Every Content Marketer knows that time is money.

Between strategy, scheduling, writing, formatting, posting and promotion there just isn’t enough hours in the day – so any tool that saves a minute or two per post can make your content machine run that much smoother.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of WordPress plugins out there purporting to be THE tool to maximize content marketing efficiency, so here is a short list of 5 simple tools to ease the content marketing process, tested and suggested by experts. Give them a try, and give us your suggestions in the comments below. Maybe your favorite tool will be added to the list!

Managing Your Schedule With Editorial Calendar

Suggested by Sitepoint and Quicksprout

This plugin gives you an overview of your blog, when each post will be published, and features an easy drag-and-drop interface. It’s basically just a calendar with scheduling functions, but this no-frills approach gives you exactly what you need in an editorial calendar, and nothing that you don’t!

Curate Content Faster and Easier with MyCurator

Suggested by Sitepoint

Often, we content marketers like to create posts of simple summaries and excerpts of content we have seen elsewhere. It’s a great strategy for quick content creation, and lets you share what you’ve been reading with your audience. MyCurator comes with a simple bookmarklet to allow you to curate content while you browse, then pre-fills your posts with images, attribution links and an excerpt that you can customize. This takes a lot of the headache out of curation, as you don’t need to worry about finding and saving images, managing links or copy-pasting formatted text from someone else’s site! This plugin works with any language, and you can classify articles based off relevance.

Master Calls-To-Action With WordPress Calls To Action

Suggested By: Neil Patel

Great content is worthless if it doesn’t help you move users along your funnel! WordPress Calls To Action helps you create simple, beautiful calls-to-action with a visual editor that supports pop-ups, A/B Testing, conversion rate tracking, and more! You can create your own if you like, or use and customize any of their extensive library of existing calls-to-action.

Make Sharing A Breeze With Monarch Social Sharing

Suggested by: Blogging Wizard

Social Sharing is a key to getting more visibility for any of your content, but many sharing plugins are clunky, over-engineered, or simply ugly. Not so with Monarch! This plugin helps you preserve the look and feel of your site with a customizable floating social sidebar. Also featured are pop-ups and flyin sharing tools which can be triggered when a user reaches a certain point of your post. Not much more to say with this one, it’s simple, attractive, and meets the need beautifully!

Manage Your Link Profile with Link Patrol

Suggested (and built) by: Search Engine Journal

As you build your content library, you will have more and more links leading out to the sites you’ve relied on for sources in the past. Of course, the internet is always changing, and a site that was high-quality last year might be Spam Central next month! The last thing you want is a a link to an unreliable site, but manually checking your link profile on a regular basis is the kind of mind-crushing tedium that drives Content Marketers insane. Luckily, Link Patrol is here to save the day! After installing this plugin, you will be directed to scan all the links on your site (This only needs to be done once, after the initial scan all new links will be added automatically.) The data is pulled into the LinkPatrol Report, sort links by domain, and flag troublesome links. Once you have identified bad or broken links, you can simply nofollow or remove individually or by domain. It’s that easy!

There you have it! These simple tools can shave precious minutes and hours off your Content Marketing process, help your sites go farther and do more, and make your site an awesome hub to delight your users.

Let us know what you think, or if there are more amazing tools to add to the list.

All plugin images provided by the plugin creator.