In early September I ventured to Content Marketing World in Cleveland Ohio. One of the sponsors and vendors was InboundWriter. I’m always looking for new a blogging tool to try and a SEO tool to spend my free time with so just before I left on Thursday I stopped by the InboundWriter booth to get a demo of the product they had to offer.  I was pretty impressed by the demo they showed me so I exchanged cards with the team and headed home.

A few weeks ago Erik emailed me asking if I’d be interested in beta testing their WordPress plugin before it launched. I told him I would be happy to! I’ve got to say, if you are a blogger or a member of the content marketing community who doesn’t have time to start learning all the tricks of search engine optimization, I’d highly recommend that you check out this blogging tool.

A Quick Overview of the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin

InboundWriter sits on the right hand side of your posts page inside of your WordPress backend. Once you start writing our post you have the option of including up to three “relevant terms” that you are planning on focusing on within the post. As you write InboundWriter will start grading your post. Once you hit 200 words, it will begin to show you the results of your content marketing.

While the concept of this is very simple, it is an SEO tool that all bloggers should consider using to help optimize their blogging efforts for search engines.

For each of your relevant terms, a star rating will pop up next to it helping you decide which keywords you should use more of within your blog post. After the plugin starts to score you, this blogging tool will also include “steps to improve my score” to help you figure out where you have gone wrong.

I’ve used this plugin on a few of my recent blogs and have had a lot of fun watching the score move as I work to optimize for a few different terms. It’s worth checking out if you have any concerns about your search engine optimization. The plugin works great on OLD blog entries as well!

InboundWriter Web Tool

If you’re not using WordPress (you should be) but are looking for an SEO tool to help optimize your website content, InboundWriter offers a web based version of their tool as well. This was the original demo they shared at Content Marketing World to help content marketers with their search engine optimization. You can optimize up to 8 documents a month for free and if you decide to optimize more, their plan is only $19.95 a month.

InboundWriter released a video about their product:

It is not a bad deal considering the results that this SEO tool has to provide!

Learn More About the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin

At the end of the day, I’m a nerd when it comes to learning about content marketing so I had a great time with the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin. It is a very simple blogging tool that can help improve your writing on a number of levels.

They have a free report for download and I highly recommend checking it out to understand the impact of real-time content optimization a little better.

Overall I think this is a fantastic SEO tool and I would recommend it to any blogger I run into. I’m excited to watch it evolve with the changes to search engines.

For more information on their plugin InboundWriter has added a new section to their website about the Inbound Writer WordPress Plugin. They do require registration in order to use the plugin, although you have both free and paid options available.

I’ve heard the name Seth Godin many times before. Recently I was flipping through a blog and came across a list of things to boost your marketing. One included “Read Purple Cow, by Seth Godin The curiosity in me decided to order the book and see what Seth Godin is all about.

I am hooked.

Ignoring the fact that this book was originally written in 2002, with great content and Seth’s writing style this book fun and easy to read. As someone who rarely ever picks up an actual book, I want to order the rest of his books.

Seth doesn’t give you a direct answer on how to make a Purple Cow. In fact, he tells you straight out that not every idea will be a Purple Cow. that’s what makes it better. He gives you example upon example of other companies who have done it in the past and why they were successful.

While I originally found the book in a marketing blog, it is something that anyone in a company interested in product development can relate to. It doesn’t take the side of the marketer but shows how each person on the team can be important to the products result.

This book looks at the past and the future of products and “being remarkable” in your industry. With TV and print advertising becoming less and less popular, marketers and those developing products have had to find new ways to stand above their competition. Suddenly it’s not about who has the best advertisement, it’s about who makes the most “remarkable product”

So you want to know what a Purple Cow is? Read the book… you will not regret it.

A few weeks ago AboutUs.org introduced a new product, a site report tool that will allow businesses of all sizes to submit their website and receive a report back on their SEO. Aliza was kind enough to contact me with a coupon to try it out.

First, I have to admit, I’m a sucker for website reports. Wednesday mornings are exciting for me because that means Raven SERP Reports are updated, I love reading stats in Google Analytics and no website I work on is complete without a run through Website Grader.

Did I mention I’m a nerd?

This week I decided to check out the site report feature at AboutUs.org.

First things first, a quick overview.

The site report costs $9.95 a month per website, but you can continuously run the reports throughout that month. You have the ability to enter one domain and select up to 50 pages on that domain for the report to give you details on.

For every new domain you add it is an additional $9.95, so keep that in mind before you start quickly running reports.

I ran www.kristypage.net through the site report and was excited to see how much information I received. When I went to save off the website report it was 26 pages long! Keeping in mind I had it run 43 URLs.

Things to Note:

• I LOVE the layout. When you’re viewing your report you have the ability to see the problems, the warnings and the positives about your site.
• Drilling down into each page of content brings you a wealth of information, things I would have never thought of such as how many words in your title!
• In a quick chance to save my report off I went to print to a pdf and the printable report is WONDERFUL. For anyone looking to try and explain SEO problems to someone who isn’t too sure about SEO, having this hard copy is AWESOME. They even show you with diagrams on a page where some of these elements are.

I mentioned that I’m a huge fan of the Website Grader. I think this tool used in conjunction with that can help direct any website get started on figuring out where they need to go with SEO.

At the end of the day, if you really want to improve your SEO, tools like this can give you an understanding but they won’t fix all of the problems. For companies who want to focus on SEO, I would always recommend hiring an SEO company to do the work.

For smaller businesses who are looking for an overview of their site at a low cost, I would recommend to start by checking this out. Signing up for a monthly fee may not be the direction you need to go, but I believe you can cancel at any time.

While you’re checking out the site report tool, don’t forget to check out the AboutUs.org Learn section! There are some great authors in there.

Confidence is something that everyone holds differently. For me, I’m incredibly confident in my hobbies but when it comes to the things I do in my day-to-day life… my confidence needs work. Back in September, my mom had sent me an article from the Toledo Blade about a girl who became a photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. One of her inspirations was a book called “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be” written by Paul Arden. Self help books, not generally my thing; books with a whole bunch of one-line quotes and large print, those are my thing. This book was definitely my thing.

Overall the book was a lot more about making money then it was gaining the motivation I needed. Granted, it was still a good book and helped me put a new perspective on life. I’m generally a person who plays by the rules, or sticks close to them. One of the best quotes that from the book was “If you can’t solve a problem it’s because you are playing by the rules.” It seems like a simple quote and a simple answer, but it made me step back and think a little bit about everything. This book was far from a book teaching readers how to play by the rules. In fact it was encouraging readers not to.

When I say not playing by the rules, I’m not referring to going out and robbing a bank. His advice was focused on making people take you seriously and making them listen. At the same time, he was encouraging readers to be realistic about things. For example, one of the headlines is “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver”.  A headline not too much further on in the book is “Don’t take no for an answer”. Both are two great pieces of advice and both go hand in hand when working with anyone. The book is more focused on a work environment, but did a great job of advice for all aspects of life.

The design of the book was also well done. It’s a smaller book so it was easy to throw into a computer bag without taking up too much room. The font was bigger so it wasn’t squinting to read and there were plenty of pictures to illustrate his points. This book was not your every day self help book, it was far from it but it had some great advice to offer and of course, was filled with some great quotes!

Some interesting advice he had to offer at the end of the book was “Present on Tuesday”. Why is that? You’ll have to pick up a copy of the book to find out why!

The Addams Family

My parents got tickets to go see “The Addams Family” in Chicago this past weekend. I didn’t know much about the musical before going to see it. I figured I would be surprised and see what comes of it. I was surprised that they do not have a CD or a program of the musical yet. They apparently don’t make them until the shows go to Broadway. We had second row tickets and it was amazing to be so close to a great cast!

Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth rocked the show. I would never have expected the two of them to come together to lead the Addams family the way they did. Krysta Rodriguez is a name that I hadn’t heard of before but she did a wonderful job playing Wednesday. There were so many scenes where Wednesday was the only person on stage not smiling or had to keep with the emo face, Krysta did such a great job of holding the role throughout the entire musical.

The musical itself is a story line I didn’t expect. I haven’t really ever watched the TV show and didn’t even realize it stemmed from a comic strip, but I definitely did not expect it to be a love story. The story revolves around the first time Wednesday falls in love and the family’s reaction to it. Without giving too much away, Wednesday’s boyfriend’s family is from Ohio and they’re “normal”. The Addams welcome them into their home and both families are in for a variety of lessons.

If you are close to Chicago I recommend you pick up tickets as many of the shows have already sold out. It’s only here for a short time but well worth the trip. The musical is on a trial run in Chicago and may or may not go to Broadway. After seeing the show last night though, I have high doubts that Broadway will turn it away.

One additional surprise, they never actually played the full Addams Family theme song…

For the last three or four years I’ve told myself that I would go through my iTunes library and clean it up. With close to 19,000 pieces of media (I’m a podcast junkie) the Track 01, Untitled, and blank names fill my iTunes library. Kevin Rose mentioned a new program on Diggnation called Tune Up. At first I was skeptical but decided to check it out. I’m so lazy when it comes to my music library, yet I always want it cleaned up.

Can I just say, WOW! I started out with the music that had no names to them, or had the generic track names. I was expecting it to get about half. Out of close to 1,000 songs it missed 22; that’s not bad at all!  That wasn’t even the best part.

One of my biggest pet peeves with my music is that an artist can be pulled into iTunes under so many different names. For example: The Beatles, Beatles, thebeatles, beatles, TheBeatles, you get the idea. With 15 different names for my Beatles collection I decided to put TuneUp to the test. They now are all named “The Beatles”. I started from a and I’m working my way to z to get all of my artists and albums finally synced up.

The one thing that has been a slight downside is that it recommends only doing 500 songs at a time. To be honest, it’s not a problem with the program; it’s what your computer can handle. I’ve been running between 500 and 700 at a time and then running a save of them all over night and it’s working perfectly. It does take a bit of time to run through it, it’s obviously not an instant process but at the end of the day when it’s all said and done, the process is worth it.

A one-year subscription is $19.99 and a lifetime subscription is $29.99. Hurry up; they’re having a Halloween sale!!!

As a knitter I’m always looking for new books to read that bring me back around to knitting. Debbie Macomber opens up the world of knitting inside the city of Seattle with the Blossom Shop series. The series starts out with The Shop On Blossom Street. This is the first book of a five book series.

Without giving anything away, the story revolves around a group of knitters who join a “Knit to Quit” group. Each person has a reason for being there and each has a story to tell. The book follows different knitters and friends from Blossom street as they go through the quitting process.

I thought the book was a great start to the series. The book takes place over the course of one summer, so there were parts of it that were sort of rushed in order to fit the entire summer into the one book. There were moments reading the book where I felt like it could have been split into two, to evolve a story line or two a little more. I would’ve liked to see more details as the characters grew and learned about their new friends and family members.

While the book did follow different a variety of story lines, each characters story lines were different enough that I never got any of the characters confused. Debbie did a good job of introducing each character and bringing in background on the characters by bringing in people from their past. Having the background information made the story line easy to follow.

Each chapter started out with a quote from someone from the knitting world. The quotes ranged from “why i like my knitting” to “what knitting means to me”.

I recommend this book to both knitters and non-knitters. While it is technically a book about a knitting shop, it doesn’t require you to have any background knowledge of knitting. There were characters in the book who didn’t knit at all. If you’re looking for a book that doesn’t require too much thinking, but still takes you into another world, I recommend it.

I’m starting the next book in the series, A Good Yarn, tonight.