This is a guest post by Travis Taborek. Travis is a content marketer and copywriter based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a graduate of General Assembly’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp and has done SEO and content work for business ranging from small tech startups to corporations like TiVo. Read his work here.

Content marketers have their work cut out for them.

They’re tasked with generating fresh ideas for content that stimulates interest in a brand and demonstrates thought leadership consistently, frequently, and at scale.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of productivity apps out there to help keep your mind focused, your writing clear, your headlines eye-grabbing, and your calls-to-action compelling.

To help you do your best work possible, I’ll show you the 10 best productivity apps you need in your digital toolbox.

Specifically, after explaining what productivity apps are, I’ll break each app down into one of four categories – brainstorming, focus, creation, and general productivity – then highlight their features, use cases, and pricing plans.

Just read through the following sections in this guest post for Process Street:

• What is a productivity app?
• The best productivity apps for brainstorming
• The best productivity apps for focus
• The best productivity apps for creation
• The best productivity apps for general productivity
• Put the pro in productivity with Process Street!

Let’s get started!

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This is a guest post from internet marketing specialist Deana Kovač at Point Visible, a digital agency providing custom blogger outreach services. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and singing karaoke – and she just can’t start her day without a hot cup of coffee!

With millions of blog posts being published daily, consumers are exposed to more content than ever before. This is intense competition, meaning not every piece of content is going to stand out.

Statistics show that 65% of marketers rank the production of engaging content as their biggest challenge – yes, churning out quality information can really be a hard task.

The Process Street blog has been going for a while now. Since 2014, to be precise. Along the way, we figured out a pretty solid process for making the most out of old content.

It’s a kind of content optimization: optimize existing underperforming content by making small, but impactful changes.

With a few tweaks to the information and layout that is already there, you can negate the need for time heavy research required for a fresh piece.

Additionally, underperforming content harms your SEO efforts. Google has said as much.

What’s more, recent SEO research suggests that having many low‐value‐add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.

But don’t worry – we wrote this post so that you can follow our process to weed out and rejuvenate your low-value content.

It’s simple really. By optimizing the same content to perform better, you convert low-value URLs to high-value resources. This can prove to be a very rewarding strategy if implemented correctly.

In this article, you will learn how to fix underperforming content through content optimization, the process of which has been split into two stages:

• Content optimization: How to separate good content from bad content
• Content optimization: Our six simple tips

We also go into some depth as to how you might use Process Street to streamline your content creation workflow, by taking advantage of some of our free checklist templates!
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This is a guest post by Ronita Mohan. Ronita is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic and design platform. Ronita is interested in a variety of topics related to digital marketing, visual content, and online engagement, which she enjoys researching and writing about.

Content marketing has certainly become popular.

In fact, it’s become a lynchpin for marketing strategies.

Businesses of all sizes are employing content marketers left, right, and center to ensure that content is created and distributed on a regular schedule.

The purpose of content marketing may have started as a way for businesses to communicate with their audiences, but it has taken on another angle altogether. Content marketing is now seen as a primary driver of SEO and organic web traffic, and content needs to be tailored accordingly.

Unsurprisingly, content marketers are spending huge amounts of time developing blog post ideas that will gain them traction, incite visitors to their websites, and tempt users to use the businesses’ products or services. But without a solid content strategy, the content itself could be insubstantial and ineffective.

That’s why in this informative post I’ll be discussing content marketing in detail, and presenting you with an easy-to-understand, four-step content marketing framework you can follow straight away. Just read the following sections:

• How to improve your content plan
• Content framework step #1: Setting your content marketing goals
• Content framework step #2: Undergoing content research
• Content framework step #3: Establish your authority
• Content framework step #4: Cross-promotion
• Use Process Street to complement this content marketing framework!

Ready to dive in?

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This is a guest post by Nicole Cowart, an online marketing executive. She works at a cloud-based company that offers smart business solutions. She is currently studying for her Master’s degree in Web Development.

Digital marketing is the future of marketing and doing business. Most successful companies currently have their online websites and stores that generate more traffic.

Nevertheless, online marketing is also the right place for beginners who are taking their first steps in the business realm.

Even if you’re not a professional marketer, you can still design and execute a successful content strategy that helps you establish your status in the online world. All you need is a good process for it.

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Data shows that creative design is reshaping products, portfolios, and industry standards at more than 70% of companies.

If creative design is so important, doesn’t it also make sense to invest time and money on writing a good creative brief?

Before the actual work of designing an infographic, launching a PPC campaign, or even beginning to pull ideas together in the early stages, you need to be sure that you have a solid creative brief.

The creative brief is the foundation upon which the work of any creative project will be done, but all too often projects fall short because of poorly written, bloated, non-actionable, ambiguous creative briefs.

And what’s arguably a bigger problem than a poorly written creative brief? The process (or lack thereof) that led to its creation.

In this Process Street article, I’ll try to address the elements that make up a good creative brief, but perhaps more importantly, I’ll look at how to build a process for creative brief writing; one that’s consistent, reliable, and gets the job done.

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I meet so many people who love writing.

Whenever anyone asks me what I do and they find out I’m a writer, they almost always say some variant of the same thing:

“Oh, I would love to write more!”

“I wish I could do that – but I just don’t have time”

“I’ve been meaning to start blogging, but haven’t gotten round to it”

These responses are pretty consistent whether they come from a regular Joe or someone whose business and professional life would benefit from them writing more.

So many companies build a blog and intend to use it properly, only for it to fall into disrepair and get forgotten.

Why?

Because writing isn’t anyone’s core task and is then seen as less valuable.

So what if I told you that you could finish a blog post in 3 hours?

Would 3 hours a week, or even a month, be worth committing to give yourself or your company a functioning and marketable blog? Is that a small enough commitment to open up a new channel or boost your SEO?

It is. You know it. So let me show you how I do it.

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An editor is a writer’s best friend.

For me, that’s literally the case. I’ve known Ben Mulholland since my school days…

But for you, an editor is your best friend because nothing helps a writer grow faster than a great editor.

How will you know if what you’re writing is any good? You write to the best of your abilities, so to you even the most poorly received article was supposed to be good.

An editor, however, will be able to sniff out weakness straight away.

• The opening line is weak
• I lost interest during this paragraph
• You don’t source this quote

And so on…

So you need an editor. And an editor needs a peer editing checklist.

At Process Street, we use checklists for everything we do. We have a pre-publish checklist for blog posts and marketing emails. We have a checklist for keyword research. We even have a checklist for making checklists.

In this post, I want to share with you our peer editing checklist for training writers and editors to become the best they can be, and creating stellar blog content.

Let’s go!

P.S: Scroll right to the bottom for an interactive version of this checklist!
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We’ve all had those days. No matter how hard you try, you can’t focus. Everything is harder than usual and heaven forbid anyone needs you to be creative.

It’s demoralizing, stressful, and makes you incredibly inefficient. That’s why it’s important to know how to get inspired.

A word of warning, however, as this post will give you techniques to help consistently find your inspiration. These tips won’t always work (everyone’s muse is different) and so it’s best to take these practices and experiment to see what works for you.

We’ll cover useful practices such as:

• How to keep a positive mindset and be more productive
• Actions to inspire you whether you’re alone or with others
• How to recapture that spark once it starts to fade
• Changing your routine (how, when, and why)

But enough blabbering – it’s time to get inspired!

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Maintaining a creative mindset is damn hard.

The fear of burnout is enough to sap anyone’s energy. When it strikes, it’s hard to imagine recovering from it.

Projects that start with inspiration can derail at the slightest hurdle, leaving you drained and wanting to give up. You might even start to think that you’ve lost your touch.

I know the feeling all too well.

All too often I’ll dive into a new post, fired up and coasting on my initial momentum, only to get 500 words of a rough outline and then flat-lining. Then the slog begins to finish it since it’s already in the calendar and now has a deadline.

This slowed my progress to a crawl, which I would beat myself up over. This cycle repeated until the stress (among other things) drove me to seek therapy, which I am still undergoing.

What I’m trying to say is that creativity is taxing, scary, emotional work. Some weeks I write 4-5 long-form high-quality articles and still have time left over to give my brain a break. Other weeks, I’ll try not to fall behind, stress myself out and waste a whole week staring at text files full of junk.

So, after recently overcoming a bleak patch, I’m going to tell you what I’ve found helps to keep hold of your creative mindset and keep your flow going. These are tips, attitudes, and practices you can work on whenever you start to feel your work slowing to a grind.

Let’s get started.

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After I accidentally threw my Macbook out of a moving car and couldn’t afford another one, I’d suffered with a Windows machine for 2 years before getting a Mac again.

I made a solemn oath never to use Windows software again, but last week, I did something that really shocked me.

I enjoyed using a Microsoft product. I enjoyed using it even when there was a viable non-Microsoft alternative.

Then why, I ask myself, am I submitting myself to a Microsoft product when I don’t have to ever see Microsoft again?

Two reasons:

1. I have made a terrible mess of my Evernote.
2. OneNote is actually quite good.

In this post, I’m going to share my experiences with Evernote and OneNote, compare them, and give you an idea of how I get value out of them as a writer and note-hoarder spending all my waking hours on a laptop.

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