InboundWriter is a relatively focused content marketing tool containing predictive analytics, suggestions, and authoring guidelines for content optimization. InboundWriter has been backed by about $2.5 million in venture capital since its inception in 2011.
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Shorthand
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Shorthand enables the user to create interactive multimedia stories for any online audience — all with no code. The vendor boasts that Shorthand is used by hundreds of publishers, brands, non-profits, and more — including the BBC, Honda, Business Insider, and Doctors Without Borders.
I think most users have found that InboundWriter is every bit worth what you pay for it. At a freemium model, it's affordable and helpful in analyzing your posts for SEO direction. It is particularly well suited for getting focused terms on specific topics, and less on more general terms.
Shorthand is ideally suited to visual stories where you have a good number of images and/or embeds or video to include. It is well-suited to long-form stories, where you wish to keep the readers' attention longer than usual. It can help to differentiate particularly important or intriguing stories from others on your website - and for this reason, it could be used as a premium content tool, perhaps for subscribers. It can also be used to showcase stories about awards you've organised, giving them special treatment. It is less suited to breaking news, or very time-sensitive news stories, as it can take some time to prepare, post or update shorthand stories. And it doesn't work well for stories with strong accompanying imagery
Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
Adding additional section templates could speed up design
More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful
I have never known it to be down during my use of it. All you require is an internet connection to log in and you can use it on multiple devices. Adding ease of accessibility, there are simple ways to log in. I've also never known a Shorthand story to go down once live on our site.
Due to the integration with our content management software, there is a short delay on our site while it loads, which may cause some readers to drift away. However, I've seen other sites where it instantly loads articles, so I believe this to be down to the content management software behind our site more than Shorthand itself. Once that brief initial period is over, it doesn't require additional loading time.
The InboundWriter support is certainly sufficient for the type of troubleshooting you may encounter when using the tool. There are chats and forums available with best practices or knowledge share. For bigger issues, even WordPress can serve as a support system for getting to the answer quickly. Luckily, you're more likely to find that it is a very intuitive tool that is easy to use.
While Yoast is also very useful as a free WordPress plugin that helps up your SEO game, where it stops at just providing direction for your meta data, like titles and descriptions, InboundWriter takes your search engine reach a bit further and helps you create relevant content for your industry that targets the right keywords and topics.
As a web-based service, it is easy for users to log into from anywhere. Content can easily be shared, as you can set up teams that enable access to each other's work as required. And content can be reviewed by others before publication using the sharing function. You can also view how an article will look on different devices.
