5 Essential Online Tools for Writers and Publishers

Writing a newsletter or article can be very time consuming.

First, you have to create your content. Then you have toorganize it. Fortunately, there are plenty of great toolsonline you can use and don't require you to clog yourcomputer with more software.

Best of all, each of these tools is absolutely free to use.

Here are five tools you can use to help you with yournewsletters and articles:

1. Newsletter Template
Formatting your newsletter will probably give you moreheadaches than anything else.

You want to make it easy for your readers to read, and youwant it to look professional when you send it out.

This site solves the problem. All you have to do is selectthe parts you want to include in your newsletter, cut andpaste the elements, and hit submit. It will completelyformat your newsletter for you, and you can even get somegreat tips and resources to help you with your newsletter.

http://www.ossweb.com/ez-ezine-template.html

2. Email Formatting Utility
Ever gotten a really great forward in your email you wantedto use, but it was too time consuming to take all of the>> out of it?

You don't have to do that anymore. This email formattingutility will strip any unecessary tags for you. You canalso use it to format your newsletters and emails to theright character count.

http://www.formatit.com

3. Article Formatter
Ok, I admit it. Before I found this utility I used to cut and paste my articles into my word processing programjust so I could get a word count.

Now you don't have to do that. Not only will this onlinetool give you a word count, it will also format yourarticles in an attractive format for submission.

This site is offered by the Freelance Writing OrganizationInt'l a large database of information for freelance writers.

http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html

4. PDF Creator
This may seem like an odd tool to recommend to apublisher or writer, but wait a minute.

Have you ever wanted to give away copies of your articlesand newsletters to site visitors? What about the $249 pricetag for Adobe Acrobat?

Then you have to consider your readers computers. What ifthey have a MAC?

Unless you have a format that can be read by both MACs andPCs you'll exclude certain readers from downloading yourdocuments.

Besides, giving away copies of your articles andnewsletters is a form of viral marketing for your business.

This site allows you to convert documents to both HTML andPDF. http://www.gohtm.com/

This site converts text to PDF.
http://www.sanface.com/createpdf.html

5. Good Research Tools
There are tons of places you can do research onthe Web. That's the beauty of the Web.

That's also what's horrible about the Web. There's just toomuch great material online to find it quickly and easy.

Ref Desk - http://www.refdesk.com - is like having your ownbook shelf at your fingertips.

You can do searches in the major search engines, finddictionaries, word of the day, quote of the day, and more.There are so many resources located here, you may even wantto make this your start page.

Find Articles - http://www.findarticles.com - is a largecollection of print articles archived on the Web. It boastsover 300 print publications in its database.

Writing and publishing can become a time consuming task.Not only will these tools save you time, they'll save youmoney too.

Jinger Jarrett is the author of "20 Websites Every Writer Needs".Get your free copy of her ebook by subscribing to her newsletter. Visit her web site: http://www.marketingforwriters.com