5 Free Marketing Tools That Could Help Make Your Content Go Viral

By Young Entrepreneur Council @yec

By Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner.

Do you have trouble getting your content shared on social networks? You're not alone.

To get more traction, you need to understand what works best for your audience and curate content that's valuable and entertaining. I've been creating content online for close to a decade, and I've noticed that it's becoming more difficult to stand out as more people become content creators. With the right set of tools, it's totally possible to make your content go viral. Let's take a look at some of the top free tools every marketer should have in their toolbox.

Alltop

To make your content go viral, it's imperative to understand what's trending among your audience. When coupled with outstanding content curation, you can outperform other stories in no time.

Alltop gives you popular headlines from popular topics around the web and is sorted alphabetically for easy search. It's perfect for checking out what's hot in your industry and is a great tool for creating new viral content. With Alltop, you can find the most recent posts for each blog that inspire you to create a new viral article.

We use Alltop to give us ideas for article topics. It helps us understand what's trending and the most popular content in our industry.

Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule

The headline of your content influences user engagement the most. It's often the first and last chance you get to impress potential prospects.

The Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule helps you curate an enticing title for your content that drives more engagement, shares and traffic. It capitalizes on the type of headline that converts and allows you to grade your headline and analyze the phrases used in it. It also generates a preview of what your headline will look like in a Google search.

We use Headline Analyzer to help us come up with headlines for our blogs posts. We reword the headline until it scores higher than 70.

Buffer

Buffer allows you to manage various social media accounts from a single interface. The platform streamlines your social media postings by giving you complete control over your content without having to log in to each individual account separately.

When scheduling social media posts, make sure to post them on peak time so they have a better chance of going viral as more people read them. You can also try posting several times per day on all your social media accounts for optimized results.  

We use Buffer to schedule Twitter posts. We typically post around six per day and space them out.

Canva

Images have a big influence on how people engage with your content. A study by Buzzsumo found that posts with images are likely to get twice as many interactions as posts without. To make your images enticing, you might want to add an editing tool in your marketing arsenal.

Let's face it, most people don't need Photoshop to make quick tweaks to their images and don't have time to learn the ins and outs of such a powerful platform.

Instead, you can use a free image editor like Canva that lets you easily beautify your images by applying overlays, filters and stickers. You can edit your images, create a collage or even create an e-book all from a single platform.

We use Canva for designing quick social media posts. This is an intuitive tool that is pretty customizable. The business plan has more features like the ability to save your business' color palate for consistency.

Unsplash

To create a viral post, the main image is important. Unsplash provides free, beautiful images taken by professional photographers. Unsplash also has an intuitive, easy-to-use site that lets you search for just about any image.

To get the most of your main image and make your content shareable, you need to make sure the image shows up on Twitter and Facebook. To do this you'll want to implement Twitter cards and Facebook Open Graph.

We use Unsplash for some of our photos. To make the photos more unique, we'll tweak them on Canva and make them even more relevant to the article.

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site that helps small businesses start their website.