Thanks to the internet, writers no longer have to rely on their paltry royalties from book sales. There are other avenues through which writers can legitimately earn a living doing what they love. Content writing, content marketing, online coaching, public speaking and contests are just a few options available to writers. But for the purpose of this article, we will focus on the opportunities in the content writing and content marketing industry, particularly because these niches are pretty easy to break into and they often go hand in hand.
If you’re familiar with the gig economy, you know that there is a growing demand for content. To meet this demand, business owners are often looking to hire content creators to help them boost their online visibility. Many writers are taking advantage of these opportunities. Again, after the content has been created, someone has to promote and or market them. That’s where the content marketer comes in. To successfully promote content, online marketers often employ a combination of email marketing skills, guest post writing skills and enviable networking skills.
In addition, they need the best collaboration tools they can find. Content writers need these tools to communicate effectively with clients, share content, track work hours and to boost their productivity and efficiency. The same goes for content marketers. Collaboration tools are indispensable because most (if not all) online writers and marketers often work as a team and remotely too. This means that you can be in a team with people who are thousands of miles away from you (yes, in different continents).
This post is for newbies and those who are already working as content creators or marketers, in freelance marketplaces or on their own. Below is a list of the best online collaboration tools for content writers and content marketers.
Google Docs
This documentation tools makes it easier for content writers and marketers to share and manage documents with other team members and their superiors. Every experiences freelancer will tell you that clients prefer to work with Google doc files (be it MS Word Docs, presentations and spreadsheet files). With Google docs, writers and editors won’t have to worry about disk space usage, virus attacks and other problems that arise from downloading documents from the web.
If you work as a blog writer, this documentation tool will be perfect for you as it allows you to create and publish blog posts. It’s free and accessible to writers and businesses on a small budget.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is an easy-to-use time management app that helps to boost the productivity of remote teams. This tool combines a wide-range of business management features such as top-notch time tracking, payroll module, task management, chat monitoring, screenshot monitoring, GPS and desktop monitoring features. Content writers can use the to-do list feature to plan their activities for the day and to track their progress at the end of the day. It’s a fantastic way to stay focused on work and avoid distractions.
Employers also use it to track how team members are spending their productive hours at work. With it’s employee-monitoring feature, employers can check in on members of the writing and marketing team to see if they are really creating content and/or promoting content.
In a nutshell, Time Doctor makes it easier for content writers and content marketers to:
- track time spent at work.
- evaluate the performance of team members.
- generate accurate billing information for freelancer’s clients.
- avoid distractions during work hours
- streamline task allocation and delegation of authority for team members, enabling them to focus on more creative tasks.
Planable.
Planable is the command center of social media campaigns, bringing all of your people and content in the same place. It’s a platform that allows agencies, social media managers, freelancers, marketing and communication teams worldwide to create social media campaigns and exchange feedback in the most visual way.
Planable brings team members, clients and social content on the same page for better, faster brand storytelling.
Brosix
Brosix, an “Encrypted, Instant Messenger Software” for Business, is an essential application for streamlining team communications. It enhances collaborations between writing and marketing team members. Its value-added “Enterprise Management Tool Suite” delivers practical tools that boost the productivity of content marketing managers.
The Enterprise Dashboard provides qualitative and quantitative analyses that effectively summarizes a team’s workload. The dashboard is so effective that it drills down into each project’s specifics and provides a breakdown of Task Team Members and Their Assignments, Completion Milestones, Popular Tags, Charted Project Trends, Associated Files—categorically archived, and much more.
Brosix ensures that content writers can upload, share and comment on files in a secure workspace. With this tool, content writers can work without unnecessary interruptions. Brosix is a great team communication app.
Google Drive
Content writers often need a secure place to store files, and so do content marketers. Sometimes, content marketers want to keep their link tracking sheets and guest post pipeline sheets a secret. With this collaboration tool, team members can take advantage of the free 15 GB storage space where they can store visual images, all kinds of documents, and even software. Imagine Drive is your office store, only it’s in the cloud and team members can access it from any location in the world. Talk about collaboration made easy.
Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that allows team members to plan projects together online. All everyone needs is internet access. With Asana, team members can access vital data that can help managers make important decisions on the projects at hand. As a content writer or online marketer, the accurate dashboard panels will help you manage and allocate tasks. It makes it easier for you to see which team member is handling which content creation project or which article promotion campaign. Asana will show you all this without having to interrupt your team member s work.
Filestage
Filestage is a project management tool that brings order to review and approval chaos so that content writers and content marketers can get the feedback they need to produce perfect work.
The review and approval tool gives content writers and content marketers the ability to share their work with stakeholders in a matter of seconds. Those stakeholders are then empowered to leave accurate and actionable feedback directly on the content to reduce confusion and boost efficiency.
This feedback can be written, or stakeholders can also take advantage of an annotation tool. This simple-to-use feature helps content marketers to collect intuitive feedback on their important pieces of content.
Filestage offers an integrated to-do list, too, so that content marketers can see what they need to do and when. This means that creative professionals never have to miss another piece of important feedback.
Those features are all offered within a clean and secure platform. Content marketers can invite internal and external stakeholders with just a few clicks, so that everybody can get up to speed as quickly as possible. Content marketers can also check project progress at a glance, too.
Essentially, Filestage gives content writers and content marketers complete control over the review and approval process.
Key Features
- Integrated to-do list
- Archive and export comments
- Custom branding options
- Mobile functionality
- 256-bit SSL encryption
What Collaboration Tools Make You More Productive?
There are very many productivity tools that make it easier for remote teams to collaborate on projects. We have only listed the best ones we’ve used or heard about. Now it’s your turn to tell us about yours.
Do you work as a content writer or content marketer? Which collaboration tools made a world of difference for you and your team? Please share your list and your experience in the comments section.
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