You've seen them all over the web, and you want in! Visual content has proven itself worthy over and over again. Original images make great additions to your content marketing strategy. Not only are they a great way to increase blog traffic, but they can be republished multiple times over, boosting your potential for getting solid SEO juice. But you don't have the budget to hire a full-time designer to create infographics, ebooks and custom visual content for you. So what can you do?
The following tools will help you create amazing visual content, in half the time, and at a fraction of the budget.
1) Venngage for Business
Making an infographic for business purposes is easy with this infographic generator. The tool is essentially a drag and drop photoshop, but also offers a wide range of ready to use templates to choose from. With the business plan, you can create and share custom templates between team members, and also select your own brand colors and fonts within the tool, so they are always easy to access when you need them. One of the business features also includes a logo library and the options of saving your favorite icons for quick reference. Venngage also has one of the best Wordpress plugins for embedding live infographics into your blog posts. You can access it here.
The Business plan is available for $39 a month when an annual plan is purchased, but to try it out the lite version of the infographic tool is completely free.
2) Slide Model
Whether you're putting together a live presentation, or you're making a SlideShare, SlideModel offers over 10,000 unique PowerPoint Templates to choose from. It's a great resource for beginners who are looking to create a captivating slideshow presentation, and all the templates function with Microsoft PowerPoint.
3) WhatFont
If you're ever looking at a well-designed web page and you're captivated by the usage of fonts but have no idea what they are, check out WhatFont. It is a Chrome Extension that scans the page and identifies the font style for you automatically.
4) Klock.work
Coming up with ideas for infographics isn't always easy. Klock.Work is an idea generator that tells you what style of infographic would be best suited for specific titles. This fun tool lets you type in any noun, and auto-generates a list of over 50 titles to choose from every time.
5) BeFunky
Like PicMonkey, BeFunky is an online photo editor and collage maker that simplifies the process of editing images for your blog posts. Add effects like shadows, lens flares or various filters to your photographs. This is a great tool to use if you want to make sure that the images on your site all fit a consistent aesthetic and theme. After all, it's important to maximize your brand image library so that people take your company seriously.
6) Beam
If you just want to create a quick chart and you're not a pro when it comes to data visualization, Beam is for you. It has been referred to as a "stupid simple" chart maker by Wired Magazine and Fast Company. You just need to copy and paste your data from a spreadsheet, click a couple of buttons to pick from the preset color and style templates, and you're done! A chart in seconds.
Creating visual content for your content marketing strategy doesn't need to be a complicated process. There are hundreds of tools out there designed especially to make your life easier. The great thing about including visual content in your blog posts and web pages, is that these images can be used and reused. What does that mean? It means you have much more potential for generating backlinks to your site, and reaping the benefits of all that organic and referral traffic.