The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

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The Year of Slop

SEO bait, syrup sneakers, and more.

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Easil

In the interest of becoming masters of IG Stories, we came across this intriguing tool – Easil gives you the ability to create branded or episodic content for Instagram stories. Plus, there’s a free version!

Here’s a bit of what you can expect from Easil:

Get access to 3500+ on-trend templates that can be edited with a few clicks.
Easily resize and repurpose templates for social media, posters, banners, menus, infographics, GIFs, and more.
Automatically pull colors from images with the Color Palette Generator to get the right colors every time.
Give your whole team can access to brand assets like branded fonts, colors, logos, or imagery.

Organize it All

Speaking of being more productive… planning out your day can be a bit easier using Todoist. When your mind is flying in all directions, this tool can help you gain clarity and organize your tasks. After all, small steps every day add up to big achievements over time. Here are a few of the features:

Get a clear overview of everything on your plate.
Easily organize and prioritize your tasks and projects.
Divide and conquer your daily tasks in shared projects.
Set daily and weekly goals, and visualize your productivity trends.

The Brand Grader

We all love a solid tool and seeing that the Brand Grader comes from Mention we’re feeling pretty good about this one. This tool lets you…

access any brand’s reputation online
seamlessly share results with your team
monitor your competitors

With this info, you grab a snapshot of how your brand performs online and the actions you need to take to improve it.

Content Decay

Let’s face it, quick wins in marketing are hard to come by. When there’s a tool that eases our workload, we’re all about it.

One way to cash in on a quick win is through refreshing old content pages. Doing this can help you increase traffic and reach higher rankings. And Content Decay by Clickflow does the initial research for you.

Connect Content Decay with your Google Analytics and Search Console data. Once connected, it finds pages that lost the most search traffic since peaking. You end up with a report of page listings that could use an update.

Not too shabby, right?

Rank Math

So you want to optimize your pages to rank higher in the search engines? Don’t we all, friends. Don’t we all.

Luckily, we’re hearing great things about Rank Math. It’s a free WordPress plugin that helps with writing SEO-friendly content and ranking higher in search engines. Just to name a few basics, you could…

Add titles, meta descriptions, and other meta tags
Redirect URLs
Find and fix dead links

Q&A Hub

Speaking of supercharged content… Brainstorming fresh content ideas that are both helpful and relevant can be a more daunting task than it sounds.

One place to look is inside Quora. If you don’t know, Quora is a hub that lets users ask questions and receive answers. It’s a pretty useful tool for content marketers to discover what kind of questions their audiences are asking.

Search for your industry or relevant topics and find discussions to help you with blogging inspiration. Plus, you can share your content and gain awareness by answering questions too.

Cliche Finder

There are times for fluff. Like sandwiching fluffy marshmallow sweetness between chocolate and graham cracker then roasting it over a roaring fire in your back yard. Anyone else counting down the days to summer campfires?

But back to business. There are places where fluff doesn’t belong, such as in PR pitches about your business’s stance on COVID precautions. We came across this nifty tool that gets the fluff out of your writing. It’s called Cliche Finder.

This free tool finds and highlights clichés in your writing. Your writing should improve as Cliche Finder identifies and helps you eliminate words, expressions, and phrases that are trite, stale, or overused.

WordPress Plugin: Icegram

We’re all about WordPress plugins and Icegram is another one of our favorites. With it, you can easily set up awesome opt-ins and CTAs to turn visitors into fans. Here are just some of the features you get with this multi-purpose plugin…

Grow your subscriber list by choosing from four different attention-grabbing, high converting email opt-in forms and message styles
Display powerful call to action buttons and drive visitors to any page you like.
Easy integrations with email marketing services like Email Subscribers, MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, and InfusionSoft
Mobile responsive design
Unique Headline Generator that creates engaging headlines – so you get a copywriting headstart
Decide where and when to show your campaigns and opt-in forms whether it’s on specific pages, categories, or posts; to certain users; on a specific schedule, via shortcode.

Free Google Ads Performance Grader

Interested in a second opinion with your Google Ads? WordStream’s performance grader can help ya out with a free, detailed review that involves areas like…