Congratulations on starting your brand new blog! Whether you’re looking to share your thoughts and ideas, start the next big website, or promote your new startup, blogging and content creation is the best way to go about it.
If you want to drive readers to your blog, and hopefully convert them into customers, the key is creating high-quality sites. They need to be engaging, informative, and easy to read. If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. Below is a collection of twelve content creation sites that we have personally put to test. Try them for yourself and see just how far they can take you.
Video Marketplaces Sites
Video is becoming the most popular way of creating content on the web. It’s instant, fun, and one of the quickest ways of getting your thoughts and ideas across. Creators on sites such as Youtube have discovered that they can cultivate a following of dedicated fans, just with a little hard work and creative thinking. These sites can help you do the same.
1. Video Scribe
If you’re just starting out, we found this tool to be highly useful and easy to use. Video Scribe lets you create whiteboard videos using their templates, meaning even if you have no experience in video creation, you can still create something fun and engaging with little effort. You start with your images and text, add in your animation times, then lay your voiceover and even music, and it’s ready to go! The service is free to use for seven days, and when your trial is over, you can buy a subscription for a reasonable fee.
2. Pond 5
As much as we’d all like it, we can’t send out film crews out to get all the footage we need for our videos. Pond 5 is a great way to buy in the footage you need, quickly and easily for one of your sites. All you have to do is type in the kind of footage you need, and you can choose from a large library of clips that are yours for a small price. There’s even public domain footage, if you’re looking to save money. When choosing your footage, you can mouse over the preview to get a look at how the video plays before buying it.
3. Video Script
Any good video starts with good writing, and if you’re not 100% confident on how to write one, this service can help. Video Script solutions provide a solid basis on which you could make your videos. Send them the basic structure, topics, and products that your video needs to refer to, and they can give you a script that you can work from with ease.
4. Fotalia
Fotalia is perfect for people who are just starting out on their new blogging venture. It offers royalty free videos for a low price, meaning that you can use super high quality clips in your videos without blowing your budget. You can pay for packages from as little as $14, so there’s a package for you and your sites. We found that these professional videos clips add a legitimate touch to your site, which is incredibly useful when you’ve only just started out.
Text Content Marketplaces
The most content that will make up any site will be your blogs and other texts. Writing content can be a real tightrope to walk, as you try and offer useful and interesting articles to read, while ensuring that you’re not filling the sites with meaningless bulk. When done well though, your text will offer your readers information that they can use, and that they can share with others to spread the word of your venture. If you’re too busy to create regular blog posts, or feel you wouldn’t be able to do them justice, these services can help you out.
5. Custom Writing Service
Keeping your blog updated regularly is the key to keeping the readers coming back for more. If you’re like us though, you’ve probably found that that’s more easily said than done. When life gets in the way, or your work starts picking up, blogging is the first thing to get shoved to the bottom of the to do list. When this happens, writers from this Custom Writing Service are the best people to turn to. Send them the outlines and topics of the blogs you want written, and they can create some high quality posts that are ready for publication as soon as you receive them.
6. Content Mart
Want to find a copywriter who you can really develop a relationship with, and work with to create great content for one of your sites? Content Mart is one of the best ways to find them. All you have to do is post the job you need to be done, and you’ll receive bids from talented and experienced copywriters. Pick the writer that you feel fits the job best, and away you go. You’ll even get a 100% refund on the work if you feel it doesn’t completely fit the order you gave.
7. EssayRoo
A good blog is a blog that has been proofread and edited multiple times before it hits your sites. As tempting as it is, hitting ‘publish’ right after you’ve written your post is never a good idea. If you’re not all that confident in your proofreading skills though, what do you do? We found that Australian writing service EssayRoo is great for editing your posts for you. Simply send them over, and they will go through them carefully, making sure no error goes unnoticed and send you back a post that’s grammatically perfect.
8. X-Essays
The one problem that plagues all of content creators is plagiarism. Everyone dreads the idea of being told their work is too derivative of somebody else’s. Plagiarism can happen accidentally, but it can make your work look as if it’s been lifted directly from somewhere else, making you look as though you don’t care about the content you create. If you’re worried about your work, there’s a solution. We’ve used X-Essays to check our writing for plagiarism, and it’s a quick and simple check that gives you peace of mind as a writer.
Photo and Illustration Marketplaces
Photos and images are the icing on the cake for your site. The visuals you use will reflect your values and vision, so picking the right ones to use can be a minefield. You can, of course, go out there and create your own images, but what if your photography or illustration skills aren’t up to scratch? These services are the best places to buy in those all important images.
9. Shutterstock
This is one of the most well-known image distribution services out there, and with good reason. The images they provide are super high quality, relevant, and up to date. Shutterstock images are used on many well-known sites. If you need just a few photos, you can buy a reasonably priced image pack, but if you’ll need images more often, there are monthly price plans you can take advantage of. What we didn’t know until we tried it was that Shutterstock offers free tools for its users, including image editing tools, curated collections, and tips and tricks in its blog.
10. Photodune
If you’re watching the pennies, this is a great service to use. Photodune has a huge library of royalty free stock images, some that cost as low as $1. If you’re just looking to try them out, or really need to watch your budget, there’s a wide range of free to use images too. We found the images to be good quality, and they are easy to download and try out in your own content.
11. EyeEm
EyeEm uses the work of some of the most creative photographers on the web. If you’re aiming to create an artistic, bespoke look to your sites or blog, this is the service that you’ll want to use. Their pricing plans are great if you just want to buy a couple of photos, as they price per photo. If you’re handy with a camera, you can even sell your own photos through the site.
12. Creative Market
Making your website stand out from the crowd is a tougher and tougher job, thanks to the amount of businesses and individuals who create sites every day to promote themselves. One of the best ways to show you’re the best is to use unique design tools to make your sites visually interesting. Creative Market offers some of the best tools available, including fonts, PowerPoint templates, and logo creators. Buying them and implementing them with your own content is simple to do, and really does make a difference to your site.
With these sites now at your disposal, your content will now be high quality, interesting, and all importantly, keep your readers coming back. You’ll also find that with the right combination of outsourced copywriters, images and video creators, you’ll have the time to oversee your site, all while getting on with what you do best.
