Real Words

The image that you see above is a screen capture of a tag cloud that I just generated for my website using ToCloud. I was working on an article about tag cloud programs and decided to check out what results I would get for my own site. I was happy to see that the tag cloud that was generated shows that I am using a lot of the right keywords on my site. What my site is about is the fact that I am a blogger for businesses. blog, businesses, content and social promotion services all show up prominently in my results. Those are exactly the kind of things that I want people to notice about my website when they visit it. This tag cloud shows that I’m doing a good job of making sure that this content is on the site.

Analyzing your own website content is only one way that you can use tag clouds to benefit your writing or to make sure that it’s saying what you want it to say. Here are seven additional ways that you can use tag cloud generators for writing:

• Promote your blog. A really cool tag cloud that shows what you write about on your blog is going to entice people to read about it. Generate one and post it on your blog, link to it via Twitter, make it a Flickr photo or send it out as a comment or social networking message. The more readers you have the more inspired you’re going to be to write better on your blog.
• Generate story ideas. You can use a tag cloud to get ideas about what you want to write about next. Just enter any URL or chunk of text into the tag cloud generator and see what comes up. Use the words there to get ideas for your next story line.
• Various creative writing exercises. Writing exercises are really good for you to do to keep your writing fresh. There are any number of writing exercises that you can do involving your tag clouds. For example, choose a paragraph from your favorite book and enter it into the tag cloud. Take the top five words that come up largest on the screen. Write five paragraphs of a story with each paragraph beginning with one of those words. Come up with your own creative writing exercises! (I’d love to hear more suggestions in the comments here!)
• Make poetry. You can use tag cloud generators to create visually interesting poems. Do this daily and you’ll find that your writing benefits from doing so because you get a new look at old words.
• Create inspirational word collages. Generate several tag clouds. Print them out. Cut out the words that appeal to you most. Make your own new word collages. Post these word collages all around the area in which you do your writing. Having them there should inspire you to keep on working at your creativity.
• Generate series of articles easily. People who do their writing for the web (or even for magazines) know that it’s very profitable to take one article and re-write it in a fresh way to create a series of related articles. This is done much more easily when using tag clouds. You enter the text of your article into a tag cloud generator. This shows you which keywords are used most in the article. Take the top five or ten keywords and rewrite the article with your focus on each of those words. For example, let’s say that you wrote an article on Celtic history. Your tag cloud shows that you wrote a lot about myths and about jewelry. Write one article about the history of Celtic myths and one article about the history of Celtic jewelry.
• Use tag clouds as an editing tool. When you are done writing a piece of work, enter the text into a tag cloud generator. See which words come up most frequently. Are these words in line with the thesis of your paper? If not then you’ll want to take the information that you have in the tag cloud and edit the work accordingly to make sure that you’re hitting all of your key points in your article.