As a content writer, you aim to publish the best articles for your audience. However, unless you’re a super experienced copywriter, you may realize that you need some extra help. Today there are some amazing content writing tools that will make your writing easier and save you valuable time.
These tools are meant to help you get organized, improve your writing, get new ideas for your next article, increase readability, and much more. To simplify your work and to produce unique content, we want to talk about 20 of the best tools to improve your content writing.
So let’s get into it!
20 of the Best Tools to Improve Your Content Writing
The Basics
Google Docs
Of all the online writing platforms, this free tool is one of our favorites. It is, in our opinion, the most user-friendly and most versatile. Google Docs offers numerous templates and a straightforward interface, which makes it easy and fast to compose a wide variety of content.
Additionally, Google Docs makes it a breeze to share documents with multiple users for collaborative efforts.
Now, if the formality of an open Word document fills you with dread, then Calmly is the tool for you. This is a distraction-free jotter pad. All you’ll see is a big white screen ready for you to write. There’s no tabs, and no formatting choices. Just a space for you to focus on the words.
This is a must-have regardless of the particular content that you write. We use this while writing anything from emails to our content. Believe us, this blog was proofread with Grammarly.
This tool will make your writing effective and precise on whichever platform you choose.
Grammarly will help you with grammar (obviously), spellings, punctuation, and eliminates any writing errors. It also helps to show you the tone of your article.
If you want to be uber professional, there’s a paid version that you can subscribe to. However, there is also a simple and free chrome extension version available that is just as good.
Word Counter
If you’re constantly wondering if you’re under or over your word limit, may we suggest a simple word counter? Now, we know that this tool is built into most word documents. In the case that your writing tool doesn’t come with a word counter, this is an excellent outside source to use. Simply paste in your content to find out exactly how many words you have.
Title Case Converter
Have you ever written a title only to be uncertain about which words are capitalized? You’re not alone, and the Title Case Converter is here for you. It is a basic tool that is used to capitalize or lowercase each word you write in your title. It offers a variety of different styles.
Just in case you forgot: Major words like — nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs are capitalized and minor words like — coordinating conjunction and prepositions are lowercase.
Thesaurus
We said that these were just the basics, didn’t we? Now, we hate to even have to bring this up, but the thesaurus is one of the most underused (and forgotten) tools out there. What does it do? Well, my friend, the thesaurus is used to make your writing interesting- no offense.
Perhaps you’re maybe using the same word repetitively, or there’s a better way of communicating what you’re trying to say. The thesaurus is your best friend in this case. It will even show antonyms of your word. It’s a wonderful tool to make your writing more appealing… or engaging, rather.
Some Hidden Gems
Have you ever wondered what your community is talking about? We certainly have – but maybe we’re just nosy. Anywho, Answer the Public will tell you all about what people are searching for on the web. This service is basically a tool that will suggest you autocomplete Google searches based on your keyword in an image form.
This can be a jackpot for content, as it gives ideas based on what questions people are asking. All you have to do is put a specific keyword, for instance “social media”, and you will get hundreds of results for your next article. Pretty cool, huh?
Now, the Hemingway editor is not like Grammarly. It’s something that will help you with the readability.
This tool will make your writing bold and polished. The Hemingway editor has two simple modes that are writing and editing mode. The editing mode shows you readability level, length, estimated reading time, and it highlights problems based on your work. For example:
- Blue highlights will tell you to eliminate adverbs if you have used more than needed.
- Green highlights a passive voice.
- Purple highlights will show you that you should replace the complex word with a simpler alternative.
- Yellow highlights a sentence that is difficult to read.
- Red highlights a very difficult sentence to read, which you should either split, edit, or remove completely.
Has anyone ever told you to “just write”? It’s one of the most common pieces of advice for those who struggle with writer’s block. 750 Words is a wonderful tool that will let you create a new habit of writing every day. It will even give you points and analyze the feelings and mindset of your writing. You can leave your inhibitions behind, as it is a completely private space so you can write anything that comes into your head.
It’s basically a free writing tool that can be helpful in kick-starting and encouraging your writing journey.
When You’re Stuck…
Is the well a little dry? Not to worry. There are tools that can help you! Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator is just one that we love.
All you have to do is enter nouns, and it will suggest 5 topic ideas. We know that this isn’t a lot of ideas, but it is a good starting point.
We know that it’s tempting to copy and paste from somewhere else- especially if you’re feeling rather uninspired at the moment. Copyscape is an excellent plagiarism tool to double check your work, and detect whether the same text already appears on the web. It can easily identify the websites that have copied your content. All you have to do is paste your link. Moral of the story, always try to be honest and original!
It’s easy to also fall into the trap of writing about things that are considered “cliche”. A wonderful tool called the Cliche Finder will improve your writing by simply highlighting cliches in your writing. Essentially, it eliminates words, phrases, and expressions that are overused.
To Make Writing More Enjoyable
We know it’s difficult to keep the focus going sometimes- especially when it comes to writing. Focus keeper helps you with your productivity. Simply pick a task and set the timer on and work on it until the timer ends. It even comes with a customized interface and it shows your progress in the form of a chart.
On that note, you work hard and need a break. Pomodoros are important to have. Writing timers like TomatoTimer allow teams to break writing time down into twenty-five minutes of strict active writing, then interspersed with five to ten-minute breaks.
Why do we stress taking a break? Well, breaks are crucial in helping to prevent a wide array of health issues, such as burnout and carpal tunnel syndrome. Overall this tool promotes a healthier, more productive work ethic.
To make your writing a little more enjoyable (and focused), some soft ambient and instrumental music may help you. This is a free web-based tool that allows you to create custom tracks to get into the flow of writing more easily.
A Bit More Technical
Don’t underestimate the importance of the headline. Sometimes it impacts whether or not your content gets read at all. Coschedule Headline Analyzer is an awesome tool that will help you to write better headlines.
It works by scoring your headlines based on the words you use. It even shows the history of previous headlines so that you can improve it. If you’ve ever had an issue with headlines when it comes to SEO improvement, this tool even shows common, uncommon, powerful and emotional words to use.
Oh, SEO. You know about it. You worry about it. You want it to be perfect. In fact, that’s probably partially why you’re writing content in the first place- to enhance your SEO, right? Great. You’re off to a good start. But how do you write great SEO content? Well, for starters, there are certain tools that can help you.
Surfer’s Content Editor is one of the best content writing tools out there. This interactive editor keeps an eye on your content’s keyword density, headlines, word count, and readability as you write it.
It can easily inspect 500+ data points and weigh your content against your competition. This way, you can create content that outranks anyone.
Just to sweeten the pot, you don’t need to switch windows or copy-paste your content to use it. You can simply integrate it with Google Docs and WordPress
In this day and age, people’s attention spans are rather short. Content now is all about engagement and concentration. Give your readers a heads up of how long your blog/article is to read with the Read-o-Meter.
Finally, if you really want to keep tabs on how well your content is performing, a tool like BuzzSumo allows you to measure the success of content on a specific domain. This also discovers the top-performing content already out there so you can identify competition and even influencers to connect with.
To Conclude
Essentially, writing tools aren’t there to do all the hard work for you. But they are there to help make things smoother so that you can focus on exactly what you want to say rather than getting distracted and adding to the stress of what (let’s face it) can already be a pretty fast-paced day job.
By using these top free content writing tools you will find you start to write better, faster.
And if you still need a hand with your content writing, Dalex Design Group is here to help you. Learn more at www.Dalexdesigngroup.com
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