10 tools to help you become an influential writer

Want to raise your profile in your industry? Or establish yourself as an expert in your niche? Discover 10 tools that will help you to become an influential writer.

According to influencers and successful leaders, if you want to be a great leader you need to be a great writer. In today’s world, writing plays a pivotal role regardless of your expertise and skills.

But while you certainly need to master the basic of writing, being a great writer is about so much more than simply ensuring you’ve mastered grammar. (If you need help with this, you can check grammar at EduBirdie.)

To be an influential writer, you need to be able to write about topics that are in the general consciousness right now (or about to), and you need to be able to write text that is engaging, interesting to read and sharable.

10 tools to help you become an influential writer

If that all sounds  bit daunting, don’t worry. As you may expect in today’s tech-savvy age, there are a number of handy online tools to help you become an influential writer in your niche. Here are 10 popular ones.

1) HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator is a popular tool for bloggers, but it’s handy for anyone struggling to find a suitable title for project.

All you need to do is enter three nouns that are related to the topic you’re writing about, then press GO/Enter and you’ll see a list of some of the most popular blogs. It’s the perfect inspiration to help you find the ideal title to draw readers into your article.

An alternative to HubSpot is Topic. Topic takes your keyword and analyzes the current top-performing content in Google. They then take that data and plug it into GPT-3 to deliver unique ideas.

For you, this means:

  • Consistently creating content that matches your readers search intent.
  • Wasting less time brainstorming ideas for your blog.
  • Filling your content calendar in minutes instead of hours.
  • Ranking higher and driving more organic search traffic.

The FatJoe Blog Post Title Headline Generator is another great tool that you can use to come up with 100+ blog ideas in just a few seconds.

All you have to do is enter your chosen topic or focus keyword, and the generator will give you pretty solid and SEO-friendly blog titles.

2) Google Trends

Google Trends a useful search engine to explore what’s trending and what’s not. You can search trending topics related to a specific category in any region. You can also use it to find the right keywords for your topic, and give your finished article a better chance of ranking higher in Google searches.

3) Hemingway App

The Hemingway App gives you suggestions on how to make your content more readable and interesting, by highlighting long and complicated sentences and common errors.

It also picks out any passive text, and opportunities for you to swap a longer word for a shorter, simpler one – giving you the chance to edit your articles to make them more appealing.

4) infogra.me

If you are searching for a way to make your content look even better, Infogra.me could be the ideal too. Visual content is a great way to share information with your audience quickly and clearly. Which may explain why, according to a study by HubSpot, 70% of marketers used visual assets to attract visitors and to convert them into leads in 2015.

5) BuzzSumo

If you’re looking for relevant and popular searches related to specific topic, check out BuzzSumo. The tools helps marketers, bloggers and writers explore trending topics in different categories, and is a vital source of articles by industry leaders and influencers.

6) Storytelling

Okay so this isn’t a tool you can download or access from your laptop, but it’s an essential tool used by every brilliant writer, and one you’ll be foolish to overlook.

A relevant, concise and well-told story doesn’t just help people understand your point of view – it can win over their heart. It can make the difference between a dry article trying to explain a complicated, abstract idea, to a viral hit that wows your audience and converts even the most skeptic opponent to your cause.

7) SpellCheckPlus

SpellCheckPlus is a tool recommended and used by dissertation writers in UK to spot and rectify errors like silly spelling and grammar mistakes. This automated tool is quick and easy to use – you just paste in your text, press Check Text and your mistakes are immediately highlighted, ready for correction.

8) Canva and Veed

Ever heard the expression a picture is worth a thousand words? An engaging image can be the difference between an article that invites causal browsers to read on, or social media users to click through to, and one that quietly disappears unread into the ether.

And with tools like Canva you don’t need to have a graphic designer on hand to create your article images for you – with some design knowhow you can easily create your own.

If you want to move beyond static images and into video, Veed is a simple online video editing platform for creating social media video content. You can use Veed to crop, trim, filter, add music to videos. Perfect for anyone looking for simple and fast video editing without the need to install or setup complex software and keep all your content, fonts, logos and color palettes in one place so you are always on-brand. 

9) Social listening

Another great way to sense check your topic and get a feel of what people are saying (and thinking) about it is to use social listening.

At its most basic, this can be as simple as searching for your phrase or keywords on sites like Twitter. Not only can it give you an insight into what people are saying about it (to pick up words and phrases or points of view to c you’re researching a topic to write, it’s important to analyse audience responses and feedbacks to it.

Topsy lets you keep an eye on social media trends, and helps give you an overview of how readers are responding to particular subjects.

10) TweakYourBiz

Similar to Google Trends and BuzzSumo, TweakYourBiz helps writers search for inspiration on a specific topic, digging up tons of material relevant to your niche in no time.

Ashley Sanford is a social media trend analyst. She’s also a passionate blogger with a core interest in leadership program and consultation. She loves sweet tweets, interesting pins and more.