Looking for some great tools to help you with social media content generation? Look no further! Here are 7 great tools for boosting your online marketing game!

1) Canva

The king of social media content generation, Canva is fast, stylish and beautiful. Up until recently I was manually cropping images, creating overlays and adding text over top of them. As an entrepreneur wearing several hats, Canva's beautiful UI and fully stocked font library saves me TONS of time - that's why it gets the number 1 spot in this list!

Canva makes generating fresh social media content easy!

2) Pexels / Unsplash

Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/) and Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/) are must-haves for any self-marketing entrepreneur looking to operate on a budget. Thanks to generous photographers around the world, both sites provide thousands of  high-quality stock photographs which are available for anyone to download and use, FREE of charge! Also worth a mention is the Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to sharing free creative works: https://search.creativecommons.org/

Unsplash is loaded with free stock photos for anyone to download and use!

3) GIMP image manipulation

Don't have hundreds of dollars for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription? Then you'll love GIMP, a free graphics editing software written by the open-source community! Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is a powerful tool that is capable of producing some very high-quality results - in fact, if you've used Photoshop, then GIMP's UI will feel familiar. While there are some differences that take getting used to, their documentation is solid. So far, there is nothing I haven't been able to do in GIMP that I could do when I still used Photoshop - GIMP rocks! Get it here - https://www.gimp.org/

If you've used Photoshop, the GIMP UI will feel very familiar

4) MailChimp

It used to be that you had to know how to write HTML and CSS and possibly even a bit of javascript in order to create big beautiful landing pages for your business. Not anymore! MailChimp offers a vertiable plethora of features, all of which are so simple to use a monkey could do it (sorry, couldn't resist):

  • Mailing lists
  • Lead capture forms
  • Landing pages
  • Customized email marketing
MailChimp is one of the best platforms for building landing pages, lead capture forms and more

And the best part is, it's totally FREE - that's right, while MailChimp does offer some nice premium features for a reasonable cost, you can absolutely do everything you need at ZERO cost. MailChimp is a must-have for any entrepreneur struggling to capture followers for their business! https://mailchimp.com/

5) LibreOffice

Like GIMP, LibreOffice uses an open-source license, meaning it is free for anyone to download and use! This very capable office-suite has a document editor that can edit Microsoft .doc/.docx formats, Excel .xls/.xlsx and more. Like Microsoft's well-known Office suite, you can add your own fonts to make your documents look even better. And it even has a built-in drawing program that can edit PDFs! There's nothing not to like about LibreOffice for producing great-looking flyers, pamphlets and hand-outs - you can make your LibreOffice projects look even better by creating beautiful cover pages in GIMP! https://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice comes with a capable suite of tools including a familiar-looking document editor

6) Ghost / Wordpress / Medium

Ghost (https://ghost.org/) is the new kid on the block when it comes to blogging platforms. With a simple yet stylish default theme, and a stripped-down yet highly-functional editor, Ghost removes the bloat so you can focus on what you do best: writing great content. Plus it comes with built-in SEO, so you never have to worry about getting your stuff out there.

This article is lovingly made possible with Ghost!

That said, Wordpress (https://wordpress.org/) is still the top dog when it comes to CMS / business website platforms - the reason being it's a lot more flexible when it comes to building fully-functioning sites (Ghost can be customized too, but you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with a lot of code, whereas Wordpress coupled with a good builder's theme can be a lot more accessible for non-coders).

Lastly, Medium deserves a mention as it's a great way to get your content seen by a lot of people, and doesn't require any technical knowldge to install / configure. In fact, there's no shame in using all 3 platforms to promote yourself!

7) Hashtags

It seems silly to mention it, why? Because we're so used to seeing them. That said, I can't tell you how many other business owners I've spoken to who spend countless hours on social media but for some reason they never use hashtags.

Repeat after me:

  • Hashtags are the easiest way to gain followers
  • Hashtags are the easiest way to gain followers
  • Hashtags are the easiest way to gain followers

Think about it: If you only have 70 people following you on Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / whatever, how will people be able to see your message unless you're using the right hashtags? You can spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, or you can pick the right hashtags and put out unique, compelling content. Hashtags are equally as important as the quality of the content you're posting!

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Do you have any free tools / tips you'd like to share? Feel free to share them with me on Facebook or Twitter!

Update: 12/5/2018

Based on a few suggestions I've received from some other people, here are a few more stock photography websites that are worth checking out!