where numerous people have contributed great posts on content marketing to the OpenView Labs site, which regularly features an array of articles, podcasts, and videos from leading influencers such as Joe Pulizzi, Ann Handley, and Jay Baer, we offer some really practical how-to resources. Later this year, for example, we will be publishing an eBook on how to build a content factory.

I’ve only scratched the surface here. Stay tuned for many more of my favorite tools and resources in next week’s post. In the meantime, how about sharing what some of your favorites are?