Best Online Writing and Research Tools

If you are reading this, you are here too early

No, seriously.

I have an extraordinary list of bookmarks, tools, online services, web apps, bookmarklets, writing websites, research sites, plug-ins, utilities, applications, and (whew!) much more that make the life of the professional writer much easier. Unfortunately, a lot of it is on pieces of paper, or text files, or notes, or – more recently – in Microsoft Office OneNote 2010. Of course, many more are buried in the bookmarks of the four different browsers I use on a daily basis. Plus the top writing help sites and writing tools on the Internet which have special homes on my Speed Dial Groups (Firefox) and also on my Morning Coffee for Chrome and Morning Coffee for Firefox setups. I fired up this post to explain what was going to happen here: I am going to write some posts or pages with lists of tools professional writers use for productivity or research, as well as to get a start on that list by having a place to “dump” the ones that come to me on a onesie-twosie basis.

Some of the electronic writing gadgets, online writing tools, and software applications for writing I use have become so second nature to me that I forget that they are stand-alone apps and services that writers can use to improve writing quality and profitability. I wanted a place to be able to jot them down without them getting lost in my online writing bookmarks at Delicious or the like.

Best Writing Plugins For Firefox – Best Writing Extensions for Chrome

If you are unfamiliar with the latter two browser extensions, then consider this your reward for reading this far even though I told you at the beginning that you were too early to get the actual list of killer writing resources and best writer tools and software.

Speed Dial is a plugin for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to create a speed dial similar to the one in Opera and Google Chrome. The difference is that unlike Chrome, Speed Dial lets you manually set which websites get to be on the speed dial and in what order they are displayed. Furthermore, the Speed Dial plug-in for Firefox lets you create more than one speed dial. These are called Dial Groups and they appear as tabs across the top of the speed dials. This lets you configure workflow based speed dials, or dials for other purposes. For example, you could make a dial group for games with your top 9 gaming websites and another dial group for finding freelance writing gigs with your top 9 freelancing websites. Even better, you can change the default layout from a 3 x 3 layout to a 4 x 4 or even 6 x 8 or whatever you like. This is a huge bonus for those of use with big widescreen monitors that can clearly display a dozen or more top writing websites.

Morning Coffee extension for Chrome or the Morning Coffee plugin for Firefox offer a similar functionality as Speed Dial, but are designed instead to be configured not as a screen where you can select the one website you need to find and open, but rather as a way to open all of the websites you need for a particular function at once.

For example, if you search for writing jobs on the job boards on Tuesday mornings, you could setup a “Tuesday” Morning Coffee session that opens five or ten or twenty writing gig websites all at once. Then, if on Wednesdays you read a bunch of technology websites to stay on top of technology news in your capacity as a freelance technology writer, you can set a Wednesday Morning Coffee session to open a dozen tech review websites.

Brian Nelson Writer News

Brian E Nelson Search Results

Well, that was fast. Sort of.

It seems that today, just three short days after deciding to get myself ranking higher for my own name, my brianenelson.com website comes back as the #1 Google search result if you search for brian e nelson in quotes. Things haven’t changed much in searches for brian nelson or, ironically, in searches for brian e nelson without the quotes.

I do my searches inside of an Incognito privacy mode on Google Chrome in order to remove the “personalization” factor in Google’s search result rankings. I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t enough. I think I’ll try again with a blank profile later this week when I set up my freelance writing office in a Starbucks. Interestingly, enough, the same search brings back this website and my last post about Brian E Nelson the writer and how I would be using things, like this WordPress.com blog to get myself up higher in searches for my own name. That shows just how meaningless this particular feat is. Without trying to link here (other than the existing links to the homepage) that post ended up #8.

Of course, that means that no one else is trying to rank for this particular “keyword”. That makes sense considering that there is no real value in it, which is why I never tried before either. As vanity projects go, I’ve seen much worse. Besides, there is always the possibility that someday I will take to someone about what I do for a living. (I’m a freelance writer.) I will tell them my name, of course, because that is how you introduce yourself to someone. And, I will also tell them the name of my writing business, because after name, where you live, and how you know the host, the next small talk items on the standard conversation checklist is, “What do you do?”

Some time will pass and there will be a need in that person’s sphere of influence for a professional freelancing writer and he’ll remember my name. Or, more likely, he’ll ask the host. I’ve got kind of an easy to describe physical build, so this happens a lot to me. (“He was the tall guy with…”) He’ll also remember that I had a funny and/or clever business name. Something about snow and an animal, but it won’t be close enough to get him to me in a search. (My business is called Arctic Llama.) So, he’ll get my name from the host or the name of someone who knows me well enough to know my last name, and he’ll type in Brian Nelson.

He’ll know it is a wild goose chase, but he’ll try it out just in case. And, there, on the first page of Google search for brian nelson will be Brian E Nelson professional writer in one form or another. He’ll think, “That must be him,” and a few clicks later he’ll be at one of my websites with a link to my writing business, or maybe he’ll go straight to my freelance financial writer page or to my freelance writing samples.

Either way, he’ll have a name and number, I’ll have a new writing gig, and this whole excercise will turn out to be a worthy one after all.

I’ll keep you posted.

Still a Spammer?

I can’t help but wondering if I am still considered a spammer.

Truthfully, I’ve never spammed anything in my life, unless you count accidentally hitting the reply to all button instead of just the reply button. But, for some reason the WordPress plug-in Akismet algoritm started flagging the links I made to my other websites as spam right from the beginning.

It isn’t really a big deal, but I am curious what caused it. Did I make too many links too soon? If so, what is the going rate on over-linking? Are 30 links in 30 posts too many? 10 posts? 1 post? What if they were links to places like FederalReserve.gov or FINRA.org, surely I can’t be accused of trying to link-bomb the definitive resources on money management, investing, and finance can I?

I actually abandoned this little project for a while out of dismay. After all, who wants to build up a spammer’s website? But, I figure if I keep adding some decent posts and the content that I create here is both quality and usable, then maybe, just maybe, the good folks at Akismet will change their minds.

If not, it isn’t really that big of a deal since the vast majority of the links from here go either to my own websites, or to websites of my clients, who are typically only too happy to get free backlinks from their writers. Of course, since this is more of a personal writer’s blog as opposed to a business resource, I don’t exactly blab about it to my business contacts. For all I know, they are deleting my pings or trackbacks, or pingback trackbackings or whatever they are called when I link to my articles that I have written for their websites.

Maybe someday I’ll got through the hoops of checking to see if my links appear anywhere. In the meantime, I’ll just keep writing and wait for the day that I see a trackback from A Freelancer’s Writing Published pointing to one of my websites without the black mark of spam draped across it.

What Does A Freelance Writer Do Exactly?

I’ve been a professional freelance writer for almost two years now. I haven’t had a “real” job in all of that time. Last holiday season most people nodded politely when I told them I was a freelance writer, or furrowed their eyebrows at me as if to ask if that was the same thing as being unemployed.

However, no one really asked much about it. In hindsight, I guess that they figured it was just some phase, or maybe just another person they knew trying (and probably failing) to start-up a small business because they got tired of the corporate world. Or, perhaps even more likely, they all figured that since my wife is a lawyer, that maybe she was supporting me and I was just dabbling in writing.

What a difference a year makes. My wife has dropped down to part-time at her job and we are planning on her quitting altogether some time this coming year. Couple that with the fact that this is the second Thanksgiving or Christmas in a row that I have given the same answer to the question, “So, what are you doing these days?” and people’s curiosity has peaked.

Follow up questions have become much more common this year.

The number one question about being a freelance writer that I get is, of course, “What is it that you write?”

This question, which used to only come from close family and friends, is the reason I started this little blog in the first place. I figured I could point people to this webpage if they were truly curious, and not just being polite. From here, they could follow whatever links they liked to my various writings around the web. It is less “business-y” than my official freelance writing business website, and less particular than my official freelance writing samples webpage.

The truth is, that most people are looking for an answer like, books, magazine articles, or even advertisements – something along the lines of, “You know that radio commercial for the Denver Zoo…” Ironically, I don’t really write any of that.

It turns out that I found clients for my freelance writing business fast and easy on the Internet. Since then I’ve earned plenty of money without pounding the sidewalk or banging the phones to find new “in real life” clients, so I’ve never really tried.

What that means, however, is that my answer about what I do leaves most people confused.

“Oh, you mean you build websites?” — Well, not complicated ones, but I do write content for big well-known websites. [More puzzled looks]

The major difficulty lies in the same place that it does when trying to find new freelance writing clients. If you have never worked with a freelance writer on a project before, you just aren’t familiar with how it works. Even the most astute can only get so far as to assume that my job is to do the writing when no one else has the time.

In the end, I don’t really try too hard to explain anymore exactly what value I provide as a freelance writer and instead just direct the conversation to things people can more readily understand, like I work from home out of a home office and my commute happens in my flannel pants. This immediately turns the conversation away from what I do and how I do it, to how lucky I am, and then, inevitably, how they should try it sometime.

Sigh.

By the way, if you want to check out some of my not-so-business writing that I get to crank out for fun and profit (sometimes) you can look at some of the Hubs published under HubLlama at HubPages.com

Squidoo Lenses Social Media Experiment

I’ve been building a couple of Squidoo lenses as part of an experiment to use social media more effectively for marketing and other promotion.  So far, I haven’t had the time to put much effort into them, but I think they are pretty nice anyway.

My most complete is the Investing Guides and Information one.

The more recent one is about Smart Retirement Planning and it looks pretty good too.

Of course, there is still a lot I can do with these lenses I have created.  The Squidoo online training website is called Squidoo University or SquidU although I’m not positive that it is actually affiliated with the company that runs the Squidoo website.

This one on self-directed IRA investing has more stuff like books and what not, but not any more information than mine.  Still, it looks a lot better, so I’ll have to keep working on it.