Inbound Writer: A Productivity Tool for Bloggers

As part of my Productivity Series, I’m going to go over my favorite tools for time management and basically just the things that help me make the most of my time online. I have three kids and luckily they’re in school (one in part day, two in full day), so I have a few hours each morning to do all of my work online. Of course it doesn’t stop there, I still blog and work during nap time as well as in the evening because I get sucked into social media really easily (don’t we all?). I’m hoping this series will help you – and me – be more productive in our blogging.

Inbound Writer is one of my favorite tools to use for blogging. Here’s a quick rundown on how to use it. First, you create a free account at InboundWriter.com.

After you log in, you will get a quick tour of how to use Inbound Writer. I recommend taking the tour, or at least following this post, before just diving right in – unless you’re a super experienced blogger in which case you probably don’t even need this tool because you’re just awesome like that.

The document score tells you how well you’ve optimized your content. Optimizing content is key, so don’t ignore this one. It looks kind of like a gas gauge, and tells you if you’re doing really bad… or really good. Keep changing things up with your content to make it go up!

This part of Inbound Writer is kind of like Google AdWords. It gives you relevant terms to use in your articles, and even rates them on a star scale so you know just how relevant they are. It’s great to have a fresh set of “eyes” to help you out when coming up with similar terms to use in your blog posts.

Choose your optimization strategy. If you use Google AdSense and want to make money with your posts, choose the advertising optimization. Inbound Writer will then tell you how well your content is optimized for that specific purpose.

Use your focus term in the title of your post for best results. If you use SEO by Yoast you already know to do this.

Inbound Writer has a Word Counter (just like WordPress does), but it also has a readability level. I love that! You would click here to start your first document. You can only do 8 documents each month with the free version, but the paid version is only $19.95 a month, so depending on how much Inbound Writer helps you it just may be worth it.

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter… What’s your favorite productivity tool?

#Productivity tool for bloggers #BBCSTL sadielankford.com/2012/04/inboun…

— Sadie Lankford (@sadie_lankford) April 22, 2012