The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools
- Updated on: 2018-12-23
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The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools
May 31, 2016
Revised January 7, 2017
Revised June 16, 2016
Great content—the kind that resonates with your audience—starts with great topic ideas. Often, the best ideas come from talking with your customers, or with customer-facing employees in your organization, like people in sales or customer service. Sometimes they magically come to you while you’re out for a morning run or enjoying an evening glass of wine on the deck. At other times, the best ideas may come from research: discovering what are your customers, competitors, and industry influencers talking about online.
What are the best tools for finding great content ideas? The best apps for capturing, organizing and prioritizing ideas? Here are almost two dozen of the best content ideation tools for finding and capturing bursts of inspiration.
Again, as for all posts in this series, tools will be shown with the number of results returned by Google on a search for reviews of that tool (not necessarily the actual number of reviews) and example showcase reviews. Links to all showcase reviews are included near the end of this post.
Google Review Count: 466
Search for topic ideas across the vast number of “Communities” on Google+.
Sample review: “Join some relevant Google+ Communities to get some content ideas from the discussions taking place.” — Online Marketing Institute
Pricing: free
2) Popurls
Google Review Count: 341
Popurls is a mashup of the web’s most visited social news sites and portals that captures headlines from its sources in near-realtime. Stories are sorted by source rather than topic, but are searchable.
Sample review: “Popurls is a dashboard for the latest Web buzz.” — PR Daily
Pricing: free
3) Wunderlist
Google Review Count: 283
Organize and share your to-do, work, grocery, movies and household lists. Set reminders and collaborate with team members. Like Evernote, works and syncs lists across devices.
Sample review: “Wunderlist is a powerful list-platform that allows marketers to organize beautiful and powerful lists for content strategy and editorial calendar use.” — Express Writers
Pricing: free to contact the vendor
Showcase reviews: Katie Lance, B2B PR Sense Blog, Express Writers
4) Evernote
Google Review Count: 263
A simple yet highly effective app for capturing ideas, to-do lists, and photos that are searchable and instantly available on all your devices. Notes can also be shared for group collaboration.
Sample review: “It’s a one-stop for gathering all of your thoughts, all of those articles you want to save for later, and so, so much more…The Evernote webclipper plugin allows you to save online articles and info to a notebook of your choice. It even allows you to move emails to a notebook! The formatting is simple and easy to use.” — B2B PR Sense Blog
Pricing: free to $50 per year
Showcase reviews: Online Marketing Institute, Anders Orsander, Shift Communications, BuzzBlogger, Perception, Katie Lance, B2B PR Sense Blog, Cent Muruganandam, Quick Sprout, Marketing Insider Group (Strategy), Blogging Wizard, SmartBug Media, Express Writers, Social Media Examiner, Robbie Richards
5) Xmind
Google Review Count: 250
Open-source mind-mapping tool to gather ideas and structure them in logical way. Useful for individual brainstorming or team collaboration.
Sample review: “Organize your thoughts, brainstorm new ideas, and visualize complex relationships with this mind mapping tool.” — Wrike
Pricing: free to $79 per year, plus multi-user corporate plans
Showcase reviews: Wrike
6) Quora
Google Review Count: 198
The ultimate Q&A website. Ask a question and see the most popular answers, answer current questions, or search to find questions and answers on specific topics.
Sample review: “The great thing about Quora is that you can search by keywords and find questions that are being posed related to your niche and the answers that have been given. Now you will have both hot topics for your business and some great answers from which to create your content.” — Marketing Insider Group (Curation)
Pricing: free
Showcase reviews: Online Marketing Institute, PR Daily, BuzzBlogger, Perception System, Cent Muruganandam, StoreYa Blog, Marketing Insider Group (Curation)
7) Scoop.it
Google Review Count: 191
A content curation tool to help discover, curate and publish content to increase online visibility online and support thought leadership, content marketing, and social media marketing efforts.
Sample review: “Turns your content creation into a magazine, while it can also be embedded on WordPress sites too.” — Maximize Social Business
Pricing: free to $67 per year
Showcase reviews: BuzzBlogger, Maximize Social Business, Catherine Pham/SlideShare, Express Writers, Marketing Insider Group (Curation)
Google Review Count: 191
Enter any three terms (preferably nouns) and HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator will display multiple headline options.
Sample review: “This is a fun little tool which, while useful, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It’s great for those moments when you’re completely out of ideas. Just be sure to treat the topics it generates with a big pinch of salt.” — Marketing Insider Group (Marketing)
Pricing: free
9) TrendSpottr
Google Review Count: 179
Discover emerging trends, viral content, and key influencers on any topic, across the web, in real time. Valuable not only for content marketing but also crisis management, influencer outreach, advertising allocations, and market research.
Sample review: “TrendSpottr is one of the popular tools that help to show what’s trending. Using this tool, you can…generate new ideas, search keywords to see the trendiest content. A real-time trend intelligence platform is offered by TrendSpottr that allows predicting emerging contents, sentiment for any topic, influencers ” and more. — Perception System
Pricing: contact vendor
10) FaqFox
Google Review Count: 176
A free online market research tool. Enter a topic or keyword phrase, then either enter websites to scrape or choose from a selection of popular content areas (e.g., business, health, tech…) and get a list of results showing what types of answers your prospective audience is searching for.
Pricing: free
11) SimpleMind
Google Review Count: 175
SimpleMind does for mind-mapping what Evernote does for notes. It allows you to organize ideas and visualize connections while adding notes and images, collaborating with team members, and accessing all of your content across devices.
Sample review: “SimpleMind for iOS is a Mind Mapping tool that turns your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch into a brainstorming, idea collection and thought structuring device.” — THINKing
Pricing: multiple price levels from free up to about $900 (purchase; no recurring fees)
Showcase reviews: THINKing
12) AllTop
Google Review Count: 171
The online “magazine rack” highlights the most popular online content across a huge number of topics, from Acupuncture and Advertising to Zombies and Zoology.
Sample review: “Aggregates the best of the web. Here you can find all of the top blogs on any given topic. Simply select a category and you’ll be taken to a one-page dashboard with the best blogs in that industry AND their 5 latest blog posts. An endless number of content ideas all on one page.” — BuzzBlogger
Pricing: free
13) Bottlenose
Google Review Count: 170
A “smart data discovery” tool that makes it easy to get real-time insights about the trends that impact your business. Track consumer and audience intelligence. product and customer intelligence, risks and threats, and competitors.
Sample review: “Bottlenose provides social media listening and analytics for marketers, including a free search tool for tracking trending news and topics.” — Online Marketing Institute
Pricing: contact the vendor
14) Google News Search
Google Review Count: 158
Search the top news stories on Google—world, national or local, plus business, technology, entertainment, sports, technology, and health news.
Sample review: “Google not only gives you a broad view of the news, but it also gives you a way to identify the most recent stories from media and reporters.” — PR Daily
Pricing: free
15) Content Idea Generator
Google Review Count: 157
A simple tool to generate headline ideas. Enter any topic or keyword phrase and see the tool displays back. Sometimes useful, always fun.
Sample review: “This helps you figure out content ideas . I love this tool to help get my creativity flowing. Check it out.” — Entrepreneur
Pricing: free
16) BigDig
Google Review Count: 151
BigDig is a “sandboxful” of thought-starting recommendations collected from great thinkers and writers. Click to dig up an idea. Don’t like it? Dig again.
Pricing: free
An online brainstorming tool that helps develop ideas based on challenges, related adjectives, and insights.
Pricing: free
18) Techmeme
Google Review Count: 124
Source for the top real-time news stories about the tech industry. A thoughtful combination of both algorithmic and human editing offers the best means for curating in a space as broad as technology.
Sample review: “Techmeme is a tech news curation site that will keep you up to date on breaking tech stories.” — PR Daily
Pricing: free
19) NewsWhip Spike
Google Review Count: 119
Find important content, stories and influencers, in real-time. See what’s engaging your audience today. Spike detects news stories from a vast array of sources then uses social media interactions to identify the top trending stories in each topic area.
Pricing: $299 per month to “enterprise” (request a quote)
Showcase reviews: PR Daily
20) ContentIdeator
Google Review Count: 93
ContentIdeator helps you find good topics to write about and lets you generate content ideas that your audience reads and shares.
Pricing: $79 per month
21) Tweak Your Biz Title Generator
Google Review Count: 75
Possibly the best title generator, this tool enables you to enter a topic or phrase and get back a huge number of title ideas.
Pricing: free
22) ShortForm.tv
Google Review Count: 62
Per TechRadar, ShortForm.tv “scans an array of online video sources, identifying the latest viral hits on your behalf. And all you have to do is visit ShortForm.tv, choose a channel – ‘Facebook Hits,’ ‘HaHa Funny,’ ‘Animated Shorts’ and so on – then sit back and watch a continuous stream of video content – no more manual searching required.”
Pricing: free
23) Inbound Now Blog Title Idea Generator
Google Review Count: 20
Scroll through common title formats you can insert your keyword(s) into, or use the search feature for additional ideas.
Pricing: free
