What started out as a service for large media companies looking to manage their content workflow, has now been turned into a portal to help business do the same. Kapost has clearly proven itself through vetted services in helping media outlets pitch, assign, edit and manage payment for content contributors. So why not let them help you do the same?

There are lot of content marketing tools and software – and a lot of them are quite good too. Whether you use tool “A” or tool “B” will depend a lot on your budget and needs. Though chances are that you’ll be using more than just one and often finding that you need to scale between a few depending on growth and content performance.

Even if you decide against going with a platform right now, you need to understand how serious content marketing works through all stages of content lifecycles. And the best way to learn how is to watch the pros in action. Kapost manages the content cycle from content strategy to publishing. They help you harness ideas, organize writers, manage your content and editorial calendar, distribute content across various channels and promote content to generate links.

Business owners that haven’t been convinced of content marketing are usually the types that base activity on return. They only want to partake in productivity channels that offer some calculated promise of ROI. That said, they don’t understand how content marketing and publishing can help them reach that end goal. But Kapost does and they help business owners understand this and weave in a strategy to make content publishing another source of revenue.

Perhaps this is the underlying reason for their success. They’re not just another platform – they’re a system that’s already greased its wheels in newsrooms that demand results. Kapost, and giant media outlets, know that links lead to site visitors. Site visitors become leads. Leads become customers.

But to draw flies to honey, you need to first have that proverbial honey – and that’s excellent content, consistently delivered, networked across other channels through links (which of course offer additional tangent marketing, ranking and SEO benefits). All this may be overwhelming for even seasoned marketers, which is when you’ll find Kapost’s support channel quite useful. They have tips on getting started with content ideas, what you need to know about content types, how to manage publishing, managing payments, managing your CMS, social sharing, dealing with billing and navigating members. For more technical needs, they even have a hefty arsenal of integration troubleshooting tips that help users make sense of analytics and integrate into other CMS like Joomla and WordPress.

Their analytics are noteworthy. Kapost lets you run similar analytics to Google Analytics. Additionally, moderators and contributors can access page views and unique visitors by contributor, post or even category – allowing you to determine what content works best and which contributors are most valuable. Allowing paid contributors to see this information is vital to shaping a qualitative mindset that writes with results in mind. This alone is an often overlooked plus point in most software and methods.

While Kapost’s shift into the business world has been recent, it’s already heralded with success. They were in beta as recently as 2010, raised over $2.6 million to push it forward – with one million more shortly after a beta launch. Since launching in beta, they’ve also offered increased capabilities over their competition.

While the competition is formidable, again the choice you settle on depends on your unique needs. Kapost is a better choice for larger content publishing needs and for clients who prefer content cycles enveloped into one platform.