Ann Handley’s Top Writing and Content Marketing Tools of 2021
Total Anarchy, a newsletter by Ann Handley, a top marketing professional, is one of my favourite web publications. Although Handley’s warm, chatty, and playful writing style is, in itself, a reward (for me, at least), the newsletter also delivers insights on life, writing and marketing ideas and tools.
Here’s a list of the writing and marketing tools Handley shared in all the issues of her newsletter in 2021.
Cliché Finder
The cliché finder uses a dictionary of stale phrases to weed out tired expressions that hardly make an impression any longer. It’s simple to use and allows you to review up to 10,000 characters at a time.
Plagium
Plagium helps you check if and where your text appears on the internet and is a worthy alternative to the more popular Copyscape. It even has a Google Docs add-on that allows you to vet your work for plagiarism right on Google Docs. You also get to choose between different affordable plans, including a free option that allows you to run a plagiarism check on up to 1,000 characters at once for a limited number of times.
Copyscape Plagiarism Checker
As far as plagiarism checkers go, Copyscape is considered one of the most effective. It verifies your content’s originality through Copyscape Premium and sniffs out plagiarisers of your work with a feature called Copysentry. Copysentry even sends email notifications when new copies of your content pop up online.
Museo
You can get fantastic photos to use in your writing from Museo, a search engine that connects you with top museums globally. The images on the domain’s results pages are usually free, but it’s best to check with the source institution for more details and credit accordingly.
Canva PowerPoint Templates
With Canva’s free PPT templates, you can get right into organising your content for your next presentation instead of spending hours designing a template from scratch.
Just Good Copy
Writing email copy just got easier with Just Good Copy. The platform is a repository of various forms of email copy from several companies to inspire you during your writing process. You can decide what types of email samples to see by selecting tags like “welcome”, “thank you”, “product feedback”, etc.
Headline Analyser
Using a metric called Emotional Marketing Value (EMV), the Headline Analyser rates your headline based on how well it evokes specific emotions. The tool produces an EMV score by determining the percentage of EMV words in your headline and explains the type of emotion your title mostly speaks to.
Tools To Help You Write More Efficiently
These tools will help you concentrate better, produce the ugly first draft (T.U.F.D, credit: Ann Handley) quickly without succumbing to the urge to edit before you’re done, etc. Here are four of Handley’s favourite ones:
- Draft (free) — simple, easy-to-use online writing, editing and collaboration tool.
- Ilys ($11.11 per month) — lets you set a word count goal and ensures you can’t edit your work until you hit that target.
- OmmWriter — offers a range of features to boost your concentration, including natural backgrounds, full-screen mode, soundtracks, etc.
- Typora ($14.99) — includes a feature that converts plain text to HTML for easy web upload.
BONUS
This final one is from Handley’s latest newsletter issue at the time of writing (January 30, 2022).
Rhymezone
With Rhymezone, you can find words that rhyme or almost rhyme with your chosen term. The tool breaks down its search results using syllable count and meter. Plus, there’s a feature that lets you check for descriptive terms that go with your chosen word.
Getting to use cool tools is one of the perks of writing and marketing, so knock yourself out and, of course, do great work with these ones.
Day 7 of the Not Enough Writers 30-Day Writing Challenge
