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There’s a lot that goes into content marketing. As you probably know by now, it’s about much more than just creating a blog post, video, or infographic and hoping for the best. You also need to know who your audience is, and you need to optimize your content so that it will attract the largest audience possible. Fortunately, there are a variety of content marketing resources available to help you handle all the minutia involved. From templates to idea generators, take a look at a few of the best content marketing resources available.

Content Marketing Resources, Blogs & Ebooks

For those who are looking to hone their Content Marketing skills, reading about Content Marketing is the place to start. From ebooks to white papers, podcasts to webinars, content marketing resource libraries are your one-stop-shop to boost your industry acumen. Hubspot and Wishpond are the end-all-be-all when it comes to covering content marketing resources. But if you’re interested in learning about the intersection of content marketing with social media or influencer marketing, look no further than IZEA’s content marketing resources or Buffer’s blog.

Buyer Persona Templates

Knowing who your content addresses is one of the first steps toward creating content that resonates and is useful. Creating buyer personas is one way to get a better idea of who your audience members are. Personas are fictional people created using real-life data. The more detailed your buyer personas are, the better able you’ll be to speak to the needs and wants of your audience.

Buyer persona templates help to simplify the process of putting together a persona, as they ensure that you get the details you need to create an accurate composite sketch of your audience. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has a simple buyer persona template that asks you to think about the challenges, needs, and concerns of a buyer.

UpCloseandPersona is another buyer persona template, but it’s much more interactive and way more in-depth than the one from CMI. You work through the template step by step, putting in detailed information about your buyer on each page. The template requires you to put your email address and company information in at the end in order to actually get a copy of the persona you created.

Blog Topic Generators

One aspect of content marketing that often trips people up is coming up with ideas for content. Figuring out what to write about every day or week can be a tall order. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator helps to take some of the stress out of coming up with new ideas on a regular basis.

The tool is free and simple to use. You type three nouns into the boxes on the page, click the button, and the topic generator spits back five possible blog titles. For example, if you were to type in coffee, laptop, and chair, you might get titles such as “14 Common Misconceptions About Coffee” and “Why We Love Laptops (and You Should, Too!)”

The tool might not be perfect, but it can be a good starting point when you’re absolutely stumped for ideas.

Keyword Planners

Knowing which keywords to use in your content is an essential part of SEO. There are a few tools out there to help you plan keywords and figure out which ones are the most appropriate for your campaign. Although Google’s Keyword Planner is designed for use with AdWords, it can also be a helpful tool for organic search planning.

Wordtracker is a free tool that’s similar to Google’s Keyword Planner, but doesn’t require an AdWords account. It also lets you research YouTube and Amazon keywords.

Headline Analyzers

As this article from the Columbia School of Journalism notes, headlines are often written last and too quickly. That’s even though they are the most important part of a piece of content. According to the “New Yorker,” a headline tells you what to expect from an article, and can even alter your perception of what that is article about.

Getting the headline right is super important if you want your content to succeed. Luckily, you don’t have to take a shot in the dark when creating headlines.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps you craft eye-catching, attention-grabbing headlines that get readers to actually read your blog post or article.

To use the tool, you type in a headline idea. And example could be “5 Reasons Why Headlines Matter”. The analyzer will ask you for some basic contact info, then it will return a score. “5 Reasons Why…” has a score of 65, which isn’t great. It’s a list-type headline that contains a mix of common (why) and uncommon (reasons) words. It has a power word (matter), but no emotional words to allow readers to connect with the content. Though the tool liked the headline word count, the character count was on the short side.

The tool doesn’t give you direct tips for improving your headline. But, it does provide guidance and advice to help you write better headlines. And, it will point you to articles that discuss the particular issues your headlines have.