Use Grammarly to detect plagiarism because you don’t have minions, and the six year old isn’t quite up to the task. (Sponsored post)
I am so glad I have my editor, graphic design department, copyright specialist, and artist in residence all working hard for me today. Guess I can take the day off.
In my dreams.
But I am glad to have a ton of tools to make the presentation of some of my ideas prettier and easier.
Grammarly may be my new fave. This drop and click program allows you to check your writing for all sorts of things that your word processor would never find. Having run the first several drafts of my book, The Pregnant Entrepreneur, through real live human editors, I consider the $135 annual subscription to Grammarly a steel. Or is that steal? MS Word never would have found that, but the contextual Grammarly editor would have! It also looks for plagiarism in your own writing. If you are referencing someone else, there is a fine line between flattery and just outright copying. Stay on the right side of that line. If you are writing a book, a blog, or businesses documents, Grammarly might be just the minion you’ve been looking for. Everyone I know needs more minions in their life.
Graphic design? I stink at it. But Ipiccy.com and PicMonkey.com are two free photo editing programs that I couldn’t live without, especially since Pinterest took over the world. Log into either of these programs and fix the quality of your pictures with just one click, add text, change fonts, and add cool stickers and labels, like this, which took me 7 minutes to create. PLEASE feel free to pin!
One of my peeps just asked yesterday about whether it was worth it to copyright blog and web photos. I told her I’m using the EasyWatemark plug in on WordPress now, so it doesn’t even take time to do it. You can see it applied to both of my shots above, automagically! And you don’t have to save two copies of the picture, since the one on your computer isn’t affected; just the one on WP gets watermarked. Even though people do steal pictures by cropping out someone’s watermark, there are VERY heavy fines for doing that, heavier than you would think. Branding everything via watermark means that your brand is out there, and creating an impression, even if it’s in your local community or with your super loyal online followers. You never know when something will go viral, right?
Last, I am just about to recruit a new artist in residence, in the form of an app called Waterlogue. I admit, I haven’t tried it just yet, since learning about it from Sarah, Thrifty Decor Chic just last week Maybe we’ll have another snow storm, and I’ll have loads of time in front of my computer to play with it. Yippee. You’ll have to give it a whirl and see what you think.
I wish I had real minions, but then I’d have to feed them, and I don’t need more of that!
