A New Formula For Content Marketing That Converts [Step-by-Step]

All content marketers know that to create content that converts, we have to know what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.

But the way most content marketers use that knowledge to plan is still pretty broad-stroke. We scan a few data sets and think, “That post did really well. Let’s do another one like it and cross our fingers.”

What if we could predict the performance of our future content more precisely? What if we could forecast if articles from last Wednesday’s brainstorm are worth writing – and how well they’ll perform?

I think we can.

I propose that with a few key metrics and some simple (enough) math in Microsoft Excel, we can predict the success of a given content idea.

Intrigued? Let’s get started.

Part 1 – Gather the Data

Step 1 – Identify relevant data

There are about a million ways to slice and dice historical data, so it can be hard to identify which stats are relevant and which stats aren’t. There are two main types of data I recommend gathering for ROI Math: content dimensions and success metrics.

Content Dimensions

To be able to observe useful trends over time, you can’t look at just one piece of content. You have to group your content into meaningful categories.

The best way to group your past content is by the variables that you experiment with during the content planning stage. Think about the decisions you usually make when planning content – what the content should be about, how long it should be, who should write it, etc. I call these variables “content dimensions.”

For your first attempt at ROI Math, I recommend sticking to these four content dimensions:

• Word Count Range (i.e. Length)

Word counts vary wildly per piece of content, so you’ll need to translate these into ranges to gauge performance more easily and give your writers more practical targets to hit.

• Author

If you have multiple in-house writers, manage a large pool of freelancers, or frequently publish work by guest writers, author performance will be an important metric to track.

• Content Format

Common format types include reviews, infographics, videos, slideshows, long-form articles, and numbered lists.

• Topic

Common topic types include the vertical, the category, or the service being discussed.

Success Metrics

To measure success, you have to define and quantify it. What do you want above every other goal? When you get what you want, how will you know?

The answer to the first question is up to you. The answer to the second question is success metrics, which you and I are about to define.

For your first time doing ROI Math, I recommend defining success using three main types of measurements: traffic metrics, e-commerce metrics, and any proprietary metrics that are unique to your business.

Traffic Metrics

Traffic metrics are an excellent indicator of success because they represent the customers who are already engaging in your conversion process. Here are a few examples of traffic metrics:

• Unique Page Views (UPVs)
• Clicks per Page
• Events per Session
• Goal Completions

I recommend analyzing just the UPVs for your first attempt at predicting ROI, since it represents your site’s overall success rather than the success of specific campaigns.

If you do select multiple traffic metrics, make sure they’re consistent with each other or your predictions will be muddled.

E-commerce Metrics

I recommend looking at net revenue if possible for your first run at ROI Math since revenue is a very broad indicator and like UPVs, will give you a good idea of your content’s overall success. As you gain more experience, you can add more e-commerce metrics like these:

• Average Order Value
• Number of Items Sold
• Lifetime Value

Proprietary Metrics

To get a more customized view of how your content is doing, think about your main goal again and the metrics you already monitor to gauge your progress toward that goal. Then, single out the one or two metrics that best determine success.

At CLEARLINK, we use answered phone calls as one of our core proprietary success metrics because it is the strongest indicator of a marketing campaign’s success and correlates heavily with revenue.

If your main goal is to become a national brand, you may measure success by how many cities you’re shipping to. If your main goal is to serve more homeless in the community, your key proprietary metric may be the number of clients served. Even if your goal is only to drive your net worth as high as possible, you’ll need a metric more specific than cold, hard cash to be strategic in your content planning.

Time Frames

When you collect these metrics from your reports you’ll want to choose a period that will represent your content well, but doesn’t provide so much data that it overwhelms you. I recommend one of the following time frames: year-to-date, the most recent 6–12 months, or a customized period that you’re particularly curious about (e.g., last holiday season, first 90 days after new hires, etc.).

Step 2 – Set up your spreadsheet

Now it’s time to set up your Excel sheet, where you’ll gather your historical data.

The fastest, easiest way to start your spreadsheet is by using a program like Xenu or Screaming Frog to run a crawl of your site. Once the crawl is complete, export the results and save them as an XLSX file.

The site crawl automatically gathers every single web address on your domain, which you need for Excel to be able to properly pull data from your analytics reports.

However, the site crawl also gathers data you don’t need, so you’ll have to clean up the sheet before pulling in any analytics.

Here’s how:

Delete Extraneous Information

• Delete any rows containing URLs you don’t want to analyze for this audit. For example, the unique URLs of generic stock photos found throughout your site may not be worth analyzing.
• Delete all columns but two: the URI and the word count. If you really want to, you can reevaluate the usefulness of the other columns once you’ve got the hang of ROI Math. For now, you’ll have more than enough relevant info without them.

Add New Columns For Relevant Information

• Create a new column for URLs. The easiest way to do this is to duplicate the URL column and then use Excel’s Find and Replace feature to delete the domain name from each URL (e.g., http://ift.tt/1MIDFvB would become /blog).
• Then create a new column for each of the four basic content dimensions:

1. Word Count Range
2. Author
3. Format
4. Topic

And finally, create a new column for each metric you selected. To review, these are the metrics I recommend adding:

1. UPVs
2. Revenue
3. Proprietary metrics (e.g., answered phone calls)

Once you’re done creating these new columns, your spreadsheet will look something like this:

Step 3 – Fill in the data

Now that you’ve set up your spreadsheet, you’re going to use a combination of brain power, Google Analytics, and Excel’s VLOOKUP function to fill in the data.

Fill in the content dimensions by hand

Fill in the author, topic, format, and word count for each URL. Unless you know your content in your sleep, this step will likely require that you visit each page.

Get your music on – this is probably the most monotonous step in content marketing ROI Math. But I really encourage you to stick it out. The sheer volume of data that Excel interprets automatically, not to mention the precision of your results, will make this task worth the extra time and effort. I promise.

1. Fill in the word count ranges first. Use whatever word count ranges you normally use to assign content to your writers (e.g., 500–750 words, 750–1,000 words, etc.).
2. Fill in the author for each piece of content.
3. Fill in the format of each piece of content. I recommend selecting from as few formats as possible to keep the results manageable.
4. Fill in the topic for each piece of content. Again, I recommend sticking to as few as possible.

Fill in success metrics using analytics data and Excel’s VLOOKUP function

Fill the remaining cells in your spreadsheet by pulling data sets from your reporting accounts. I recommend starting with Google Analytics.

1. Open Google Analytics and navigate to the All Pages report under Behavior/Site Content.
2. Choose the time period(s) you’d like to analyze and filter out all content from before and after.
3. Display all columns to make sure you don’t miss any key metrics, and then download the data into an XLSX file. (This will not be the same file you are using to calculate ROI Math. You will have these documents open side-by-side.)
4. Return to your original Excel file. For each success metric column, use the VLOOKUP function to populate the cells with the corresponding data from your exported Google Analytics spreadsheet.
5. Repeat steps two through five for any other reporting accounts. As long as your reports include a URL or URI in the export, you’ll be able to integrate the data into your audit.

If you don’t dive into analytics on a regular basis or aren’t familiar with Excel, I recommend tutoring yourself in the VLOOKUP function until you get the hang of it. It’s a fast and extremely reliable tool for cross-referencing.

Part 2 – Do the Math

At this point, you’ve gathered all the data you need. Now you’re ready to crunch the numbers.

Step 4 – Create a PivotTable

To predict future conversion, you’ll need to compare every single content dimension against every success metric and quantify how well each content type has performed in the past. Excel’s sophisticated PivotTable feature can do these comparisons quickly and easily.

Here’s how to create your PivotTable:

1. Select all the data on your spreadsheet by typing Ctrl + A or clicking the triangle in the top left corner of your spreadsheet.
2. Head over to Excel’s Insert tab and click on PivotTable. It should be one of the very first icons on this tab.
3. When the PivotTable dialog appears, select the option to create the PivotTable on a new sheet. It will appear as Sheet2 in your Excel doc.

The PivotTable is another Excel feature that takes practice to understand. If you’ve never used it before, either tinker patiently until you get the hang of it or study some tutorials first.

Step 5 – Use the PivotTable to find averages and variances

Your goal with these Pivots is to calculate two new metrics – the average performance and variance to average of all content dimensions. These two meta-metrics hold the key to predicting how well similar content will perform in the future.

To systematically calculate the averages and variances, complete the following steps for each content dimension and success metric.

Here I’ve used author and UPV as examples:

1. Drag and drop the author field into the ROWS field of the PivotTable.
2. Drag and drop UPV into the VALUES field of the PivotTable. Use the dropdown menu to the right to specify that you want the PivotTable to return the Average (not the Sum, Count, or anything else) of the UPVs for each author.
3. Drag and drop UPV into the VALUES field a second time. Use the dropdown menu to specify that you want the PivotTable to return the average variance of the UPVs for each author.

Each Pivot should look like the below screenshot, with the content dimensions appearing in the ROWS field and the averages and variances of each success metric appearing in the VALUES field.

As you complete each pivot, copy and paste the data to a third sheet formatted with the columns below. Complete all the pivots until you have recorded the averages and variances of each success metric.

• Dimension Type – Shows which dimension type is being analyzed (e.g., format).

• Dimension – Shows which specific dimension is being analyzed (e.g., long-form articles).

• Average UPV – Shows the average number of UPVs within the time period you chose for that specific dimension (e.g., long-form articles have an average UPV of 12,000).

• UPV Variance – Shows how much that dimension differs from the average across your site.

• A column for the averages and variances of each remaining metric

This tab should look similar to the below screenshot:

Part 3 – Plan Winning Content

If you’ve gotten this far in the process, congratulations! You have completed an impressive feat of auditing, pivoting, and formula-writing – and now comes the fun part.

Step 6 – Set the stage for the brainstorm

Everything to this point has been about analyzing past performance. Now it’s time to look forward.

Start a fourth tab to house your ideas for future content. You’ll want to start off with a column for content ideas, followed by columns for author, topic, format, word count range, and average variance of each of these dimensions.

Populate each variance column by using a VLOOKUP function to pull the corresponding values from your PivotTable results. To check if the function is working correctly, type one of your authors into the appropriate column and check your third sheet to verify that the VLOOKUP has returned the same average variance you see in your pivot results.

Step 7 – Brainstorm

As you brainstorm new content ideas, add them to your fourth sheet and propose an author, word count range, topic, and format for each one. You can either do this yourself or have the individual idea contributors add them in.

As you add these details to each row, the VLOOKUP will automatically populate the variance columns and you’ll slowly see trends emerging. It’s like magic, except nerdier.

Now get ready for your hard work to really pay off.

Step 8 – Calculate the likelihood of conversion

Create one last column and label it “Result.” This column is your golden number. This column is the reason ROI Math exists.

To find the values for this column, use the =AVERAGE formula to average all the variances across each row and then subtract 1 from that average.

Here’s what the golden number should tell you:

Based on the historical performance of the proposed author, format type, topic, and word count, the content idea “ROI Math” should convert 8.75 percent better than the average piece of content on JeffBullas.com.*

*Disclaimer: This example is purely aspirational. I have no historical data to back it up.

There you have it. From now on, you can confidently predict the likelihood of conversion for every content idea you have.

Step 9 – Shape your content strategy

ROI calculations are very flexible. If at any point while brainstorming you get a low or negative percentage, you can immediately tweak the content dimensions (e.g., increase the word count, change the format from slideshow to long-form, etc.) to try and improve the chances of success.

Once you’re comfortable with ROI Math and you’re feeling adventurous, you can even go back to the beginning and add additional success metrics (e.g., promotional metrics like links, shares, etc.) and content dimensions (e.g., time of publication, day of the week, etc.). You can even compound the dimensions if you like – for example, you can find the word count range that works best by format vs. the word count range that works best across the board.

The more layers you add to your calculations, the more precise the predictions become. Keep at it until you get a model that works for you and your site.

ROI Math as a jumping-off point

Content marketing ROI Math has helped me sharpen my content planning process dramatically:

• I can now hand-pick strategic publication dates based on the probability of performance.
• I can now assign content pieces to the authors that perform best in each category.
• My brainstorming is more efficient because I already know which formats and topics perform well.
• I manage risks better because I can estimate how badly something might flop and how much it will cost me.

But let’s get real for a moment.

Ideas are surprisingly fickle. Some of our best ideas (according to us) end up producing mediocre results, while run-of-the-mill ideas can be off-the-charts successful. Some of the most successful pieces we’ve published at CLEARLINK started out as high-risk ideas.

I encourage you to use ROI Math for inspiration. Use it as a sanity check, but when decision time comes around, go with your gut, your common sense, or some combination of both. No spreadsheet can replace human intuition.

Treat ROI Math like the living, breathing process that it is. Take chances, make mistakes, get messy, and then learn from it.

Let’s improve ROI Math together. If you have any ideas on alternate use cases or on how ROI Math can be improved, please hit me up on Twitter @daveydemille.

Guest Author: With over 6 years of digital marketing experience, David DeMille has brought a real passion for marketing to his current position as marketing director at CLEARLINK. He focuses on creating data driven strategy, consumer driven content, and a community worth engaging in.

The post A New Formula For Content Marketing That Converts [Step-by-Step] appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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A New Formula For Content Marketing That Converts [Step-by-Step]

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https://masteringads.com/fs/?getit THE WEB Funnel System is taking a lot of the spotlight nowadays and for good reason. The results have been exceptional and several top names in the industry are taking note. With that said, the Internet Funnel Program is not for everyone. There are cons and pros depending on what precisely you are looking for. This article is made to help you assess if the Internet Funnel System can be part of your head to tools and resources. Internet Funnel System - Before I dig in, I do, I have a caveat. I use the system myself and have had tremendous success and We also know Matt the creator of the system and work with him on a regular basis. Who is featured in one of the scheduled program videos you may have seen. I've met Mike on several occasions at industry events in the Bahamas and London where we were both attending an online business mastermind. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtilG0vbHDTijUBB_STR0A Mike has achieved phenomenal outcomes utilising the web Funnel System averaging over $250,000 a complete year in the last 3 years. And that is via someone who lost his earlier corporate job due to a work related brain injury. After his accident Mike needed some time to recover and working at home using the internet was his last resort. And he managed to get work. So what exactly may be the Internet Funnel System? It really is a business and training system all in one. You can use the principles from the training to help you structure your current business to maximize your outcomes if you already have one and utilize it as a business program if you don’t have your own products and services just yet. In short, the Internet Funnel System addresses the certain specific areas where most small and home-based businesses fail. I claim business because we need to make one thing clear… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incYd-yuJ5g

Internet Funnel Program [Reward] Website Marketing Strategy

https://masteringads.com/fs/?getit The Internet Funnel System is taking a lot of the spotlight nowadays and for good reason. The total results have already been exceptional and many top names in the industry are taking note. With that said, the Internet Funnel Program is not for everyone. There are pros and cons depending on what specifically you are looking for. This article is made to help you assess if the web Funnel System can be part of your go to tools and resources. Internet Funnel System - Before We dig in, I do, I have a caveat. I use the system myself and have had tremendous success and I also know Matt the creator of the system and work with him regularly. Who is featured in another of the scheduled program videos you might have seen. I have met Mike on several events at sector events in the Bahamas and London where we were both going to an online business mastermind. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtilG0vbHDTijUBB_STR0A Mike has achieved phenomenal outcomes using the Internet Funnel System averaging over $250,000 a full year in the last 3 years. And that is coming from someone who lost his earlier corporate job due to a work related brain injury. After his accident Mike needed some time to recover and working at home using the internet was his last resort. And he made it work. So what exactly is the Internet Funnel System? It really is a business and training system all in one. You may use the principles from the training to help you structure your current business to maximize your outcomes if you already have one and use it as a business system in the event that you don’t have your own services and products just yet. In short, the web Funnel System addresses the certain specific areas where most small and home-based businesses fail. I state business because we need to make one thing clear… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incYd-yuJ5g

Internet Funnel System [Bonus] Website Advertising Strategy

https://masteringads.com/fs/?getit THE WEB Funnel System is taking a complete lot of the spotlight these days and for good reason. The total results have already been exceptional and many top names in the industry are taking note. With that said, the Internet Funnel Program is not for everyone. There are cons and pros depending on what specifically you are looking for. This article is designed to help you assess if the Internet Funnel System could be part of your go to tools and resources. Internet Funnel System - Before I dig in, I do, I have a caveat. I use the system myself and have had tremendous success and I also know Matt the creator of the system and work with him regularly. Who is featured in another of the program videos you might have seen. I've met Mike on several events at market events in the Bahamas and London where we were both going to an online business mastermind. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtilG0vbHDTijUBB_STR0A Mike has achieved phenomenal outcomes using the Internet Funnel System averaging over $250,000 a complete year in the last 3 years. And that is coming from someone who lost his previous corporate job because of a work related brain injury. After his accident Mike needed some time to recover and working at home utilising the web was his last resort. And he made it work. So what exactly may be the Internet Funnel System? It is a training and business system all in one. You may use the principles from working out to help you structure your current business to maximize your results if you already have one and utilize it as a business program if you don’t have your own services and products just yet. In short, the web Funnel System addresses the areas where most little and home based businesses fail. I claim business because we have to make one thing clear… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incYd-yuJ5g

4 Strategies for Improving Social Engagement

Editor’s Note: This post is one of Convince & Convert’s Top 10 Posts of 2015.

Simply too many brands use social media as a free advertising platform where they can sell, sell, sell. While the drive to push sales on whatever platform available is admirable, social media (as most of us have realized by now) plays by different rules. It’s not like broadcast television, where you buy spots on primetime, talk about your brand, and see sales walking in the door.

Social media instead demands a symbiotic relationship between brands and their fans. (highlight to tweet) You will only drive results from social media when your fans truly like you, identify with the values you project, and derive value from the content you publish.

Here we shall discuss a few ways to move your business beyond “sales” mode into to true “relationship” mode.

Learn How Fans See Your Brand

When you work on shaping a distinct brand identity to influence your audience via social media, you first need to know what they think about you now. You need to know how aware they are of your brand, its offerings, whether they perceive your brand positively or negatively, how your competitors fare in the same space, and so on. This allows you to make more informed decisions, as opposed to shots in the dark.

A tool like Mention offers you the ability to listen in on conversations about your brand and its related keywords across the web. Using Mention, not only do you get to hear in real time what’s being said about you online, you even get to participate in these conversations directly.

An interesting feature of Mention is that it allows the right people to engage with an audience in discussions that are taking place somewhere else. For example, a technical question on Quora can be answered directly from within the tool by your product manager, while a promotion-related query on Facebook can be tackled by your marketing manager simultaneously.

Mention allows you to track and analyze your brand’s position over time, helping you judge the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

Another powerful tool is Talkwalker, which corrals all online activity surrounding your brand in a single, searchable place. Choose your search terms (your company name, your industry niche, potential content topics, etc.), and watch related posts appear alongside easy-to-understand engagement data. You can even sort results by engagement statistics or tweak your search terms to monitor your competitors’ activities.

Talkwalker also provides handy “hashtag cloud” visualizations, which illustrate activity surrounding related hashtags. Whether the hashtag is an official part of your campaign or fan-generated, you’ll be able to track its use over time and any positive or negative sentiment attached to it.

Schedule Social Posts to Save Time

Posting content on a regular basis is critical to showing up on users’ cluttered social media feeds. A post or two a day may seem relatively easy to do, but will have pretty much no impact on your fans. The odds of your lone post showing up versus thousands of others put up by friends, family, and other brands fighting for your users’ attention are pitiably low.

While Facebook is getting all the negative publicity for low (or no) exposure, the problem is especially compounded when it comes to Twitter. How many 140 character bursts do you need to get your followers to react? How do you manage to craft and publish multiple “interesting” or “engagement-inducing” tweets every single day?

Enter Tweet Jukebox. All you need to do is divvy up your content into different “jukeboxes” or categories. Tweet Jukebox then uses this content to automatically post tweets as per a schedule you decide. You can store thousands of records per jukebox, ensuring that you never run out of things to tweet

The best part is, when a user mentions your brand online in a tweet, you can thank every single one of them (automatically).

As you can see in the screenshot above, Tweet Jukebox comes with a free built-in Jukebox with quotes that can be directly posted on Twitter at the click of a “Tweet it Now” button. They also have an interesting “Jukebox Store”—a little like the iTunes store—where they feature hundreds of Jukeboxes that users can download and use for free. The service even allows users to create their very own content, store them in Jukeboxes, and share them with the Tweet Jukebox community.

Still short of content? Tweet Jukebox also goes back to older tweets and reposts them with a fresh twist. So much for social media being a time hog. With the chore of posting and scheduling multiple times a day taken care of, you can now focus on the more important task of creating and curating great content that your users will love.

If you find yourself overwhelmed by all the channels you monitor and fill in a single day, Sprout Social offers a solution. This social media management tool’s standout feature is its single, streamlined feed—a blessing for any manager who’s tired of juggling multiple tabs and menus. From your dashboard, you can auto-schedule posts across all major social platforms. Free social ROI reports help take the mystery out of how those posts performed.

Attract the Right Kind of Attention

Talking up your brand on social media is good, but getting important people talking about it piques your audience’s interest and takes your brand visibility (and eventually acceptance) to a new level. Advertising professionals have known for decades what social media marketers are only just realizing: A celebrity endorsement is social media gold for your brand.

HARO is one such tool that will help put your brand on the New York Times front page (It could happen!) without you spending a penny on any of it. HARO (or Help A Reporter Out) connects journalists in need of interesting new content with content experts who need a platform to publish their stuff. This synergetic equation means that you can offer interesting and novel content that features your brand to reporters looking for their latest scoop.

HARO sends you alerts about journalists in need of “sources” or content experts in specific areas, and you can reach out to the ones that match your skill sets. The credibility of the journalist in question automatically lends credibility to your product and gives your brand an opportunity to be featured on respected platforms that it may not have been able to get on otherwise.

Manage Customer Complaints ASAP

Getting face to face or screen to screen with users in real time is an option that no marketing platform other than social media offers. Then why relegate the critical function of CRM to traditional channels like the phone or email? Companies that have invested in CRM via social media regularly reap the benefits of instant and engaging conversations with customers instead of plain old complaint resolutions. You should, too.

Nimble is a social CRM tool that allows you to offer customer care over social media platforms with ease. Nimble does a bunch of things exceedingly well. It builds detailed customer profiles by collating data from various sources: Outlook, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

It tracks step by step every interaction you’ve ever had with each user, thus offering a clear portrait of every customer. This rich customer data helps you respond to them in a more meaningful way, on the platform they are most comfortable with.

Conversations across platforms all come to one location, creating a unified inbox from where you can respond to every customer input instantaneously.

Every seasoned salesman knows that it’s not rock bottom prices but the strength of relationships that they build with clients that will see them through. Use social media as a tool to build relationships instead of hard selling to them with every post.

Get more content like this, plus the very BEST marketing education, totally free. Get our Definitive email newsletter.

       

4 Strategies for Improving Social Engagement
from Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting http://ift.tt/1mTluhZ
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20 Killer Blogging Tools for Customizing Your Content

Getting your blog post images right is crucially important.

Studies have found that 93% of the most engaging content shared on Facebook contains images, and that images have an 80% memory retention rate (compared with just 20% for text).

What’s more, recent eye-tracking studies have shown that internet users are less drawn to stock photos than they are to original visual content, meaning that the wrong type of image can greatly damage your blog’s engagement.

Thankfully, it’s easier than ever before to create custom blog images that’ll really stand out.

There are plenty of programs and resources available to the discerning blogger who wants to improve their blog imagery.

Here are twenty tools that you can use to make sure your blog is as visually appealing as possible:

1. Canva

There are plenty of image editing programs available, but Canva is one of the most widely used – and with good reason.

It’s free, it’s easy to use, and there are plenty of options to make sure that you’re able to manipulate and edit your images without a lot of hassle or effort.

2. PicMonkey

If you find that Canva doesn’t quite suit you, PicMonkey is a great alternative.

It’s got a lot of the same tools as Canva, but it’s slightly easier to get your head around, and it offers more font options, which means you’ll find it better for adding text to images.

3. BeFunky

BeFunky works a lot like both Canva and PicMonkey in the way it lets you edit image files. It also comes with a variety of templates and resources to help you get the most out of your images.

There are plenty of tools in BeFunky to help image manipulation newbies to get started instantly, but the program also has a lot of depth, and can be a great tool for more experienced image editors as well.

4. GIMP

For those who’d like a level of image editing on par with Photoshop, but who aren’t comfortable with the high Adobe price tag, GIMP is often recommended as the best alternative.

The program is a free download and offers just as many options as Photoshop. That said, it can be a difficult tool to come to grips with, and many of its more advanced features may be wasted on you if you’re just after quick and simple edits.

5. Paint.net

Those who are familiar with Microsoft Paint (who isn’t?) but who want something a little more advanced will get along great with Paint.net.

It’s a free download program that makes quick and simple photo editing easy, but it packs a lot of user friendly features that mean you can get more advanced with your edits if you feel the need. If your first instinct is to reach for MS Paint, you’ll probably be better off with this.

6. Easel.ly

Infographics can be a big attention grabber for a blog, but it’s not always easy to create them.

Easel.ly lets you work from existing templates to throw together well designed infographics in a matter of minutes, taking a lot of the hassle out of developing a good layout.

7. Infogr.am

If Ease.ly’s not quite your cup of tea, you might like to try this program instead – it’s incredibly similar, but boasts a different variety of customizable templates.

Infogr.am is simple to use and gives creators a fair amount of control over their finished infographic, and its drag-and-drop interface makes infographic creation as quick and painless as possible.

8. Social Image Resizer Tool

Sometimes all you need to do is crop or change the size of an image.

For uses like this, the Social Image Resizer Tool is invaluable for speeding up the process, meaning you don’t have to fire up an image manipulation program every time you need to trim the bottom off a photo.

The program’s handy list of common social media image sizes is a great resource as well.

9. Recite

Sometimes, all it takes to make your blog post stand out is a few pretty quotes to grab reader interest.

Tools like Recite let you enter text and instantly create a pretty image file, with customizable fonts and colors, to give your article some variety while drawing readers to the important passages within a text.

10. Over

Similar to Recite, Over lets you use text to create images. Its main selling point, though, is that it’ll let you overlay text on top of an image of your choice.

This means that your picture can feature a killer quote from your article, but also can draw in visitor attention through a compelling visual.

11. Quotes Cover

Similar to both Recite and Over, Quotes Cover lets you turn text into images. It’s specifically designed to help with social media cover photos, but its tools can be put to use for any image project.

It boasts a wide variety of options to make sure that your quote stands out as much as possible, so if you didn’t find an appropriate style on the other two sites, this might be the option for you.

12. Pictaculous

Not everybody naturally has an eye for colors.

When designing images, it’s often helpful to know which colors will perfectly complement the photo that you’ll include at the heart of your blog post.

Pictaculous lets you upload an image, from which it’ll generate a color palette based on the picture that you can use to make sure your blog post has a consistent color theme.

13. Ribbet

Collages are a fun way to draw in a user’s attention and make use of several key images at the same time.

Ribbet takes the hassle out of the process of building a collage by letting you upload photos to various templates, meaning that putting together a neat collage won’t slow you down too much.

14. Smush.it

High quality images are important, but it’s also crucial that you keep your page loading times as low as possible.

For that reason, you might find this web-based program a real lifesaver – it lets you upload and compress a file to make it as small as possible, which will help both your SEO score and your visitor retention.

15. Jing

If you’re looking to include screenshots in your blog post, you might want to check out Jing.

Jing is a downloadable program that lets you take screenshots, then quickly and conveniently crop and edit them so that you can show the part of the screen that matters most.

This means that you can get crucial materials for your blog together as quickly as possible, saving time and effort.

16. Skitch

Much like Jing, Skitch lets you easily take screenshots and quickly edit them to the perfect size.

It also lets you add annotations, so you can make sure your images are well targeted and clear of purpose.

17. Fotor

Fotor is a pretty amazing catch-all alternative to many of the other tools on this list. It’s an all-in-one program that lets you edit, crop, and alter images, but it also boasts collage abilities and special tools for creating custom social media cover photos and profile pictures.

This is a great program to save time and to avoid having to run images through several different tools before they’re ready to be uploaded.

18. Imgflip

If you’re looking to create a quick gif to add some simple animation to your site, you might want to check out Imgflip. The website allows users to easily upload videos or still images and use them to create unique gifs, without a lot of the hassle usually associated with creating animation.

19. Pixlr

Pixlr allows you to add a wide variety of filters and overlays to your images.

If you’re looking for a particular style or look for your photos, you’ll probably find Pixlr to be a useful tool.

20. Placeit

To give digital products a little bit of extra authority, you’ll want to take a look at Placeit.

The site allows users to upload images, which then appear within everyday scenario photos, such as people browsing the web or using computers or tablets.

This site makes it much easier to get great photos of your digital products being used in the real world, without having to hire a photographer to take custom photos.

What other tools do you use for your image manipulation? Share your thoughts and recommendations by leaving a comment below:

Guest Author: Aaron Agius is an online marketer, web strategist and entrepreneur and you can check him out at AaronAgius.com

The post 20 Killer Blogging Tools for Customizing Your Content appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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20 Killer Blogging Tools for Customizing Your Content