Ben Sibley 
Content marketing took the world of digital marketing by storm.
These days, it’s as common as any traditional method for driving sales growth. But if you want to succeed with content marketing, you need the right tools.
The great news is that there are loads of free tools available for WordPress site owners.
The content marketing plugins listed here can help you plan your content, track your analytics, collect email addresses, and much more.
Keep reading to find our top recommendations.
1. Independent Analytics
If you’re looking to grow your business with content marketing, we think you’ll love our plugin, Independent Analytics.
Independent Analytics is an alternative to Google Analytics that is GDPR-friendly, performance-optimized, and tracks visitors automatically once installed.
As a content marketer, you’ll enjoy that you can see all your posts and pages listed by title in the analytics dashboard:
The filter system makes it easy to drill down into specific blog posts, articles by certain authors, or posts in a particular category. You can even filter by the publication date, which is invaluable for checking for articles that need republishing. This isn’t possible with tools like Google Analytics that don’t know when each article was published.
We think it’s an awesome tool for content marketers, but you don’t have to take our word for it; it’s completely free to use, so give it a try for yourself and see what you think.
Get started with Independent Analytics
2. MailOptin
MailOptin is one of the best email marketing plugins on the market, and it’s free!
This newsletter plugin lets you to create beautiful, customizable opt-in forms and add them to your site. There’s both a widget and shortcode for placing the form where needed. You can also get the popups and slide-in options by upgrading to the Pro version.
MailOptin will help you generate leads from every blog post you write, which is critical if you want to get business value from your content. You’ll have no trouble integrating it with whichever email service you prefer because it’s compatible with over 50+ of the top platforms, such as Mailchimp, GetResponse, and ConvertKit.
3. Ultimate Blocks
If you’re struggling to create highly readable and compelling content, which is simultaneously SEO and conversion-friendly, check out the highly-rated Gutenberg plugin, Ultimate Blocks.
The Ultimate Blocks plugin makes it much easier to craft conversion-worthy content. Some of its exciting blocks are the rating, review, button, call-to-action, feature box, countdown, and testimonial blocks.
Other blocks like content toggle, progress bar, howto schema, styled list, tabbed content, and number box can increase content readability and SERP feature. Ultimate Blocks is also a lightweight plugin that will never slow down your website, while including loads of customization options for things like colors, fonts, layout, and alignments.
4. Strive Content Calendar
Strive is a beautiful and responsive blog calendar plugin that makes planning your content schedule easier than ever.
The calendar appears right inside your WP dashboard, so when you re-schedule a post in the calendar, it actually gets re-scheduled in WordPress. This means you don’t have to worry about syncing WP with your calendar – it’s handled automatically.
Strive includes other valuable features for content marketers, like the ability to create private revisions of existing posts and checklists that show up in the post editor.
If you want to keep your content marketing efforts centralized in WordPress, Strive will make this much easier.
5. LuckyWP Table of Contents
When it comes to creating a ToC for your blog posts, there’s no better solution than the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin.
If you write long-form content, you might want to include a table of contents in every post. The ToC gives readers an idea of what to expect and it helps visitors from search engines locate the exact info they’re looking for.
This plugin by LuckyWP can automatically insert a ToC in all of your posts because it reads the headings in the content and generates the ToC dynamically.
In terms of customization, there are custom colors, and you can choose which headings to auto-include in the ToC, which is extremely useful. For instance, you might find that your articles have lots of h4 elements that clutter the ToC and choose to hide them so that only the h2 and h3 elements are used.
A table of contents is a good idea for most blogs, and this plugin makes it effortless to add one to every post.
6. Novashare
Modern content marketing places an emphasis on SEO, but social media marketing is also a critical component.
One way to boost your social presence is to include share buttons in all your posts so that readers are more likely to share your content with their followers, and one of the best plugins to add these buttons is Novashare.
You can see the buttons added by Novashare in this post. There’s a floating sidebar, plus a row of buttons above and below the content. The buttons are stylish, customizable, and take just minutes to add to your site.
While people don’t use share buttons as frequently as they used to, the presence of the buttons can remind them to share in their preferred way. Additionally, seeing these icons lends a sense of familiarity and can make your website appear more trustworthy and legitimate.
There are lots of social sharing plugins available, but Novashare is our favorite because of its customizability, ease of use, and negligible impact on site performance.
Find your favorite new content marketing plugin
These are some of our favorite plugins for improving our own content marketing strategy, and the best part: most of them are free!
There’s no risk in trying these plugins to see what they can do. You’ll probably want to install a few of them, or even all of them, to get the best results.
If you’d like to learn more about Independent Analytics before trying it, we have loads of additional screenshots and tutorials.
Get started with Independent Analytics
And if you have any questions, feel free to post your comments below.
Thanks for reading!
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