As online content creators, editors and marketers, it’s our job to keep up with the rapidly evolving field of content marketing. Content creators today, need to have a broad range of skills. In addition to our writing and editing skills, we need to be general savants in:
The resources below are excellent primers in all these relevant fields. They contain tutorials, training videos, whitepapers, case studies and eBooks created by industry leaders. The best part is that they are all free!
Grammar and Writing Resources
1. Yahoo style guide is simple to use. Since it’s already created for you, it saves you the time and effort required to develop your own style guide. All you have to do is follow the style conventions. Ap Stylebook online is one resource that requires a small annual fee of $25 to join but is an indispensable tool and needs to be included in this list.
2. Dictionary.com and MerriamWebster.com are essential dictionary resources for all content creators. Synonym.com is a great resource when you’re searching for alternate terms. Using synonyms instead of repeatedly using the same keywords is also recognized as an seo best practice .
3. Purdue University’s OWL (Online Writing Lab): The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material that help with general writing skills, grammar and punctuation.
4. Writers workshop addresses common problems in writing such as dangling modifiers, homophones, run-on sentences and sentence fragments. A quick read of the workshop’s everyday grammar will strengthen your grammar and consequently your writing abilities.
5. Daily Writing Tips: Get writing tips sent to your inbox, daily. Topics range from grammar to punctuation, from spelling to usage and vocabulary.
SEO Resources
6. Search Engine Land is an excellent resource to catch up on the latest seo news. Danny Sullivan, the editor in chief, is an established name in seo circles and is known to regularly and accurately predict future seo trends.
7.Moz is also another excellent resource given the fact that their beginners guide is the de facto beginners guide to seo.
Content Marketing
8. Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Certification course is an excellent course on inbound marketing and it’s free! The course curriculum includes 18 classes on inbound marketing from blogging, to seo to social media, it covers the entire spectrum of subjects on inbound marketing but the best part is that these courses are taught by heavy weights in their respective fields. Ann Handley, Rand Fishkin, Guy Kawasaki and Avinash Kaushik are some of the contributors.
9. Content Marketing Institute has several whitepapers, case studies, interviews with prominent personalities. Another excellent resource is Copyblogger.
Content Strategy
Content Strategy is slowly emerging as a necessary field to administer, develop and plan all content for large corporate web sites.
10. Brain Traffic: Kristina Halvorson is a leading authority on content strategy and her blog is extremely educational.
11. The Content Wrangler: Scott Abel, the founder of the Content Wrangler is a leader in the field of content strategy. He also runs a LinkedIn group called the Content Wrangler Community. It’s an active group and the discussions also teach you about content management, content quality and content standards.
Information Architecture
12. The Information Architecture Institute has a ton of information for newcomers looking to learn more including a library, tools and a job board.
13.The Nielson group has a comprehensive list of reports, whitepapers and guidelines that underline strategies to enhance the user experience. The topics range from the mobile user experience to ecommerce user experience to site-map usability.Useit.com is Jacob Nielson’s website on basic usability guidelines. The site includes useful videos, books and reports.
WordPress help
14. Kristi Hines 70+ Resources to Start a WordPress Blog : Kristi Hines blog, kikolani.com, on blogging and blog marketing is excellent and a must read for content creators. She has outdone herself with this remarkable primer on everything you need to know to create a WordPress blog.
15. WP Beginner is a blog that serves as a beginner’s guide for WordPress users.
Web Coding Resources
16.W3 schools is a great resource for those tech savvy content creators who like to have some control over their site layout. W3 schools have excellent tutorials for everything from basic HTML to PHP to programming languages such as SQL and ASP
17.Codecademy has some great basic tutorials for people looking to get started with coding.
Images
18.Flickr Creative Commons license: If you do an advanced search on Flickr with the option of creative commons checked, you could find some really cool pics. The only thing to remember is to give attribution based on the type of creative commons license you get.
19. Free digital photos.net: The current picture for this post is from freedigitalphotos.net. True to their name, a pic of this size is free, anything larger does require a small fee.
Analytics
20 . Occam’s razor: Avinash Kaushik is the # 1 authority today on web analytics and reading his blog is as good as getting a good tutorial on the different ways that you can use analytics to help your website gain more traffic, more prospects and ultimately more customers.
Which resources do you use to keep up with changes in the field of content marketing? Please share with us in the comments below. Thanks.
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Hi Gazalla,
This is a great treasure-trove of resources, including a few I hadn’t come across before – so I’ll be bookmarking this for future reference.
I also use thesaurus.com, several sites for finding quotations and online encyclopedias.
Many thanks for pulling all these together for us – very helpful – I’ll certainly share this post,
Regards,
Sue
Sue Neal recently posted..How to Turbocharge Your Writing With Free Reference Tools
Thanks, Sue for appreciating these resources and for sharing the thesaurus.com link which is also a great resource. I’d also like to hear about your resources for finding quotations.
Hey Gazalla – it’s a strange coincidence but I’ve included some quotation resources in the last post I wrote, which you can find via the commentluv link. We must be on the same wavelength!
Sue
Sue Neal recently posted..How to Turbocharge Your Writing With Free Reference Tools
I’m especially interested in checking out number 20 – I need to learn more about analytics and how to leverage those insights to optimize online marketing strategy. Great list!
Thanks, Ruth. I need to spend more time learning about analytics as well. All the best:)
Avinash is a goldmine for analytics. I can recommend his books too.
Adi Gaskell recently posted..Air BnB housing the homeless after Sandy – how to use your community for good
Wow, Gazalla, you’ve outdone yourself with this blog chock-full of really great resources. Well done! One tool I have only once used but is said to be awesome is InboundWriter. I promised myself I would get back to it, as it checks for optimal keywords prior to publishing. I know Jay Baer uses it and a few other well-known bloggers, so it could make this list.
Cheers,
Frederic
Frederic Gonzalo recently posted..24 heures dans l’univers économique de Google [INFOGRAPHIE]
Inbound Writer is a personal favorite of mine. I’d written about it in this article – 7 Essential SEO Tools for All Content Writers. I decided to focus this article on resources that we can learn from about the various fields in Content Marketing. But I think now that you and Adi have mentioned a few awesome tools, I should do one only on tools for content marketing. Thanks for the idea:)
Some great resources Gazalla. A couple more to mention are Triberr (obviously 🙂 ) and PostJoint.
http://www.postjoint.com
Adi Gaskell recently posted..Air BnB housing the homeless after Sandy – how to use your community for good
Whoa, that’s a serious list! I actually just started using Codecademy to learn some simple programming things. I met one of the founders at a conference recently and she said they’re working on a whole bunch of new things so I can’t wait to check them out. And for me, the W3C is indispensable because at some point I’m bound to forget how to write a CSS rule 🙂
For SEO stuff I also like Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable. Those have good tips and news.
Thanks for putting this resource together, it makes a great bookmark to reference again and again!
Carol Lynn recently posted..Mobile Vs. Desktop: How Much Content Should You Have?
Thanks, Carol. Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable are excellent resources for SEO news. I hope that the community as a whole can use them to refer to and learn from the best!
Thanks for the VERY comprehensive list. I guess it takes a lot of times to go all those links, but i’m halfway there. I just created my first blog (thanks to startbloggingonline.com) and I’m now looking to go a bit further. Probably going to publish some really high quality 2000+ words posts and maybe even do some SEO. Will see..
Again, thank you.
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