When starting out with a content marketing strategy, it can seem intimidating to go at it alone, especially without tools, resources, or help from a content marketing agency. I mean, would you ever throw someone into the ocean without a life jacket? Of course not. But when you task your marketing team with the challenge of creating, executing, and measuring a great content marketing strategy without the tools they need to do it well, that's basically what you're doing.

Now, you don't need to assemble a huge team to be successful in content; small content teams can still achieve impressive results. What you do need is to give your team the support, structure, and resources it needs to get the job done.

Luckily, there are tons of free tools out there to make your content marketing process a little smoother. Below, I've listed eight of my favorite free content marketing tools:...

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks. You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content....

Squeeze more traffic and conversions out of your old content with these 9 content hacks that can help you repurpose your content.

Will the content bubble burst like the dot-com one? No if you stay on top of the predictions and trends for continued success – Content Marketing Institute

About a year ago, I came up with an idea. I wanted to show you how to generate $100,000 a month from a new blog.

I picked a topic and have been making progress toward that goal.

But what if you haven’t picked a topic yet?

That’s why I wrote this article. A great blog has to start with a topic.

These are the types of articles, topics, and approaches that have demonstrated massive success in the past and will continue to do so in the future....

Without ever getting into YouTube, you can do short videos on several social media sites. On Vine, they last six seconds, Instagram they are 15 seconds, and on Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook the videos can be as long as 2–3 minutes. Once videos are created, they can also be pinned on Pinterest.

You don’t need expensive camera equipment, though it will add to the quality if you do use something different than you smartphone camera. It should do a decent job until you have the funds to invest in something better. Short videos are like a dessert or snack, just enough to satisfy and not so much that in the middle you’ve had enough and are trying to figure out how to end it sooner rather than later. And getting the story or information visually is almost always preferred to reading about it.

Video marketing has been unanimously chosen as one of the rising stars in marketing corridors, thanks to social integration and investments by Internet giants. It is gaining a vital place in the marketing plans of all major companies to connect with consumers, engage with them and convert them into paying customers.

Don’t believe the hype? Here are some statistics to prove the point. According toSyndacast, 74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video. Not only that, studies show that using the word “Video” in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 19 percent, click-through rates by 65 percent and reduce un-subscribers by 26 percent. According to Twitter, videos and photos get the most retweets....

What’s the point of this story?

First — as you know by now — that there is only value in content if it “moves.” If my article had not received any attention from my readers, it’s unlikely the reporter would have found it on search.

There was no inherent SEO value in my original post — I had invented the term social scoring — so the web activity alone led the reporter to me.

But there is a bigger lesson here.

Would I have been found by the New York Times reporter if I had only posted my ideas about social scoring on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn?

The answer is obvious – no.

To have the opportunity for real authority on the web and vast reach, you need a certain type of content that has depth and breadth. Every organization active on the social web needs at least one source of “rich content....

Employ someone and you have to consider salary, workspace, and equipment; not to mention benefits like medical care and paid vacation time.

Conversely, freelancers are only paid for the work they do.

This is generally (though not always) more cost-effective than taking on someone in-house, and allows you to increase or decrease their workload as needed.

This makes outsourcing extremely flexible, which is a huge win for small businesses.

But don’t get too excited just yet… there’s a hard part: actually finding great freelancers and managing them effectively.

Thankfully there’s plenty of tools designed to help you do just that (and many more being released all the time).

Let’s take a look at some of the more recent additions to the market that can help you to outsource and manage your content creation in 2016...

Bloggers, website owners, marketers, and article writers have one main concern on their minds: how can they create more content in a shorter period of time? It’s not only about quantity, though. We do want more content, butcontent quality matters—we also want to make a greater impact with a single piece.

Not to worry; technology has your back. Here’s a great resource on content marketing and a general introductioninfographic, and below are seven tools that will help you create masterful content....

Do you spend a lot of time crafting the perfect piece of content, only to find that it barely generates any shares, let alone drive leads?