4 Tools Under $20 That Will Cut Your Content Creation Time In Half
Make technology your friend and master several platforms with these 4 power-packed tools.
Make technology your friend and master several platforms with these 4 power-packed tools.
This is the best time in history to be a content creator.
According to Forbes, the creator market is estimated at around $104.2 billion and is continually growing. Every platform is flocking to support its creators and help them monetize their passion.
Every day, there are around 2 million articles, 720,000 hours of videos, 500 million Tweets, and 2 million LinkedIn posts published on the internet. If you take a long time to create each piece of content, other people who create faster than you will move ahead of the game.
In today’s digital age, we should take help from technology to help us in our content creation as well.
That’s why, in this post, I’ve shared four of my favorite tools that will help you cut your content creation time in half. These tools do most of the heavy lifting, so you can focus on ideating and analyzing audience stats. They are also useful for working professionals and startup owners. Effectively, anyone who’s on the lookout for productivity guides and tools that will help them grow their business better should find these tools useful.
1. Octoparse: Collect and analyze data from any website in minutes.
The first step in creating quality content is to do thorough research. You need to find what your audience is talking about, what’s new and trending in your niche, and how your competitors are engaging with their audience.
Without this research in place, you’d be throwing arrows in the dark!
But going through multiple websites and social media platforms to collect data takes a crazy amount of time and effort. Not to mention, it’s also no fun.
That’s why I use Octoparse for my research.
Here’s what it does
Octoparse is a powerful data-scraping tool that allows you to collect data from any website in just a few minutes, without needing to learn any coding.
You can easily select the data elements you want to collect from multiple websites. Within a few clicks, all your data will be ready to be exported in the form of an excel sheet.
Isn’t that amazing?
Let me take you through an example.
Let’s say you need to create content around productivity and you want to know what people on Twitter are talking about it so you can map your content with their interests.
Here’s how you can use Octoparse to extract that information for you:
Step 1: Download Octoparse and enter the “Advanced Mode” to create the task. Then go on Twitter and search for #productivity. Copy the url and paste it in the “Website” box.
Step 2: Tap on one of the Tweets and click the “Select sub-elements” option to select all the Tweet content.
Step 3: Now click on the “Select All” option. You can see the data of the selected Tweet extracted in the table below.
Step 4: Then click “Run” and all the Tweets will appear in the form of a table which you can easily export in an excel sheet, and go through it to get a feel of what your audience is talking about.
That’s how simple it is to collect data using Octoparse!
You can also use it on your competitor’s Twitter or any social media account and extract the content they’ve been posting for a while. This will fill your content calendar with amazing ideas and give you a jump ahead of your competitors.
There’re infinitely other ways you can use this tool and ace your content creation game. Download it here.
Cost
It has a free plan which allows you to get 10,000 records per export with unlimited pages per crawl, which is enough for freelancers, solopreneurs, and content creators.
For large corporations that need to extract data in large amounts, you can consider their premium version which starts at $75/month billed annually with a 5-day money-back guarantee.
Check the whole pricing structure here.
2. Llama Life: Cross off items on your to-do list, one at a time.
How many times did you create a to-do list to get work done, but never *got time* to complete it? And before you knew it, your tasks piled up to become a huge daunting list that now requires you to spend sleepless nights in front of a computer screen.
Quality content needs focus and a calm mind. If you keep abandoning your tasks for the last minute, the content you eventually generate might not be of much value and later, you’d need to spend more time re-doing it.
That’s why it’s important to finish your work on time so you don’t rush it later.
But how to stay focused and motivated to make sure you not only create to-do lists but actually complete them? That’s where Llama Life comes in.
Here’s what it does
Llama Life is a productivity and time-boxing tool that helps you get stuff done, one task at a time.
Unlike other time-boxing tools, it’s designed to feel simple, easy to use, and gives you a sense of calmness when you open it.
You just have to enter your daily tasks, the time you need to complete them, and then arrange them in the order of priority. You can also select a pie chart timer, in case the countdown timer makes you feel stressed.
If there are certain tasks you repeat daily, you can save them in a Preset List as shown in the right panel below. It’ll load all your saved tasks to your schedule automatically.
While working on a task, the soundscapes running in the background helps you stay focused. And on completion, you get an instant reward with confetti streaming down, which gives a huge dopamine kick of getting work done!
What I love the most about this tool is its “end-time” feature. Once you time-block your day, it’ll tell you exactly when all your tasks would end. And if you add or delete tasks from the list, or don’t complete them on time, the end time will change accordingly.
Also, if you move the little stopwatch icon up/down (refer to the image in ‘Step 2’), it’ll give you a different end-time capturing only the tasks above it. This feature immensely helps you manage your expectations right.
Here’s a quick walkthrough:
Step 1: Open Llama Life on your desktop and create your free account.
Step 2: Add tasks to your list along with the duration. If you don’t add any duration, it’ll default to 25 min.
Step 3: Arrange your tasks as per priority and start the timer by clicking the ‘play button’.
Step 4: Complete your tasks with focus, till the timer runs out.
I’ve found that having Llama Life running silently in the background of my laptop encourages me to be more focused and diligent when I’m working. If you’ve been trying to find a perfect tool that really helps you get work done, Llama Life can put an end to that search.
Cost
It gives a 7-day free trial, where you can test and find if it’s the right fit. Once the trial ends, you will default to the Free plan where you have access to basic features. You can then upgrade to an Extra Focus plan starting from just $2.50/month billed annually where you will have access to all features. Check out their price here.
3. Descript: Edit audio + video and transcribe them to text.
There are a lot of publishing platforms that exist today. It’s almost impossible to create content for all of them without burning yourself out. But sticking to just one or two platforms can put a cap on your growth. As a creator, you want your digital footprint as wide as possible.
That’s why it’s important to select the relevant platforms and repurpose your content for them. But the challenge is: creating and editing the audio and video content and then converting them into written content also takes up a lot of time.
That’s where I use Descript. It has made my life as a content creator much easier.
Here’s what it does
Descript is an audio and video editing and transcribing tool.
It has a lot of in-built tools, which makes audio/video editing as easy as editing a word document.
It also has amazing sharing features that make it easy to share my content from within Descript to all other platforms instead of publishing it to each platform one by one.
It’s not only powerful for video creators, but you can easily extract audio from it to publish as a podcast. Then, you can transcribe it to text that you can use as a first draft for your written content.
There are many ways you can use this tool to amp up your content repurposing game. For me, here’s how I use it:
- Think of an idea and outline it on paper.
- Record a candid video, edit it within Descript, then publish it on my YouTube.
- Extract the audio file from the video, edit it a bit, then publish it as a short podcast on my other social media platforms.
- Export my transcript into a Google doc, edit a bit — and my article is ready to be published.
Just imagine: all you have to do is to create a video, and your content for all social media platforms will be ready within a few minutes, without you putting much effort into it.
How cool is that?
Try Descript today. It’s a must-to-have tool if you want to create content faster and establish your authority on multiple platforms.
Cost
It has a free plan that gives you 3 hours of transcription and full audio and video editing. If you want to use more features of Descript, upgrade to their paid plan starting from $12/month. Check the whole pricing structure here.
4. Genei
As I mentioned earlier, research plays a vital role in creating valuable content. You have to go through your competitor’s blog posts, industry news, and research and studies to understand the concept better and find relevant data to include in your content.
But what if you could use a tool that reads the entire content on your behalf and summarizes all the important points of the content to you?
Yes, there’s a tool that can do that magic: Genei.
Here’s what it does
Genei is a tool that summarizes and analyzes web pages and PDFs using AI.
It features cloud-based notes and annotations, document storage, and cross-reference support for multiple resources at the same time.
The AI imitates the human understanding perfectly and collects the most crucial points to help you create high-quality notes and paragraphs in just a few clicks.
It’s also super easy to use. Here’s a quick guide:
- Install the Genei Chrome Extension on your web browser and create an account.
- Open a blog article or a PDF that you wish to summarize.
- Click on the Genei extension on the top right corner of your browser.
- And Voila! Your summary is created.
If you subscribe to the paid web app (which I’d personally recommend), you can also store documents, generate notes, extract keywords with AI, create references, read extracts, and more.
You also have access to Genei’s advanced summarization algorithm, which produces higher quality and more consistent summaries. Here’s a screenshot to show what the web-app interface looks like:
It also highlights the important keywords that the article contains and gives you the extract of the article which you can use now for your research or content creation purposes.
I really love using Genei to finish my reading material faster, also sometimes repurposing my articles to post their summary on LinkedIn and Twitter, and to create my newsletter content out of them.
If you’re not a speed reader and find it difficult to skim through the written content and research material, then Genei is the best tool for you. Install the Chrome Extension and start using it today.
Cost
It has a 14-day free trial where you can learn about the tool and how it’s helping you save time and research efforts. If you think it’s the best fit for your needs, upgrade to their paid plan which starts from $12/month. Check the whole pricing structure here.
Final words
Summarizing, here are the four tools that will help you speed up your content creation game:
- Octoparse: Collect and analyze data from any website in minutes.
- Llama Life: Cross off items on your to-do list, one at a time.
- Descript: Edit your audios/videos and repurpose your content into text.
- Genei: Summarize webpages and PDFs in seconds.
I hope this article has been helpful and you loved the tools mentioned here to create more content in less time. Start using them today and you’ll be surprised at how fast you’re creating content and growing your brand.
Author’s note: Some of the links mentioned in this article are sponsored. But I love these tools so much, I would never have shared them with you if I didn’t think they can add amazing value to your life and journey as a content creator.
Want to be a successful freelancer but struggling to find good clients? Check out my 90-day guide to finding your first high-paying freelance client here. You’ll find 5 pitching secrets, 2 email templates, and a solid framework to get your freelancing career started.
