Whether you’ve been a freelance copywriter for a long time or you’re just starting out, you’re probably familiar with the constant battle to be more productive. Especially as a freelancer, you only get paid if you finish the project, so the faster you can get work done, the more you earn.

On top of that, you also have to remain accurate and creative to ensure that clients are satisfied and come back to you for future work. This constant balancing act may lead to burnout over time. Luckily, there are multiple tools that can help you avoid that.

Tools for Article Ideas

While there are many tools to help with freelancer productivity, in this article, we’ll focus on ones solely related to writing. But before you can even start writing a new newsletter, blog post, or feature article, you need to come up with ideas.

Sometimes, this is the part of the work that takes up the most time. This is especially true if you need to write about a topic you’ve never written about before. It’s also hard to come up with new ideas if you’ve written about the same field for years.

1. AnswerThePublic

Answer The Public page

The best way to create content that will benefit your client is to find out what people are searching for. One of the quickest ways to do that is to type a general subject in Google (such as “innovations in Tech”) and to see what comes up.

AnswerThePublic, however, takes this search a few steps forward. Once you type in your main keywords, it provides you with the most searched questions and phrases in that area. Those can not only give you great ideas for articles but can also just be the headline for the article.

The website is free to use. However, you only get two free searches a day, so try to use them wisely and pick the most relevant word for your search.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush keywords

If you can’t find an idea with the previous tool, SEMRush might be a good place to look next. This website is widely used by SEO experts, which is why it contains a variety of tools — from competitor research to PPC and social media marketing. But you don’t have to be an expert to derive benefit from it as a copywriter.

With a free account, you can search the top bar for a keyword related to a broad topic. This will generate Related Keywords, which can help you zero in on the right idea.

Even better than that is the Content Marketing menu. There, with Topic Research, you can find out what other websites are writing about the topic to spark up your creativity.

SEMRush Content Marketing Tools

Tools to Help You With Writing

After you find the right idea, it’s time to buckle down and actually write the content. This is the stage that some writers find the most painful, but there are some tools to navigate these waters as well.

3. Qwated

Qwated experts tab

When you’re not sure how to open an article, an expert quote can be the easiest solution. Those can also help you structure your article with ideas for subjects to explore as sub-headers. But finding an expert can be time-consuming if you don’t have a list of people on hand.

Qwated is a website that connects journalists with trusted experts; there are plenty of people who’d be happy to contribute to a blog post in exchange for a link to their website.

It’s free to use and incredibly easy. You simply navigate to Experts and input the person you’re looking for, before asking what you want to ask them. You will receive the answers to your inbox, and usually, people respond pretty fast.

4. Quillbot

Quillbot article checker

Let’s face it—as creative as copywriters are, they are not usually inventing the wheel. Most chances are that someone else has already written about the topic. This can work to your benefit because you can draw ideas from other articles, and expand on the topic.

However, if you find yourself struggling to rephrase something you read somewhere else, there’s a tool for that as well. When you paste any text in Quillbot, it will offer you a different way to say it, which will ensure you don’t plagiarize other writers and save time in the process.

5. Check-plagiarism

check-plaigirism content checker

This comes as a direct continuation of the previous tool. Even if you use Quillbot to ensure you don’t copy-paste information from other websites, some sentences may remain the same. And even if you wrote the content in your own words, you may have some sentences stuck in your head, which you don’t realize you duplicated.

With Check-plaigarism, you can be completely sure that your text is original. We all know that Google doesn’t like duplicates, not to mention the legal troubles you can get into if your client runs this check and finds that the content is not 100% original.

6. Readable

Readable content checker

Once you finish your article or any type of text, it’s time to check how good it is. You probably already use Grammarly or other useful Chrome extensions for writers to make sure you don’t submit anything with typos or grammar mistakes.

Readable adds another layer to those spell checkers. It also looks at how long or complicated your sentences are and how accessible your text is. If you want more people to read it, sometimes it’s best to keep the language relatively simple.

This tool scores your text and helps you understand where you can cut down, what needs clarification, and what just doesn’t work.

Don’t Forget to Take It Easy as a Copywriter

As much as you may want to finish work quickly, and move on to the next project, sometimes you just need to take your time. While these tools can help you become more efficient, they don’t replace what you bring to the table as a writer.

So if you feel that you can’t come up with ideas, or you have writer’s block, maybe try to leave that project alone and come back to it another day. Use these tools to help you progress, but remember to also take a break once in a while and recharge.