By Ali Lawrence

Ali Lawrence is a content specialist for an Internet marketing agency and blogs in her free time at MarCom Land about online PR, copywriting and content marketing. Her articles have been published by Muck Rack, SEMrush, and Spin Sucks.

Connect with Ali on Twitter @Ali_MarCom
Blog: marcomland.com
Read more of Ali’s articles on Contently: alicialawrence89.contently.com
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Content doesn’t come easily, but for most brands, it’s an essential way to drive Web traffic and to influence visitors. This means that for every article that one of your site visitors comes across, hours probably went into coming up with the topic, doing research and putting together what’s on the screen.

As someone who writes and oversees marketing content for a living, I get it. I’ve been there; I am there, every day. There’s not a lot of time to waste when I’m on deadline and my company, and my clients, have needs. That’s why I was excited when I found out about Inbound Writer, a tool that promises it can predict whether the topic you’ve been thinking about pitching – or writing – is worth your time or not.

What is Inbound Writer?

Put simply, Inbound Writer is a subscription-based tool – ranging from $200-$500 per month – that provides predictive analytics for content. It uses information garnered from the target publishing website and specific topic popularity to determine whether or not an article will perform well or fall flat.

This is big – anything that promises to save time that would otherwise be wasted is worth a try in my book. In fact, Inbound Writer promises to save countless hours while driving two to four times more Web traffic. It’s also the only tool currently available that predicts outcomes before content is even written.

How does Inbound Writer work?

Inbound Writer operates with four key capabilities. It predicts outcomes, reviews previous work, suggests topics and provides authoring guidelines.

To start, users enter the topic that they’re interested in writing about, along with information relating to which page that topic will be published on. From there, Inbound Writer provides scores about how popular that article is likely to be along with predicted traffic and engagement levels.

The site then provides suggested topics – based on the original idea – along with predicted popularity scores, as illustrated above. When a suggested topic is clicked on, authoring guidelines appear that provide keyword analytics – what should be included, what is disposable – along with insight into the composition of the article in question.

Along with being simple to use, the tool is valuable to those that don’t have experience with keyword research and analyzing their own content. Users can scan their past articles to find out what’s garnered the most attention, and what could have performed better. This provides important audience insight – by understanding what pieces have appealed to visitors in the past, you’ll learn more about which topics and structures are most appropriate for your website.
Not all of my ideas – or any writer’s ideas – are golden. We miss the mark sometimes. When that happens, a lot of energy and time is wasted that could have been spent on more valuable endeavors.

Inbound Writer helps take away the questions associated with coming up with topics and makes the pitching process easier by suggesting multiple topics for each single idea that I search.

If you struggle with coming up with solid ideas and doing keyword research, Inbound Writer might just be the tool for you (if you have the money to spend on it every month). However, for those who know how to do longtail keyword research and have already invested in tools like Buzzsumo and SEMrush (which can also help determine great topics/keywords) the cost may not be worth it. Only advantage would be saving some time in research, since the tool is very easy to use, and being able to track each
post in one convenient interface.

Interested in trying it out? The site offers a demo for interested customers who complete the form on their homepage. Give it a try to find out if Inbound Writer could be beneficial for your brand or blog.