AnswerThePublic.com – Discover what people are asking about on any topic, brand or product. Use 1-2 words to get the best results. You may do limited queries for free and after that, they offer an unlimited option at around $79 a month. AnswerThePublic listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around your topic, products or brands.
I use Curation Soft’s tool to assist me in finding content I can take excerpts from, videos, images and more. It allows me to import the content into my blogs by dragging and dropping into my blog or website. While maintaining the links to the other website and giving them credit for the post.
Grammarly: This tool will help you become a better writer. It has grammar, punctuation and style checkers. It gives you tips to improve your writing and gives you usage examples with matching adjectives. Best of all it works anywhere you write- Facebook,Wordpress, powerpoint, word, email and more. It really makes writing content easier and faster. Free and paid versions are available.
Google Trends – This is also a fantastic content planning tool. You can research when specific phrases trend and look for “break out” terms. Break out terms are new related queries you can take advantage of by creating content around them.
Google Alerts: I set up alerts on keywords or phrases in quotes so I can get the daily scoop on blogs, news and other websites that have my key phrases in them. I will also set them up for products that I want to promote so I can see if they are in the news and take advantage of it in a timely manner. You can create as many alerts as you like with your Google account and you can remove them or refine them as often as you need to.
Weird observances and Trivial Holidays: I love using TimeandDate.com to discover all those unusual holidays and observances all over the world. This is one of the easiest ways to come up with content ideas on a schedule. Best of all it is evergreen content. They are categorized by monthly and then daily observances. Things like “Lost Sock Memorial Day” – May 10 or “Say Something Nice Day” – June 1 could be used to create conversations, social media content, videos and more. The ideas you can generate from a resource like this are endless.