10 Free Content Discovery Tools to Skyrocket Your Blogging Efforts

You’ve probably heard the advice to use content discovery tools to create content for your blog, when you ask someone “I don’t know what to write next?”

That’s the great advice, especially for bloggers who love writing terrific blog posts on daily basis.

Today, I will show you six free content research tools that you can use to create engaging content.

But first…

What is content discovery?

What is a content discovery tool?

A content discovery tool is software that recommends brilliant and personalized content ideas to the users for their query.

There are many free content discovery tools available online that people are using for news articles, academic journal articles to television.

Why should you use content discovery tools?

Let’s get started.

#1. Hunt the viral content topics at Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo probably one of the best content discovery tools available online.

It is content marketers’ favorite content marketing tool.

However, you can use Buzzsumo’s basic features for free. But if you want to use its other amazing features, you have to upgrade your free account.

Let me show you how to use BuzzSumo to find brilliant content ideas.

For example – you have a fitness blog. You probably want search keywords six pack abs, flat abs, burn fat, etc.

Right?

First, I head over to Buzzsumo and enter a keyword “sixpack abs” and selected six months to know how articles related to six pack abs have performed in last six months.

It will give me the idea if I have chosen the right keyword or not.

After that, I look for the content that has lots of social shares.

As you can see, I have some out of the box keywords that I can use to write my next blog post.

Let’s borrow some titles from the Buzzfeed’s articles which have lots of comments.

See what I found:

Another one…

Now, I can use these titles for my blog.

Original Titles:

Modified Titles with keywords found from Buzzsumo:

By now you might have understood how to use Buzzsumo to find amazing blog post ideas.

Now it’s time to move on other next content discovery software…

#2. Find trendy topics on Content Studio

No one likes outdated information. That’s why you need to create content that is in the trend.

This is where Content Studio comes.

It is the one of the best Buzzsumo alternatives and demanding content discovery tool available online.

Content Studio is designed to make data-driven blogging more insightful, relevant and entertaining.

Let me show you how to use Content Studio:

First, head over to the Content Studio and search for the keyword you want to create content around.

Here is the result it provided to me.

These are the top performing articles under mobile SEO in the past 30 days.

By using this tool, you can understand what types of content are in the trend, and how you can write a better article than them.

Content Studio not only helps you find the trending topic for blogs or social media sharing but also allows you to publish blog on Content Studio.

You can even find interesting articles, videos, images, GIFs, and quotes in any industry or niche for sharing.

#3. Dig on Reddit for out of the box blog topics

Reddit is a powerful and very popular social media site, even though its general design is very boring.

It is the first website that runs by its users.

You can create your own group (that is called subreddit) in it and invite others to join.

It’s enough about Reddit.

Now, let’s see how to use Reddit for traffic generating content ideas?

To use it, I head over to its homepage and write the keyword ‘Blogging’ in the search box and enter.

It offered me popular subreddits related to blogging.

I clicked on the first subreddit because it has 10,805 subscribers and it is eight years old.

It means here I can find some good topics for my next blog post.

Here are the blog posts that are doing good on this particular subreddit because people have upvoted on these articles.

You see all the posts people have liked are the case studies.

It means, if I write a case study on my blog and share that on Reddit chances are that article will get some quality traffic and up votes.

#4. Use Right Relevance to see what influencers are sharing

Right Relevance is one of the popular content discovery tools to help you with content discovery.

If you are looking for a free Buzzsumo alternative then this is your tool.

It shows the latest article posted on the web as well as shows how many influencers have shared that post.

So, you can easily understand the quality of the article. And write about on the similar topics on your blog.

#5. Find relevant and updated content with Content Gems

They call it is one of the best content discovery tools.

It scans thousands of articles every day on the search engine and provides you the best results relevant to your search term.

However, to use ContentGems, you have to sign up.

It is a paid tool. But still, you can use it for free.

Here is the pricing plan of Content Gems:

As you can see here are last seven days relevant and popular articles in your niche.

#6. Get the most popular article in your niche by using Alltop

Alltop is a site that aggregates all the top stories from popular sites across the Internet.

This is my favorite site to read some high-quality posts about blogging, WordPress, SEO, and content marketing, etc.

Let me show you, how you can use Alltop for content discovery?

First, head over to Alltop and enter a keyword.

In my case, I entered “blogging” in the search box and hit enter. It brought me all popular categories.

I want to check out blog posts under blogging.

Therefore, I clicked on blogging, and it redirects to another sub-domain.

Here you can see the most popular stories.

Check out those articles one by one and see which suits best to you for your next article.

#7. Use Feedly to feed the fresh content to your audience

Great content ideas come from various sources.

Sometimes you may not go to all the sources to find the content ideas you need someone who does this job for you.

Who can do this job better than Feedly?

Feedly, known as a “news aggregator,” collects, organize, and personalize relevant content from all over the web at a single location that you can share and access simply.

Moreover, it is one of the most recommended free content discovery tools.

Feedly fetches the best content based on your interest and date relevancy.

The good news is you can use Feedly app on your mobile devices to do content discovery.

#8. Social Animal 

Social Animal is the new player of content marketing tools team but more advanced than others.

It not only provides you the most relevant content but also tells you when should you post that to get the maximum response.

Following are some features of Social Animal:

Social Animal brings you the best content for your keyword as well as show the content length along with social counts.

#9. Flipboard (Build your online magazine) 

Flipboard is one of best content discovery platform that most people often overlooked.

In other words, it’s an online magazine that organizes world’s best content for you.

Some people say Flipboard is one of the best blogging apps for mobile devices. You can create your own online magazine for free.

How to create a magazine on Flipboard:

First, you have to create an account on Flipboard.

Once you logged in second step is to click on “Create Magazine” and give it a niche name. Make sure you use a meaningful name as per your niche requirement and keep green button on.

You can create any number of magazines on your Flipboard account.

#10. Scoop it – Find the great content

Scoop.it is a popular content curation tool that publishes content from all around in almost every niche.

Using this tool you can research and publish the best content for your readers.

How does Scoop.it works?

Scoop.it is an advanced content research tool that find and curate relevant third-party content that you can you use for share on social media, create content or save for further read.

It is one of demanding content research tools trusted by 4+ millions professionals and marketers.

Final Thoughts!

Knowing SEO is awesome.

But, writing great content on the right topic is great.

When you mix both, your blogging will reach on the cloud nine.

By using these content discovery tools, you can be able to write some viral blog post as well as curate content.

A successful blogger should be a good content curator.

Now is your turn which content curation tools you are going to use to create amazing content for your blog?