Are You a Solopreneur or Creator? These Free Tools Will Save You 1000+ Hours
8 handy resources to optimize your efforts.
Allow me to make a blanket statement:
All creators and small business owners are strapped for time.
In the absence of a team (or sometimes even a single employee), creatives and entrepreneurs find themselves with much to produce and little time to do so.
That’s why I want to help you save boatloads of time by providing free resources that’ll complete some of the work for you.
How am I sure that it’ll save you so much time?
It’s simple. The more unoptimized content you have, the slower you’ll make progress and make money.
This means you’ll have to grind for longer to reach the same result as someone who used all the tools available to give their effort the best possible chance to succeed.
Some of these tools are also just handy in that you don’t have to jump through manual labor hoops to get the same result.
Make sense?
Alright, here they are.
Make Thumbnails That Stand Out: Thumbsup TV
One of the most (if not THE) important aspect of growing a YouTube channel is having successful video thumbnails.
For those who don’t know, the thumbnail is the little image that indicates what the video is about (other than the title).
It’s so imperative that you possess stellar thumbnails because bad thumbnails = no clicks = no growth or income.
One of the biggest issues with achieving a good thumbnail is fitting it to every possible device and format.
That’s where Thumbsup.tv comes in.
It’s a neat website that allows you to upload your to-be thumbnail and check what it’d look like in column, sidebar, homepage format, and more.
According to Google, most YouTube users are on their phones. This means it’s imperative to make sure your thumbnail stands out even as a tiny version.
Spice Up Your Content With Eye-Catching Infographics: Piktochart
Piktochart is a free graphic design tool and infographic creator with options for paid plans.
All those simple but beautiful infographics you’ve seen floating around online? Chances are they were made with Piktochart.
But take one look and you’ll see it’s a lot more than that:
Not only does it give you access to graphic and written tools, but it can be used to edit videos as well.
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
Video editing feels complex and daunting? With Piktochart Video, it’s as quick and straightforward as editing text. Automatically transcribe, add subtitles, and crop video to optimize for different social media channels. All in a matter of minutes.
Pretty neat, huh?
Spy On Your Competition’s Success: VidIQs VPH Metric
I’m not a big fan of video keyword research tools. They often contradict each other because they don’t have full access to the YouTube API.
But VidIQ’s YouTube tool has a particularly useful feature. It’s called Views Per Hour.
With this feature, you can see an approximation of how many views a YouTube channel’s most popular videos are getting. Here’s an example I took from the popular channel Kurzgesagt:
Note: you can only see this metric if the channel owner has activated “Make video statistics on watch page publicly visible” in their settings.
This is a great indicator of what videos are already doing well. This gives you something to compare your content ideas to before setting out to create them.
The Pro version of VidIQ will include a detection feature for finding competitor videos that are rising in views per hour. But the free version will give you a neat sample size (among other free features).
Give Your Titles an Emotional Edge: EMV Headline Analyzer
Compared to other questionable headline analyzers, this one has one goal:
Determine if your headline or title will tap into readers’ emotions.
The best marketing is often emotional and intellectual. It moves the customer in some way by tapping into their fears and aspirations.
Just plug your podcast, article, or video title into it and see what happens. A score of over 30% means you’re on the right track.
😉
Rank in Search More Easily: Keyword Golden Ratio + Keyword Surfer
This first part isn’t as much of a tool as it is an equation.
Keyword Golden Ratio or KGR refers to finding a “golden opportunity” within keyword research.
It was coined by keyword expert Doug Cunnington of Niche Side Project.
It is a strategy that revolves around the process of finding target keywords that aren’t covered in-depth by any website online.
You then produce as many of these KGR keywords and machine-gun out content optimized around them to quickly rank your website on Google search and build topical authority in your niche.
This is the equation:
“Allintitle results” refers to an advanced Google search operator to find you the number of pages that contain the exact search phrase in their title.
For example, if your long-tail keyword is “javascript course for beginners,” here’s how you can search for the “allintitle” in the search bar:
allintitle:javascript course for beginners
In the screenshot above you can see 2980 pages have my long-tail keyword in their page title.
Before the next step, you should know that the KGR score you want to be aiming for is ~0.25.
According to Doug, this is why:
If you have a KGR of 0.25 and a maximum search volume of 250, you end up with about 63 allintitle results.
That means that there are only ~63 pages on the internet targeting that keyword phrase by using it in the page title.
With a quality piece of content, you have a really good chance of ranking well amidst only 63 competing pages!
Next up, you have to find the search volume (second part of the equation).
There’s a free Chrome extension for this called Keyword Surfer. On top of other cool features like keyword suggestions, it will give you an estimated search volume score as seen below:
Note: Drop the “allintitle” as it doesn’t work with Keyword Surfer.
As you can see, Keyword Surfer estimated a monthly search volume of 40. This is admittedly a bit hit-and-miss considering paid tools are more likely to have a bigger database to work with. Oh well, onto our final result:
allintitle results / search volume = 2980 / 40 = 74.5The aim was to find a result below 0.25, so this score is pretty garbage. This means this isn’t a keyword you shouldn’t optimize (according to the school of KGR).
Phew. That ended up being a mini 101 on keyword research. But hey, this tool should be pretty helpful if you’re trying to rank your content (which is all of us).
High-Quality & Royalty-Free: Pixabay Video, Music & Sound
Pixabay is generally known among Medium writers as an alternative to Unsplash and Pexels for finding copyright-safe images.
But it can also be used to get some crucial things for video content: footage, sound effects, and music.
As you can see here, it’s pretty high-quality stuff too!
The official Pixabay license (circled below) shows that you can use footage, sound, or music freely for commercial purposes like monetized YouTube videos.
With basically every site charging for resources like this, Pixabay and its generous contributors are a great gift for content creators.
Expand Your Topic Sphere: Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a tool for researching topics that are rapidly growing in search volume as we speak.
It has a premium version, but the free version lets you browse around plenty.
You can sort by category and time as seen below:
Free versions are often a little more cryptic than what you’d like, but Exploding Topics can give you a give an indicator on what topic you’re about to make content on. (Keep in mind that the data is based on American search volume only).
If you combine the knowledge you gain from Exploding Topics with KGR, you can even find a way to capitalize on a trendy keyword that’s just about to blow up.
One-Stop Shop For Video: Social Video Plaza
Now, this is a free tool bonanza.
Social Media Plaza provides you with tools every video creator would find useful:
- Video title generator
- Video description generator
- View to Sub calculator
- Channel name generator
- Embed HTML code generator
- Video title length checker
The last one is particularly useful. Just like Medium headlines, some titles will be truncated depending on the device your viewer is seeing your video.
This can hurt your chances of gaining a viewer due to a lack of complete context. And who wants to click on a fuzzy video?
Social Video Plaza also has free downloadable templates and spreadsheets for thumbnails, A/B testing, video descriptions, scripts, defining your target audience, and more.
Again, if nothing else, the video title checker is super helpful.
All the tools mentioned:
• Thumbsup.tv
• Piktochart
• VidIQ Extension
• AM Institute Healine Analyzer
• KGR + Keyword Surfer (Chrome only)
• Pixabay
• Exploding Topics
• Social Video PlazaIf you’re enjoying Medium, sign up through my referral link. Thanks!
Want to learn everything you need to make a living as a creative solopreneur? Follow my publication here.
