Content Creation Tools — Best Free and Paid in 2022

You need to have a toolbox full of skills to be a content creator. With obstacles like perfectionism often blocking our path to content creation success, it’s essential to have access to tools that help us. This is my list of the best free and paid content creation tools to start using today.

Grammarly

Having used the free version for years, I was intrigued to find out how many more grammar mistakes the tool would pick up when paying for their premium service. Wow, the quality of my writing was drastically improved and so much easier to read.

If like me, you love writing but are not very hot on grammar or spelling, then this free and paid tool is a must-use before clicking publish. You can also install it on your browser to check the content you are writing on social media.

Canva

Not a graphic designer? **Canva** has you covered, from social media posts to presentations, posters, animation, and video content. Like Grammarly, I used the free version for a year before upgrading to Canva Pro and couldn’t be happier with the service.

You receive more templates, access to an extensive library of elements, graphics, photos and a wide range of multimedia.

Adobe Rush

Part of the Adobe Creative Cloud package is Adobe Rush. With this app, you can easily edit videos on your phone, export them, and share them on your favourite social accounts.

Make changes to the colour, slow the video down, and pretty much all the video editing features you would expect from Adobe.

Ahrefs

When writing articles for your website, it’s essential to complete keyword research. Find out what search terms your target audience is using on search engines before you spend time writing the content. This tool is a recent addition to my content creation toolkit.

The free version is excellent and will be fine for those just starting out, but it is one tool I expect to upgrade to a paid plan in the future.

TubeBuddy

The free version of TubeBuddy is a little limited, but as a user of their paid plans, it is a tool that has helped me grow my YouTube audience. The keyword explorer allows me to come up with video ideas.

While tags are becoming less essential in the search algorithm on YouTube, it helps ensure you add the correct tags for the video topic. My favourite feature is the SEO Studio, which allows you to build the perfect searchable title, description, and tags for your video.

Notion

Think of this as a planner, note taker, task organizer on steroids. Notion has a beautifully designed desktop and mobile app that helps you keep organized as a content creator. Personally, I use it to write content ideas as they enter my head. My content scheduler is hosted here, and a library of resources to help me research content ideas.

As a content creator, keeping documents, files and designs in one place make me super organized. Honestly, I could not live without Notion.

Google Trends

When creating content, you will want to occasionally focus on trends within your industry and niche. When a topic receives an increase in searches, having content published on time will build your audience.

Google Trends is a great tool to find out what these trends are. You can also use the tool to see peaks in searches within your niche throughout the year. If you write about BBQ grills, you can see that searches drastically increased because of the hotter weather around June.

Pexels

Unless you have time to take photos to use on your website or on social media, finding non-copyright images can be a challenge. In my opinion, Pexels has one of the best libraries for photos and videos online.

It’s advisable to read the terms of use on each photo but assuming you are not using the images or videos for monetary gain, you will be fine.

Pablo

This is an excellent free desktop tool if you want to quickly add text to an image for social media or blog posts. Simply choose a template, photo and type the text. You can also add filters, change the text alignment and share on social media.

Answer the Public

Saving the best for last. One of the quickest ways to build an audience is to create content that answers frequently asked questions. Coming up with topic ideas to create content on can be very time-consuming. This tool helps you with both of these tasks, and it is entirely free to use.

Simply enter a search term, i.e. content creation, and it will give you many questions about this topic.

This is my list of the best free and paid content creation tools to start using today. Hopefully, these tools will help you become a better content creator and lead you to success.

Originally published at Creator Trail on March 31, 2022.