Well, I know you’re probably not ready for another list post after that mega list of writing links I posted yesterday, but I’ve been meaning for a while to share with you some of the tools I use online. You probably already know that I’m a knowledge collector and experimenter with shiny new web stuff. In my bookmarks, I include a ‘tools on test’ folder, which is all the stuff I’m trying out. What’s more important, however, is my ‘tools I use’ folder and I’m sharing some of those tools with you today.

Five Top Tools for Writers and Bloggers

Every Time Zone

Every Time Zone tells you what time it is in every time zone in the world. I work and collaborate with clients and bloggers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa and more and I’m hopeless at working out what time it is in different places. This tool does it for me. I also take advantage of the multiple clocks functionality in Windows 7, so I can see at a glance local time, Eastern time and European time (those are the ones I need most often.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch is a simple way of timing a job. I like the fact that I can pause it if I take a break to make a phone call or look something up online. Sometimes I use it to make sure I’m keeping to the time I’ve allocated for a job. Time is money, after all, and I need to make sure that when I quote, I am accurately reflecting my time investment.

Workflowy

Workflowy bills itself as a ‘brain organizer’ and it’s true that it works well with my creative process. It’s a planning tool. I outlined one of the ways I use it in Book Planning with Workflowy on the Authopublisher blog.

Copyscape

Copyscape. I really couldn’t do my job without this plagiarism checking tool. It’s a good way of checking that posts offered to me haven’t been plagiarized or that content written by a new team member has not over-relied on research sources. (Believe me, that has happened, and Copyscape allows me to send it back for revision before it gets anywhere near a client). I’m an honest person and this ensures that anything that leaves my desk (even if not written by me) or is published on my blog meets my ethical standards.

Trunk.ly

Trunk.ly is a great way to save all the stuff I share. I know people rave about Evernote, and I have flirted with Springpad, but Trunk.ly makes it easy. I just link in my blogs and social media accounts and it aut0matically collects the stuff that I share and presents it in an easily accessible format. There’s a bookmarklet, too, for on the fly tagging and saving of research sources. Update: Since I wrote this, Trunk.ly has been acquired by Delicious, so I’m on the lookout for a replacement.

One Trick Ponies

There are a few other tools I use that do one thing well. I probably use these a couple of times a month.

• Replace smart quotes with straight quotes – useful to avoid that ugly Microsoft Word gobbledygook in posts.
• Remove line breaks
• Strip HTML tags
• Aspect ratio calculator – useful for working out how to resize images or videos to fit a particular height or width.

So these are some of the tools that support my writing. I hope you find them useful, and if you have any favorite tools, please share in the comments. I’m always ready to try something useful.

(Image: scjody)

I’m always a bit sceptical about tools that claim to improve your grammar and, as a result, your writing. Maybe that’s because I’m a professional writer with an excellent command of the language and its rules. (I even know when it’s OK to break them.) But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Grammarly, which claims to be ‘the world’s most accurate grammar checker’, so I decided to check it out. After all, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Microsoft Word’s tool, could it?  According to the site, 300,000 students as well as international business people and bloggers are using it to provide:

• 150+ Grammar Checks – Check your text for the proper use of advanced grammar rules. Get accurate error explanations.
• Plagiarism Detection – Find borrowed text before it gets you into trouble. Automatically generate references.
• Vocabulary Enhancement – Use words that make an impact. Liven up your sentences and improve readability with context-optimized word choice suggestions.
• Contextual Spell Check – Spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context. No more embarrassing typos like then-than, to-two-too, lose-loose.

It can also check citations, and features an in-line editor.

Grammarly in Action

Here’s what happened when I put it to the test.

I pasted a 900 word blog post into the checking window, selected ‘blog post’ as the type of content I was checking, pressed the review button and waited a short time. It found 53 issues, each of which had a pop up card with short and long explanations of the grammar point being flagged. You could even vote on whether the information was useful before moving on. How many of those did I agree with? Here are the notes I made as I was going along.

• Incorrectly saw the ‘in’ in LinkedIn as a preposition at the end of a sentence – perhaps that needed to be added to the dictionary.
• Pronouns – though I didn’t agree with the error it highlighted, it indicated that I could have omitted one pronoun.
• In one sentence, it didn’t pick up that picture was being used as a verb and flagged it incorrectly.
• Grammarly correctly found one missing comma around the phrase ‘of course’.
• Then to the spell check – it didn’t recognize blogging ( in this day and age, come on! ) but at least it offered the option to assume the word was correct.
• Did plain text need a hyphen? Perhaps!
• It didn’t pick up my bullets on copy and paste so incorrectly flagged lower case letters.
• Some people might find the tips on word choice helpful, but didn’t do much for me. When I described something as beautiful, that’s what I meant, not beauteous, divine or lovely.
• Perhaps where I used good, I could have replaced it with brilliant or nifty.

Out of 53 issues, I agreed with 3 or 4, and I loved the ability to save the grammar report as a PDF.

Testing Academic Grammar

My second test was with a dissertation excerpt ( the other categories are academic essay, report, book review, research paper, presentation and business document). It found very few errors, disliked the use of square brackets and ignored Harvard referencing which is common in UK academic institutions. However, it did give examples of how to fix the references using three forms of referencing common in the US. This would be extremely useful to students, who often struggle with this area.

I performed the test again on a piece of writing I knew was flawed (I won’t say who it came from) and it correctly identified spelling and punctuation errors (though I would have loved to see some word choice suggestions. For this person, who struggles to write clearly, Grammarly definitely has some potential benefits.

Good Grammarly Features

Things I liked about Grammarly included:

• being able to see a summary report with one click – there’s a link at the top of the screen
• as much or as little explanation of errors as you can cope with
• the plagiarism checker – I checked this with a post I knew had been scraped and correctly identified it as 100% plagiarized, though it didn’t find the original source
• the fact that you can choose from several different types of documents.
• the ability to ask questions about grammar points from the review screen via a pop up form – answers appear on http://answers.grammarly.com/
• the online grammar handbook – http://handbook.grammarly.com/
• the grammar checker is better than the one in Microsoft Word, in my opinion

Who is Grammarly for?

Most of the writers I know write too well to need a tool like Grammarly, but as a teacher, I knew plenty of students and beginning writers who could have used the help. Like other tools of the type, Grammarly isn’t a substitute for knowing the rules yourself, but if you’re a poor writer, it can help you improve. A year’s subscription will set you back $7.95 a month, but there are 20% increases for quarterly and monthly plans.

When I got the email asking me to take a look at the Blog Headline Action Guide and Toolkit (aff) (by Jered Slusher and Jean Sarauer), I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. In some ways, you could say the information it contains is common sense, but if you are starting your blog and want to draw your readers in, this is a good resource. It’s also pretty useful for bloggers who are feeling out of ideas and creative spark.

What’s Inside

Here’s the first part of the table of contents:

• Why Strong Headlines Increase Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales
• The Essentials of Irresistible Headlines
• 9 Simple Steps to Writing a Great Headline
• How to Evaluate & Transform Your Headlines

The first section of the book takes you through all the places where your blog headline will be seen, from search engines to status updates and more. It explains why it’s essential to use your headlines to draw readers’ and sharers’ attention when there is so much competition.

In part two, the authors highlight some headline writing techniques, citing examples from a wide range of blogs. There’s also a box at the end with the takeaways from those two sections. Part three gives you a 9-step headline writing process, making key points about identifying your reader, making them interested and checking that you’re not making any unsubstantiated claims. Part four picks apart some headlines, using a ‘hot or not’ formula, providing some additional lessons on which headlines work and why.

Taking Action on Blog Headlines

As usual with books of this type, I find the toolkit section most useful. It includes worksheets to allow you to put all the principles in the book into practice:

• Headline Writing Tip Sheet
• The Headline Checklist…
• 9-Step How to Write a Headline
• 5-Step Headline Transformation…

and, best of all:

• 175 Sure-Fire Headline  Formulas

Is It Useful?

I think the value that this book brings is collecting information about headline writing in one handy place. It also gives good guidance for people that struggle with headline writing. Is it worth the $27 price tag? That’s really your call. At the moment, that price includes monthly headline training updates and a 1-on-1 email consultation, so it looks like a good deal to me. If you’re still unsure, perhaps this interview with Jered will help you decide. As for me, I plan to use the Blog Headline action Guide the next time I’m feeling short of headline writing inspiration.

Coming soon: Jered Slusher reviews the headlines on Get Paid to Write Online and assesses why one headline in particular works well.

by Courtney Ramirez

Successful content writing is about two things – using the right keywords and creating engaging content. And the second part is where research can really stump you. There are dozens of ways to find the right keywords and in many cases your client is providing them. But where do you go to find great research to create engaging, compelling and (most importantly) accurate content?

The truth is – it can be hard. With websites like ehow.com and other content farms paying writers a pittance to produce keyword rich content, even the simplest of keyword searches can produce poorly written, barely researched and inaccurate information. It’s gotten to the point where the first page of Google is completely unreliable for some keyword terms.

In addition, it can often be hard to get information from the right perspective that fits your client’s needs and individual perspective. Take global warming for instance. If you’re working on an article from a client that is coming from a conservative point of view, how are you going to find the right resources that support that view?

Fortunately, there’s a new search engine that has solved both of these problems for me, and I hope you get a lot of mileage out of it as well. It’s called Blekko.com and despite the funny name (it reminds me of trying to give my kids medicine) it has some great features that make it an excellent research tool for writers who care about accuracy and perspective.

Blekko.com is good for search for two specific reasons. First, it is being heralded as the world’s first “spam free” search engine. The team at Blekko actively works to eliminate spam from their results. In fact, they have completely banned a list of 20 sites from their search engine results that are considered to be content farms (see the list). This reduces my search time significantly because I don’t have to wade through dozens of results from AnswerBag and other similar sites. If you see a site in the listing that isn’t appropriate, you can click the “spam” link and it will be removed from your personal search results.

On top of this, Blekko categorizes results with what it calls “slashtags” – these take a little getting used to but are really helpful when you get the hang of it. A slashtag is a way of classifying information within the search. So for our “global warming” search, we’d use “global warming/conservative” and Blekko pulls up a list of results from websites with a conservative point of view. The same goes for /liberal or /ecofriendly.

Slashtags can also help you organize information by date, which is critical if your content is related to a specific event and you need to get the latest. Other slashtags can be used to narrow down your results to specific websites (like /youtube if you want to see videos on the topic).

Finally, Blekko makes search easier for me because I can create a customized list of my own slashtags with websites and resources that I prefer to use. While I haven’t used this feature as much, I look forward to exploring it more.

There’s a lot of bad content online – so it’s important to choose your sources wisely for creating the original and engaging content that your clients are looking for. Give Blekko a try and it might make your writing process easier. Be sure to watch the intro video and you’ll be using slashtags like a pro in no time.

Courtney Ramirez is owner and head copywriter at Six Degrees Content, where she blogs about content marketing and connecting with search engines and readers. Follow her on Twitter @CourtneyRamirez or @6DegreesContent.

Google Tools for Writers

I sing the praises of Google’s Google Alerts tool regularly. It definitely makes my job as a freelance writer and a professional easier.

What is it? Google will let Google account holders set up an instant or periodic notification system that tells you via email about certain keywords appearing online with links.

Here’s how I use it in my writing career:

Tracking a Name

By setting a Google Alert for a name, particularly my name, I can see when websites mention that name or when articles get indexed.

My Websites

I have set an alert for some of my more focused website addresses. This way, I can see references to the site on other pages as well as see when I’m getting indexed and this helps me track my search engine rankings. I find this much faster than combing through my site statistics.  (I still do that but this way I see quick alerts daily or even instantly)

Writing Job Alerts

If I want to know about newly listed writing jobs in general or about specific types of writing jobs, I can set an alert for Google to tell me about new listings.  This could help me uncover opportunities pretty quickly and delivers job postings to my email box rather than my having to dig for them through job boards.

Writing Project Research

I set alerts for topics and keyword phrases that I have regular assignments for.  With many clients in different industries who rely on me to write with authority and knowledge about their industry, Google Alerts helps me do that in a way that saves me on research time. I can set file folders up in Gmail to save information to read later and that way I don’t miss important news or information about a topic.

My Articles

At times I’ve set alerts for article titles of mine  or articles I write for customers that I wanted to track online. I once found an instance of plagiarism that I was able to deal with swiftly thanks to Google Alerts.

Alerts can be set and turned off as and when you need them. Google has some great tools for writers. I also use Trends, Adwords, Google Docs, and am starting to dabble with Google Buzz. What’s your favourite Google tool?

Not one finger touched the keyboard in the making of this post. Instead, I dictated the post using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This is not the first time I have used the software. I first tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking back in the early 1990s. I was writing a dissertation and I wanted to save myself some time and trouble by dictating it. It wasn’t that successful. The software did not recognise my speech very easily, it took weeks to train and I spent so much time making corrections that it would have been easier just to type it out. So I was intrigued to see what would happen this time around.

Installation and setup

It only took a couple of minutes to install the files, set up my microphone and do a couple of other housekeeping tasks. Then I started the training process. To my surprise, it was extremely quick. It took no more than 5 to 10 minutes to read through the training file, which also gave some handy tips on how to use the software. Once it had saved my voice files, I was ready to start using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I decided to put it to the test initially by dictating a paragraph or so see how accurate it was. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily Dragon recognised my voice, coped with my UK turns of phrase and generally got it right. There were very few errors. Once I had finished dictating, I closed down the program and it saved my updated voice files. This process enables Dragon NaturallySpeaking to learn and to improve accuracy over time.

Putting Dragon to the test

Then I decided to give it a real test by dictating this post. To get started I clicked on the microphone and the Dragon bar, opened Windows live writer and began to dictate. You can see the results for yourself. While there were a couple of minor errors, I didn’t spend any more time correcting those than I would have done had I typed out the entire post. I would say that I had to make no more than five corrections in this post of more than 800 words.

Mastering voice commands

One area that can be tricky to master is the use of voice commands. These can be used to handle standard program functions, though the standard version of the software does not allow commands for all programs. For example, when I dictate text into Microsoft Word not only is it easy for me to create new lines and new paragraphs, but I can also save documents, format text, create bulleted lists and more. When dictating in Windows live writer however telling the program to save did not work.

Old issues resolved

When I originally bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking, one of the things that annoyed me was how long it took to start the software and how slow it made my computer. Neither of these issues applies now. Another issue that has been sorted out is that the program no longer interprets every breath as a potential word. That means I can take time to think without having to turn the microphone off. That said, the microphone is very sensitive so if you fumble your words by dictating everything that it thinks you have said will appear.

Useful features for writers

There are far too many features in this program for me to list them all in this review, so I have tried to focus on the ones that writers will find most useful. For example, you can import documents so that the program becomes familiar with the phrases you usually write. You can change the program mode to allow you to focus on numbers or spelling. You can correct certain words to help the program understand your local accent.

Health benefits for writers

There is also a lot of additional functionality in other versions of the program, such as the ability to run your whole computer without having to type anything. Even with the standard version that I am running I can see the possibility of reducing the amount of typing that I do — and this is one way in which I see the software being particularly useful for writers. If you are suffering from the occupational hazards of wrist strain, tendinitis or RSI, using Dragon NaturallySpeaking means that you will be able to keep working — or writing — without impairing your health. (Of course, you may find that you drink a lot more. I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time talking when in my home office.)

The verdict

If you are the kind of writer who thinks faster than you can type, Dragon NaturallySpeaking will certainly be useful. It is worth learning the voice commands that work with each program as this will make you even more efficient. But even without those you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking effectively. My verdict, one day of use, is overwhelmingly positive (which is why I’ve signed up for their affiliate program). If this is what you get after only five minutes of training then I am looking forward to seeing how the program improves after days and months of use.

If you have ever used Dragon NaturallySpeaking or other speech recognition software, then please share your experience in the comments. And if you have specific questions that I haven’t covered in this review, please feel free to ask.

I’ve produced a number of series on this blog which I know many of you have found useful. Now I’ve decided to make them available in another format.  I now have PDFs of:

• SEO Your Website
• Promotion Is Free
• Making It As A Freelance Writer
• Freelance Writing Questions

That means you can get all the posts in each series in one handy file which you can print or save.  Feel free to share them with others, provided you link back to this post, don’t edit the content and credit me as the author. There is no charge for downloading them, though if you find them useful, you can always come back and make a contribution to help keep the site going.

(And in case you’re wondering, I created them with Zinepal.)