Non-Techie Tools & Apps: Wordle

I use lots of simple technology, tools and apps on my Macbook and my iPhone that enable me to have a more productive (and more interesting) solo entrepreneur experience. Some are more useful than others, but all play a role in my business life – small or big – that I value. Let me introduce you to Wordle.

MPowered Marketing Blog Wordle Diagram

At first glance, Wordle looks like an odd little picture application comprised of words, but not very useful.

But I propose you would be wrong in appreciating Wordle‘s usefulness.

The Wordle program is not that sophisticated, and it is not a profit-driven application, so it likely never will be. However, if you can overlook it’s flaws, you can use your imagination to extract some goodness from this graphically appealing word play tool.

How to Use Wordle Like a Marketer

1. Research – type in any URL that has a blog or an RSS feed and see at a glance the keywords that the author writes about. This is not a Google Analytics “quantified” style of research,which has it’s place. Rather, it’s a snapshot view of the impression a person might make upon visiting their website. It is a brand perception point of view of what the blogger writes about.
2. Self-Assessment – type in your own blog URL or RSS feed URL and see what words that you have written – the most common “recent” words will populate your Wordle. It provides a nice quick snapshot and theme of your blog writing. Ask yourself if it is a good overview of what you want people to be reading? Is it showcasing the best themes? Use the
3. Create Your Own – you can type your own key words, idea words, theme words into the tool to derive your own Wordle diagram. Use it to promote a new program, create a Facebook cover, design a blog graphic to share on Pinterest, and so much more. Use your imagination!
4. Promotion – Wordle has no licensing restrictions on how to make use of any picture diagram you create or derive. You can somewhat tweak the way it looks (and you can completely alter the colours to match your visual brand). If you play with it so that it looks like your website, you then have a fun and perhaps powerful cloud of language that you can use on anything from your blog to business cards to tshirts if you want.

How To Tip for Saving Your Wordle

First, know that you can use many different preset style and colour palettes to make your Wordle uniquely yours. You can play with fonts and colours and styles to brand-match it to your website or your program marketing. (Recommended)

When done, you can’t “save” a Wordle picture. You need to screen capture it. I use Evernote or Skitch. You can also use a tool like Jing (all are free). All three let you capture just a portion of your screen. Once your Wordle is created and ready to use, use one of the tools to select just the Wordle image and save it as a picture for a variety of uses. Skitch is fast and gives you multiple format options (.jpg, .tif, .png, .gif etcetera) which helps if you are going to use the Wordle for printing purposes. You can also play around in Skitch to enhance the Wordle a bit.

Here is the Wordle I created for International Alliance of Motivated Part-Time Entrepreneurs for an example of another “look”.

Why Wordle?

Today’s social marketing platforms are enhanced by images – and in fact, images are one way of increasing your click-through from Facebook and Twitter to your website (which in turn helps your SEO). Posting to Pinterest with your own images linked to your own website is also proving high click-through traffic back to websites. This is one fun way to create a graphic with incredible ease for many purposes – marketing and fun.

What are you going to Wordle?