Free Content Marketing Tools

At AVSEO, we love looking at free tools as a content marketing strategy.

Tools like the free Backlink Analyzer from Ahrefs allow us to show the capabilities of similar products. While useful in its own right, it also gives potential buyers a taste of what they can get when they sign up for Ahrefs.

Find opportunities to create free tools

As with blogging and video marketing, you don't want to create free tools in a haphazard way. You want people to search for the tools you want to create so they will rank highly in Google and generate organic traffic.

To do this, you can use Ahrefs Keyword Analysis.

Let's say you have a car website and you want to create a free tool. Enter a broad match keyword such as “car” into Ahrefs Keyword Research and go to the Phrase Match report.

Then, in the “Include” line, add qualifying terms such as “calculator”, “tool”, “tools” and “check”. Set the option to “Any word” and click “Apply”.

Now you will see good topics such as “car loan calculator”, “car finance calculator” and “car leasing calculator”. These topics can be considered as options for creating a suitable free tool.

Create a free tool

You've found the opportunity, it's time to create the free tool itself.

But before that, be sure to look at the top results for your target keyword. Look for problems related to them. Ask yourself guiding questions.

What's good about them?

How can they be improved?

Then take what you've learned and make something similar, but better.

Build links

Your free tool will not rank on its own. There is a positive correlation between links and rankings, which means you need to build links to your newly created free tool.

The easiest way to do this is to contact those who already link to similar tools that are inferior to yours.

Let's say you created a free car loan calculator. In the previous step, you should have checked the existing top pages, understood what was wrong with them, and solved these problems in your tool.

Now you can reach out to people who link to said tools, tell them about your tool and explain why it's better than the ones they already link to.

This method is also called the “skyscraper technique”.

Creating and using free tools is one way or another a good tool in content marketing, AVSEO company recommends that you always look at things from different angles and develop your business in many ways, without ignoring possible prospects and opportunities.