Here is our curated list of top tools you can consider as a content creator. I’ve divided them across categories for different use cases.
Note: Some of these use affiliate links, so if you buy through our link, we may make a commission (at no cost to you). Thanks for your support!
Content Creation Tools
Google Documents: The go-to software for drafting any kind of content, including textual, podcast, or video scripts, or anything in between. Its collaboration capabilities let you drop comments and discuss specific changes in the document itself.
Grammarly: While not a replacement for the human eye, Grammarly provides a formidable layer of defense against typos and grammatical errors in your writing. It has a range of apps and extensions to help you check not just your Google Docs — but also your emails, text messages, and everything in between.
Consensus.app: A recent addition to my creator stack, Consensus finds research papers on any subject you’re creating content about. It uses AI to provide a solid scientific grounding to your ideas (if there’s relevant research available) — simply when you ask it a question.
Website, Hosting, and Domain
GreenGeeks: The website hosting of choice for us at Elite Cntent Marketer for the last few years, GreenGeeks provides value for money hosting service. Their support is helpful, and I’ve witnessed downtime only once in the last two years.
It further helps that you’re on an eco-friendly web host that puts back three times the power they consume into the grid.
Namecheap: Domains could come bundled together in a special deal with your hosting. But if it doesn’t, Namecheap is an affordable domain registrar for registering a domain name. I plan to use it for all of my domains after Google Domains has been acquired.
GeneratePress: A robust and lightweight WordPress theme with ample customization capabilities, I’ve been using GeneratePress on Elite Content Marketer for a few years now. You can design a professional and elegant website with it, even without using page builders. Oh, and their customer support is super helpful.
Social Media and Design Tools
Tailwind: Tailwind takes care of scheduling pins on Pinterest around the clock, thereby saving you lots of time. And letting you get lots more repins and followers. The company has also integrated Instagram marketing and a suite of AI tools to help you with other marketing efforts.
Tweet Hunter: How would you like to get more engagement and followers on Twitter? As soon as you plug a phrase, Tweet Hunter shows you tweets that got high engagement in your niche. You can use them for inspiration or the tool’s AI writer to generate one (if you face a creative block).
Canva: Canva is the default place on the web for creating graphics for your website and social media. It has a range of templates for all common platforms and use cases to help you hit the ground running. The addition of their suite of AI tools in the Magic Studio has made it even more useful to generate copy or edit your photos.
Koji: A “link in the bio” tool that lets you integrate and sell digital products or services by integrating with various apps, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube among others.
Audience Building Tools
Beehiv: An extensive platform that has a suite of tools to create, publish, grow, and monetize your newsletter. It is superb value for money with a generous free plan for testing its email marketing capabilities.
Discord: If you want to build a community for your audience — around your paid course or membership or even your subscribers — Discord offers some cool tools. It lets you create a “server” and talk to your audience via chat, voice, and video. You can also use its paid subscriptions to offer private events, exclusive content, etc.
Monetization Platforms
Payoneer: An affordable alternative to Paypal, I use Payoneer for almost every for cross-border transaction I make to pay writers and contractors I work with. I also use it to get payments from my clients in USD at a lower fee than most other payment platforms. It also lets you withdraw the money you receive to a local bank account.
Thinkific: If you want to sell online courses or memberships, then Thinkific’s Elearning experience is unbeatable — especially at the price it offers. You can host the content on your custom domain, set up affiliates and coupon codes for your courses, and set up communities for them as well.
Stripe: Touting itself as the “financial infrastructure of the internet”, Stripe lets you create your product catalog, create payment links and invoices, set up recurring payments, and lots more. It’s a popular payment processing application to manage payments for your products, services, store, etc. — over a lot of channels.
AI Creator Tools
ChatGPT: OpenAI took the world by storm in late 2022 with the launch of its advanced language model, ChatGPT. You can use it to execute LOTS of tasks from your creator workflow — including generating content ideas, writing your blog or social media, scripting your next video, proofreading/editing, summarizing content, and lots more.
Synthesia: If you want to stay ahead of the curve, creating AI videos from text prompts, Synthesia is a great platform for the same. It has 140+ AI avatars, supports hundreds of languages, and makes video production accessible to everyone — even if you don’t have actors, cameras, or a studio.
Notion AI: Notion is the gold standard for project management for organizing your projects and tasks, documentation for your processes, and accessing templates by other content creators.
Its AI capabilities help you find instant answers by searching across your docs and projects, writing first drafts for articles, generating summaries and insights from your info, etc.
Chatbase: Want to make your creator expertise available to your audience at scale? Chatbase lets you build a custom ChatGPT on the top of your website or your data (such as email newsletters) and lets you customize its AI as per your preferences.
YouTube and Video Tools
TubeBuddy: TubeBuddy is a great market research and analytics tool for your YouTube channel. It can help you fine tune your content ideas, dissect the popular videos of your competitors, and even streamline your YouTube workflow. Overall a great tool to get more YouTube views and subscribers.
RunwayML: Another great text to video tool with advanced machine learning capabilities. It offers a suite of AI Magic Tools for video editing, including, color grading them with text prompts, blurring faces, splitting your footage into clips, cleaning your audio, and more.
SubMagic: Want to generate YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and other short-form videos with captions? Submagic uses AI to generate transcripts in close to 50 languages, automatically adds sound effects and emojis, auto zoom effects, highlights keywords, and more. It can help you generate more engagement on your short-form content.
Quickvid.ai: An AI video editor, Quickvid lets you repurpose your long-form videos into short ones. You just need to upload your video (or share a YouTube link), then let its AI detect important segments of your video and add captions as well as emojis to them. You can use it to generate social clips quickly.
Podcasting Software
Buzzsprout: If you want to launch your podcast, then Buzzsprout offers an affordable hosting service. It’s easy to use, letting you get on all the prominent podcast directories. It also offers options to get paid support from your listeners and a paid Cohost AI feature to create automated transcriptions, show notes, etc.
Descript: Editing multimedia can be time consuming, but Descript makes editing audio and video as easy as a document or slide. It also offers screen recording, transcription, clip creation, and an embeddable player to host your media on your website.
Riverside.fm: If you’re interviewing guests remotely for your podcast, Riverside offers a powerful studio that can record high quality videos. It separates the tracks for you and the guest, generate transcripts, and AI social media clips.
SEO Software
Surfer SEO: If you’re driving traffic via SEO for your website, Surfer is a must have tool that can help you with on page SEO. It analyses the top ranking results for your target keyword. Then shares insights on the keyword phrase combinations you need to optimize your content for, and give yourselves the best chance to rank in SERPs.
Ahrefs: If there’s one tool most SEOs will know about for dissecting organic competition and planning their content strategies, it’s Ahrefs. You can use it to find —among a whole host of other things — the backlinks and keywords you need to rank for a specific topic.
Creator Burnout Management Tools
RescueTime: To track your time on your laptop and mobile, RescueTime is pretty cool. It works in the background, offers a premium feature “Focus Time” that can block distracting sites for a designated period, and sends weekly reports with your “productivity pulse” and time spent working during the week.
Caveday: Multitasking is one of the quickest ways to feel exhausted and (not) get work done. Caveday is a virtual community of knowledge workers that helps you monotask one 50-minute session at a time and stay accountable while doing so.
You can schedule your working sessions in advance and go in the “cave” facilitated by a host to get some deep work done. For the creator kind of tasks that can feel lonely, I have found Caveday helpful to feel motivated and disciplined in monotasking.