7 Essential Free Services for Website Content Creators

All content creators need to have a website and rely less on third-party platforms that control content through algorithms. You can build an audience through your content and email list with a website.

As website content creators, you need 6 essential free services to sign up for. All of these are free and allow you to perform tasks that must be completed to build an engaged audience online.

Here are 7 essential free services for website content creators.

1. Google Search Console

Add your site to the Google search console and monitor the performance of your website. Find out what search terms people are using to find your content.

Discover who is linking to your website. Test if your website is mobile-friendly, which is incredibly important as a content creator.

Receive notifications when there are issues with your website or content. Monitoring your website’s performance on Google searches is vital to ensure that you drive your target audience to your pages.

2. Google Analytics

There are other analytics services online, but Google Analytics is free and a powerful tool to discover where people find your website posts and pages.

Set up goals to track users on your website. Find essential data like how long people are staying on your pages and the experience they’re having.

Set up reports to monitor your website engagement and data on your products or purchases. As a website content creator, this tool is essential.

You can use the Google Site Kit WordPress plugin to set up both search console and analytics on your website in just a few minutes.

3. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

When creating content on your website, you must ensure that it’s optimized for search. Discovering keywords for your on-page optimization is critical to ensure your posts and pages are found by your target audience.

The Ahrefs keyword explorer is our favourite free tool. Enter a search term, and receive a list of suggestions and how many searches you can expect if you are at the top of the search pages. You are limited to data for 10 search terms for the free version.

The questions tab helps find out frequently asked questions on the keyword term so you can create content your audience is searching for.

4. Grammarly

Creating a professional-looking website isn’t focused on design. Your website needs no spelling or grammar mistakes, which builds trust in your content and any services or products you sell.

Grammarly uses Artificial Intelligence to quickly scan your content and highlight suggestions for improvement. It looks for grammar and spelling mistakes, clarifies your content – is easy to read. The software also looks at how engaging the writing is and if it has the perfect delivery.

There is a free and paid version, and we love it enough to pay for the Pro version, which, in our opinion, takes your writing to a higher level with suggestions to improve words, sentence structure and much more.

5. Pexels

Where possible, you should use your own photos and avoid too many stock-looking photographs. You know what I mean; those staged offices and corporate-looking images do not build trust in the website.

Looking at Creator Trail, you will see a photo in each article we publish and try to avoid that corporate, staged look by using images from Pexels. It’s free, and the photos, in our opinion, look professional and less staged.

6. Canva

Most content creators do not have the budget to hire a graphic designer. Canva is a brilliant free (and paid) service where you can create professional-looking presentations, blog graphics, social media content and a ton more templates that will make your content stage out.

We love Canva with all our hearts and have paid for the Pro version. This gives us access to even more templates, graphics, images, videos, you name it; any content needed can be found on Canva. We even designed our logo on Canva; we love it and highly recommend the paid version if you can afford it.

7. Mailerlite

We have left the best to last. Having used Mailchimp for years, we were delighted to discover Mailerlite for capturing email sign-ups on our website. We can keep in touch with our audience and continue to offer them advice in their inbox.

Building an email list is incredibly important for a website content creator because you want your audience to keep coming back. Create a regular email and promote new and exclusive content.

Mailerlite is super simple to set up and embed a form onto your website so you can start to capture email addresses. The support is terrific, with fast responses to any questions you have. Did we mention that it’s free?

In all honesty, we recommend that you sign up for their paid service because you can send emails without the Mailchimp branding, and there are many additional services like sending emails at specific time zones.

Why are these tools essential?

These 4 must-use audience-building tools for content creators will help you ensure your website is optimized for search, provide you with data to improve your content and discover the correct search terms used by your audience.

Building an email list is vital for all content creators.