Pro Copy Tips » Writing Tools

32 essential tools I use to run my copywriting business

Dean Rieck — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:00:14 +0000

I had this idea to write a short little post on tools I use to run my freelance copywriting business. I figured it would be easy.

But when I started looking at all the software and online tools I actually use, I had one of those “sheesh” moments. I had no idea just how many tools I rely on. I could have made a list of 101 tools.

But it’s a busy week, so I’ll cut it down to just 32 I use a lot. This includes some design tools since I offer design services to my clients as well as copywriting.

Oh, and keep in mind that I’m on a PC Windows system, so there aren’t any Mac tools here.

Writing and Design

OpenOffice – After using Word for years, I finally got fed up with how big and clunky it had become (like most Microsoft products). A friend suggested OpenOffice and I haven’t looked back. It’s basically a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. You can read my post on OfficeOffice here. I use the writing application to write copy and the speadsheet to track projects and income.

Notepad – If you use Windows, you have Notepad. It’s a handy, no-frills text tool that’s fast and simple. I use it to record project notes and to-do lists. The files are tiny and, as far as I know, universal, so you can open them in nearly any writing program.

Adobe Acrobat – In the good old days, you had to create physical mockups to show clients. Acrobat lets you print any electronic design to a pdf format and email it. It’s also the business world’s choice for sharing pdf documents of any kind. You can get the free Acrobat Reader, but you can only use it to read documents. I use Acrobat Pro since it offers more features for design.

Adobe InDesign – Quark once dominated the market for layout programs. But I bailed when it started getting quirky and stopped working well with Adobe products. InDesign is now the layout program of choice for just about everyone, and it integrates perfectly with all the other Adobe products.

Adobe Photoshop – Even if you don’t do design, you should at least get an old copy of Photoshop. It’s a big, complex program, but it gives you nearly every imaginable tool to manipulate and process photos.

Adobe Illustrator – I admit that I don’t know much about Illustrator. I have it because it comes with the Adobe design collection and it’s useful for dealing with logos and illustrations.

sendspace – If you’ve ever tried to send large documents by email, you know that sometimes they don’t go through. That’s because some email providers limit the size of attachments. sendspace is a free tool that lets you upload files up to 300MB, then send a link others can use to download them. It’s an incredibly handy tool.

Communications

Thunderbird – I loved Eudora for email, but it stopped offering updates. So I switched to Thunderbird. It’s fast, easy, and offers plenty of features for managing email, including a good file system and search capability.

RKS Fax – Some people claim to use a fax all the time. But I get maybe 3 faxes a year, so I dropped my fax line and tossed the fax machine. Now on the rare occasions I have to send or receive a fax, I can use RKS Fax and run the fax through my computer and phone line.

Yahoo Mail – Some claim that Gmail is a better option, and it may be. But I couldn’t get the text message confirmation to work, so I went to Yahoo. This is simply for throwaway email addresses for situations where I don’t want to provide someone with my primary address.

Business

ACT! – At this point in my career, I have thousands of contacts, including clients, prospects, colleagues, designers, fellow copywriters, business resources, and so on. ACT! is a contact manager primarily for sales people, and it’s a bit too complex for my needs, but I haven’t found anything as useful. It has a great calendar that is tied into contact information, so you can track everything you do with clients and potential clients.

TaxCut – If you make money, you have to pay taxes. I suppose I could hire someone to do this for me, but there are two problems. One, I’m a control freak, so I like to do this myself. Two, you really don’t save much time by hiring someone, because you have to organize and annotate records for them anyway. TurboTax (one of my clients) is just as good and maybe a little simpler.

Carbonite – The single best business tool I have. It’s an online backup service. Pay the $55 for a year’s subscription (a bargain), install a tiny program, and it automatically backs up your documents. Set it and forget it. Some people like Mozy, which does the same thing.

DropBox – James at Men With Pens turned me onto DropBox when I wrote about creating a computer recovery plan. This is a cool little application where you can drop any file and have it instantly backup online. It’s a great way to sync multiple computers or access files if you’re on the road. I use it to access files on my wireless laptop. If you get the paid version, you could keep all your files in it for an easy backup.

Norton Internet Security – I’ve had several virus incidents, one that killed my computer. So I’m fastidious about computer security. Norton is one of the better antivirus solutions and is priced reasonably.

PayPal – If you want to accept payments over the Internet, you need PayPal. It’s free and simple. Some clients pay me this way and all advertisers and affiliates pay this way.

Online

Firefox – I abandoned the Explorer web browser for the same reasons I abandoned Word. I don’t like most Microsoft products. Firefox is free, simple, and secure. And there are a zillion plugins and tools. Firefox also remembers my passwords for online services and tools, which saves a little time.

Bloglines – If you subscribe to RSS feeds, you need way to read them. There are endless ways to do that, but I started using Bloglines a few years ago and have not had any reason to change. It’s free and does a nice job of organizing lots of feeds in one place.

Google Analytics – For blogs and websites, Google Analytics gives you a set of robust statistics and reports on visitors, keywords, traffic sources, and tons more.

GoDaddy – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they offer lots of services for email, site hosting, URL registration, and more. Apart from putting this blog on a slow server, they’ve given me good service for years. And it’s hard to beat their prices. One nice freebie is the automatic installation of WordPress with any hosted site.

Alexa – If you want to see how your site ranks compared to others, this is a quick way to find out. Just enter your URL and click. The results are questionable, but it’s close enough for most people.

Compete – This is similar to Alexa, but gives you a wider set of information. The free version is limited, though. If you want the works, you have to pony up a subscription.

Publishing

WordPress – You know what this is. It’s the preferred blog platform for just about everyone. It’s free, easy to use, and there are endless themes and plugins to give you whatever features you want. As I said above, if you host your site on GoDaddy, they’ll install it automatically.

CoffeeCup HTML Editor – If you do any HTML code editing, you’ll appreciate this little tool. It automates many of the repetitive tasks of coding, such as endlessly typing tags. CoffeeCup is a neat little organization and offers plenty of other tools. Even if you don’t want to do coding, check them out.

FeedBurner – If you have a blog, you publish a feed. And if you publish a feed, you need a way to manage it. Feedburner does that. Google acquired them some time ago, so to use it, you need to have a Google account. Google will take over the planet someday with all their free tools, so you might as well submit now and get an account.

Filezilla – This is a free ftp program. If you don’t know what ftp is, you don’t need Filezilla. If you do know what it is, you may already be using Filezilla. If not, try it. Basically, it’s a way to upload and download files on the Internet, such as when you’re adding photos to your website or blog.

Constant Contact – If you publish a newsletter or do basic email marketing, you have several choices, including MailChimp, iContact, and AWeber. I settled on Constant Contact and like it. I use it to publish a couple newsletters (one of which is growing at up to 1,400 subscribers a day).

Social Marketing

Twitter – I had my doubts about tweeting, but it’s proving to be an easy way to share information and drive traffic to my blogs. I’m not an expert, but I’m learning fast. If you’re new to social marketing, Twitter is a great way to start. It’s easy. You can follow my tweets here.

Facebook – You’re probably already on Facebook, so I don’t need to describe it. But I would advise that you be careful about how you manage your account. It may not be wise to invite clients to your private page. I suggest setting up a fan page, which you can manage from your account but which will remain separate.

LinkedIn – This is probably the best business networking tool right now. It works a little like Facebook, but it’s geared for business. You can connect with people, publish updates on your activities, post a full resume, import your blog posts, join discussion groups, and send private messages to contacts. You can connect with me on LinkedIn here.

HootSuite – I just wrote about how to use HootSuite on my other blog. It’s the easiest way I’ve yet found to manage multiple social networks. I use it to schedule tweets and updates on 5 networks.

bit.ly – Web addresses can get pretty long, which causes a problem with Twitter particularly. bit.ly is a fast way to short URLs. If you use HootSuite, it has a built-in link shortener.

Do you have an essential tool you use frequently?

Whitesmoke to the writer’s rescue

Dean Rieck — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:00:43 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it up to here (I’m holding my hand up to my neck now) with the typical spell check and grammar check.

These built-in writing tools catch some of the more obvious things, such as misspelled words, but they’re near useless for grammar and punctuation. And they don’t catch things like missing words.

That’s why I was so thrilled recently when I discovered Whitesmoke. It’s not just a spell checker, it’s a comprehensive proofing and editing system that is a genius compared to what you get with word processing software.

There’s no substitute for a human proofing your copy, but this comes pretty close.

Whitesmoke isn’t a writing program. It’s a special application that runs in the background and integrates with whatever program you’re using. So no matter what you’re doing or what program you’re using, Whitesmoke is there to check your writing. Well, actually it doesn’t work with all programs, but it works with most of the ones you’re likely to use.

So if you’re writing with Word, entering text in a form, writing a message on a forum, or whatever, you can use Whitesmoke to scan for errors.

Let’s say you’re writing an e-mail message and you want to check it before you send. Just select the text and either hit the F2 button or click on the little floating button on your screen. You click on the suggestions you want to accept or click for more options. When you’re satisfied, click “apply” and the changes are inserted into the document.

Here are a few features:

Grammar Checker that catches tricky grammar errors.

Style Checker to help you improve sentences, vocabulary, and writing style.

Spell Checker for ordinary typos and spelling.

Punctuation Checker which is pretty amazing.

Error Explanations, which tells you why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.

Dictionary–Thesaurus, which is a little more robust than usual.

600 Letter Templates in case you need to write a letter and don’t know how to get started. This is not all that helpful for me, and I’m not impressed with the letters. However, maybe others would find this useful.

The other neat thing about Whitesmoke is that it offers a variety of specialized versions for general writing, business writing, creative writing, bio-tech writing, hi-tech writing, and executive writing.

You can see a short demo for a better idea of what Whitesmoke can do.

And if you’re interested but not convinced, you can download Whitesmoke and try it free.

If you try the demo, let me know what you think of it. It’s not perfect. And different writers will react differently to how it works. I think it’s good for proofing written copy when you don’t have a human proofreader. It’s great if you’re learning English.

How to type thousands of special “hidden” characters

Dean Rieck — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:00:47 +0000

Have you ever been writing copy and needed to insert a ® (registration mark), © (copyright symbol), or some other special character?

On some word processing programs if you type (c), the program will automatically transform those three characters (left parentheses, the letter c, right parentheses) into the proper one-character symbol. This works for a few other characters as well.

But there are other ways to do this and access thousands of “extended characters” hidden inside the fonts on your computer. One is to look up a list of Alt codes for all the characters, which you can find on the Internet. For example, if you hold down the Alt key and type 0169, you get ©.

Another way is to open a little built-in program called Character Map on Windows and Character Palette on Mac. You just select the typeface you’re using and you can choose from a huge collection of special characters. Personally, I find this a lot easier than memorizing Alt codes. And using the correct symbols gives documents a professional look.

If you need a little help, read more about Character Map or Character Palette.

Trash MS Word and find freedom with OpenOffice.org

Dean Rieck — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:00:49 +0000

If you’ve never heard of OpenOffice.org, it’s time you did. It’s the choice of thousands of smart writers.

“Choice” isn’t a term you associate with Microsoft Word. You use it because it came pre-installed on your computer. Right?

Word is the standard word processing program for the business world, so it’s convenient to have documents in that format. But let’s face it, like so many of Microsoft’s products, Word has grown into a clunky behemoth. You probably don’t use more than 5 or 10 percent of its features.

Worse, with the release of the Vista operating system, Microsoft stopped pre-installing Word and replaced it with Works, a program that went out of vogue years ago. Why? I guess Bill Gates needs a new pair of shoes. He wants you to pay for Word.

But with OpenOffice.org you have a better choice. It’s small, it’s fast, it includes all the features you need as a professional writer, and it’s free.

What is OpenOffice.org? To quote from the website …

OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

What this means is that OpenOffice.org gives you all the best features of the MS Office Suite, including MS Word. “Open-source” means it’s software created by a community of programmers and offered free of charge for anyone to use for any purpose. Just in case you think that sounds suspicious, it’s not. Open-source is common. If you use WordPress for your blog, for example, you’re using open-source software.

I got fed up with Word long ago. And when a friend told me about OpenOffice.org, I gave it try. Soon, I began using OpenOffice.org for all my copywriting chores and never looked back. I also use the spreadsheet program (which works almost exactly like Excel) for simple accounting chores.

Not only is OpenOffice.org faster and easier than Word, its default file format is “open standard,” meaning it will open on nearly any word processor. And it opens files from most other processors as well. If you still want your files in a Word format, you can do that too. No one will be able to tell the difference.

If you’re looking for something faster and easier than Word, or if you just don’t want to pay for Word, try OpenOffice.org.