Content marketers who research topics, look for guest post opportunities, compose articles, and even make instructional videos could improve their productivity with a few helpful Chrome browser extensions.
The folks creating, publishing, and distributing content as part of a business’s marketing strategy have lots of tasks to complete. Fortunately, Chrome allows for extensions, several of which can be very helpful in my experience. What follows are five Chrome browser extensions for content marketers.
1. Save to Pocket
Pocket is an application and web service that lets a user save any web content — article, video, image — to read or view later. In fact, the service was called “Read It Later” when it launched as a Firefox extension in 2007.
Today, Pocket is owned by the Mozilla Corporation and is available on many platforms and in many formats, including as a Chrome browser extension called “Save to Pocket.”
For content marketers, Pocket is an excellent way to collect research material.
As an example, imagine that you are the content marketing manager for an online kitchen supply store. You want to encourage folks to cook at home. So you decide to launch a series of articles about the health benefits of home-cooked whole foods.
As you research, you look for articles on Google or DuckDuckGo in your Chrome browser. But if you’re like many folks, you don’t initially read every article from top to bottom. And you don’t watch every video from beginning to end as soon as it shows up on a search results page. Rather, you collect several articles, studies, and videos and review it all later.
Thus when you see an hour-and-eight-minute video presentation from Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. about how diet can prevent and reverse heart disease, you save it to Pocket. Then, you view the video later, with the other home-cooking material you saved.
2. Soapbox by Wistia
Wistia is a video hosting and tracking platform that launched in 2008.
Wistia has an easy-to-use Chrome extension called “Soapbox” that allows marketers to record their screen and their web camera at the same time. This can especially help B2B businesses.
Say you have a wholesale ecommerce company providing parts to mobile bicycle shops. Your customers use an app to keep track of their inventory, set up automatic replenishment, and search your catalog for special orders.
Part of your job is to create videos that explain how to get the app installed and configured. Rather than hiring a production company, you can use Soapbox to create and edit presentations.
The tool could be used for any tutorial video that requires showing your screen and yourself.
3. Grammarly
This service is a lifesaver for anyone who writes. Its benefit goes beyond a Chrome extension to improve writing on many text editors and applications.
For example, the Grammarly Chrome extension will monitor your spelling and punctuation in Google Docs, offering suggestions or corrections in line. Grammarly will also work with WordPress, Hootsuite, Facebook, and several other editors that load in the browser.
The premium version of Grammarly can even help not just punctuation, but also the overall quality of your writing.
4. Hunter
In some ecommerce companies, content marketers may be responsible for link building via guest posts and occasional public relations. It might include conducting interviews or obtaining background info about a business.
Hunter is a Chrome extension that helps discover the email addresses associated with a website. Simply navigate to that site, click the extension icon, and Hunter will provide you with a list of email addresses, names, and titles. It will also tell you how many sources it used to find each email address.
Hunter will display publicly available email addresses associated with a given website.
Imagine you are a content marketing specialist at an online auto parts and accessories store. You found an impressive blog about financial planning, and you want to pitch an article that provides estimated annual maintenance and repair expenses for the 10 best-selling sedans in the U.S. The blog doesn’t have a contact us page nor does it have a “write for us section.” But you’ve installed Hunter, and you use it to obtain a list of potential contacts.
5. Ahrefs Toolbar
The Ahrefs toolbar, like any toolbar, takes up a fair amount of real estate at the top of a Chrome browser. But in exchange, it puts several of Ahrefs most popular reports directly above the page in view.
This includes a broken link report, which content marketers can use to detect broken links that might trip up their audience. Or you could use the broken link report as part of your content outreach, identifying sites with broken links and offering them a replacement from your own site.
Or you might use another report to find potential search-optimization problems with an under-performing article.
