Reviews

ProWritingAid Demo and Review (Video)

February 16, 2021 by Arun Leave a Comment

Introduction

Whether we are writing a novel, a blog, an essay, an email, a report, or anything else, words are the tools we use to get the ideas out of our head and into someone else’s.

So, in this process of passively communicating with other minds, it takes a great deal of cognitive power to edit and correct our own writings – often interfering with our creative flow and turning a blind eye to potential errors, mistakes, and painful sentence formations.

Clearly, a software can help in mitigating at least the majority of this pain.

ProWritingAid is one such software.

What’s in here

In this detailed article, we will see a complete demo of this software that is also a popular alternative to the Grammarly software. I have used both these tools, you would have even seen my Grammary review video here – and, towards the end of this blog post, you’ll also see WHY I have let go of my Grammarly premium account to expire due to some very important differences between Grammarly and ProWritingAid.

This could even help YOU with your decision on which software to use going forward, so make sure you read (or watch the entire video), till the end.

For all the visual peeps out there, watch this detailed post in a video format from this video here on my Tech Library TV YouTube Channel: (don’t forget to subscribe for more such videos and descriptive reviews in the future)

If you are in a hurry, simply use the Table of contents with timestamps given in the video notes section (if you are watching directly on YouTube) to quickly jump to those parts in the video.

Spoiler Alert

You’ll see that I am slowly moving away from Grammarly by the end of this article due to one very important reason, mentioned in the end of this post. Nevertheless, I am not against Grammarly but just found a better alternative. Grammarly is still great and I am absolutely fine with its free version for using in my simple non-confidential articles.

The Core

From a high-level perspective, we have two ways to use ProWritingAid:

either we can use it within writing apps as an assisting tool, OR,
use its web editor online to directly upload your text.

We’ll see how to edit online using the web editor now!

Detailed Review

Let’s go ahead and create the account first – at the time of signing up, simply provide your best email address, choose a strong password, and select what type of writer you are, from the adjacent-given drop-down button.

And click the ‘Sign Up for free’ button.

Alternatively, you can also use these Social logins. Now, since I have already created an account, I am going to click on this login button directly. This takes me to the web editor.

ProwritingAid has improved a lot in the recent past – its editor was a simple one with robust features like this one, which was mostly reserved for the premium users but they now have an updated and new editor which we can view from these links.

Simply, click on the one that you want to use. This article explains the ‘New Editor‘ though.

Old Editor: https://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/Editor
New Editor: https://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/WebEditor/Go

As soon as we land on the new web editor, we see a lot of icons and a couple of options to choose how we want to start our editing process. Either upload your document in a word processor format or Plain Text Format.

You could also simply copy and paste your text into the web tool from anywhere.

From the horizontal action bar on the header, we have the menu, writing style selection, and language options. You could also upload your document to edit from its menu option.

Additionally, there is also a “Word Explorer” which is an excellent tool to spark some creativity with any word’s definition, synonym, examples, and more. This is quite useful for finding the right words and sometimes even breaking through our writer’s block. It contains a thesaurus, contextually related words, rhymes and examples from books and much more.

This is available from the menu drop-down.

When you login, you can also see a sample text with some errors.

There are a plenty of reports available to run on our write-up.

Note that, hitting on the ALT key also gives us with a set of keyboard shortcuts to access these different reports.

Let’s now quickly go over what these different reports can offer us – remember we can run these reports for free (except for the plagiarism check, which needs credits to be purchased).

These reports are free only for the first 500 words at a time, so if you have a 1000 word write-up, you need to break your checks into two – with 500 words each.

This limit is removed if you choose to upgrade your license to premium version which is just 50$ per annum – quite cheaper compared to similar tools like Grammarly which costs close to $139.95 USD per annum.

You can even get a Lifetime Premium version of ProWritingAid for just ~~$175~~ $399 (as of January 2021) – I recommend grabbing this lower price before ProWritingAid changes its pricing model because, at this price, it offers a great deal of editing assistance for any kind of writers.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid – a Comparison

Let’s now see a comparison of Grammarly and ProWritingAid software.

Both offer to edit anywhere we write – offline, or online – but only Grammarly offers their tool offline even in the free version whereas ProWritingAid’s free version is available only for the web – if we need it within Word or use it as a Desktop tool, we need to upgrade to the premium version.
I thought that at least a minimum integration could be given for free users by PWA, but only web editor is available. If the limited 500-word check free version was also made available as an add-in within Word – then that would have clearly won over other similar tools like Grammarly which offers a free office add-in, desktop standalone software, and also a browser extension.
Overall, the threshold cap for the free version is kept on the number of words that we can edit at a time within ProWritingAid – only on the first 500 words at a time – otherwise almost all the checks and features are available on the online tool – on the other hand, Grammarly doesn’t limit on the words we check but blocks out majority of the features on the free version.
Cost-wise, the PWA is certainly cheaper compared to Grammarly at its current pricing model – clearly setting it apart from its competition – with no reason not to buy it.
Plagiarism checks: The downside with PWA, in my humble opinion, is that their paid version gives only 50 plagiarism checks per year. Which is really less, if you ask me, whereas no such limits exist with the paid version of Grammarly. Although not everyone would want to check on Plagiarism, it doesn’t make sense to limit its check, is what I feel. At least for the paid users, this check must be made unlimited.
Privacy: Next, let’s talk about content privacy. Grammarly collects user content as you can clearly see from their terms of use here (https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy#what-information-does-grammarly-collect-about-me) whereas ProWritingAid doesn’t collect any of our work as mentioned from their FAQ section seen on the screen (https://prowritingaid.com/en/App/FAQ/#security).
- This factor was a clear win or lose for me – I never want my work to be stored or collected by anyone for that matter, without really knowing or controlling how this will be used further in the future. This is the main reason why I have let my premium version of Grammarly expire without renewing its license.
Finally, the contextual spelling errors that are not exactly errors but correct words misplaced in the sentence – these mistakes are beyond ANY tool’s scope to catch, and thus only a human editing can solve.
If you liked this review, please also feel free to check out SoftwareHow’s review on their website.

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Conclusion

It doesn’t matter what type of user you are – be it student, blogger, author; ProWritingAid will have you covered by helping you improve your writing and getting your ideas across more clearly.

If you liked the review, please get your lifetime premium version at just a one-time fee by clicking here: this is an affiliate link, which means, I get a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Get ProWritingAid now !!

How to Create Short Intro Videos for YouTube using InVideo

September 22, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

Creating a short video as an intro or outro for YouTube from scratch is hard work. It takes time to position the logo where we want (after multiple trials and errors), find suitable music, get quality footage to use – not to forget the copyrights involved in the process.

InVideo is a tool which can help us exactly with just that. And more. I have been using it for a while now and it has become an important component of my video creation tools, mainly because of its ready to use templates and pre-made designs with music, scenes, animations, placeholders – it all cumulatively saves a ton of time!

A Definitive Guide to Using InVideo Video Creating Web App

Throughout this blog post, I will also mention some key features, tips, tricks, settings that you may find useful. I also mention a few things that need some improvement, so make sure you read this article completely. It took me a long time to break down all the important steps in this guide post, to create any video within InVideo – so once you finish reading this guide post, you’ll master everything that is there within InVideo.

Start using the InVideo tool for free NOW!

We will see how to use the InVideo tool to create your next professional-looking video, ad, or any promotional footage in under a few minutes.

Here’s a video with a sample intro video (actually two) + a complete walkthrough of what we are going to cover in this article. You can simply watch this video for the full walkthrough or keep reading further if you are of the ‘reading’ types.

Both the intro clips you see in the above video are created using the InVideo software in just a few clicks – and yes, no installation required in my computer – it’s all happening within the browser.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to create a similar video for your own purpose.

We will cover 3 sections in this article:

First, we’ll see the account setup process. It shouldn’t take long, it’s really short and simple.
Then, we will do some initial important setup such as uploading and adding some brand presets.
Finally, we will see how to create the video.

Now a full disclaimer here. I got a free account for creating this review video, and that being said, this video doesn’t show any bias and I have been using this tool for full 30 days tinkering around finding what’s good and what needs improvement, before producing this review for you. So, rest assured, you can be sure that this is a fair review article.

But if you choose to invest in this software (I don’t necessarily call it a purchase because you can definitely reap its rewards in terms of time saved and of course in terms of the professional boost you are about to give to your brand) – so if you choose to buy and invest in this software through my affiliate links below, I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you and that way you will be supporting my creations.

Get InVideo for just $5 per month.

We now know what is InVideo, next let’s create a new InVideo account.

There are some limitations with a free account but it does let you produce videos with a watermark – as you can see above from the screenshot.

If you choose to upgrade, there are two plans available at the time of making this video – which are Business and Unlimited plans.

The names of these plans may change depending on when you read this. These plans cost you $20 and $60 if you choose to go with paying every month, but you can instantly save 50% of it if you pay for the annual price, which costs $10 and $30 respectively, billed annually.

InVideo Promo Code:

And if you want to get an additional 50% off of this price you can use this InVideo coupon code arun50 and click on ‘Apply‘ to get it at just $5 per month paid annually.

Next, let’s see the account signing up process

Signing up process is pretty quick – just provide your name, email, number, and sign up. Once you are in, you will actually have a few setup options that can be done, but these are not compulsory to proceed and can be set up anytime later on. For now, I will just walk you through these settings.

If you scroll down a bit, you can see this ‘Personalize now‘ option through which you can let InVideo know your preferences. This will show some tailor-made content for you to focus on.

Another key setting to take care of is the Brand Presets section accessible from your profile menu here. Adding a logo once at the beginning using the ‘Brand Presets’ section enables you to have your brand logo in each scene by default. It also creates an end clip including your logo and social handles.

The brand presets option detects colors for text, background, etc. automatically once after you add your logo in accordance with the color of your logo. We will see how to make use of all that later.

Now, we are ready to create our first video.

Here, you will be greeted with three different workflows to create videos:

You could use their Pre-made video Templates – where you can use more than 3000 templates to create videos in under 10 minutes.
Use the Text-to-Video option to create videos from articles.
Start from a Blank Template to pour your own creativity.

The best part is that all these three options allow us to create videos in either Wide, or Vertical or Square format, thus catering to popular video content platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and vertical ones specifically to target mobile users and square ones for marketing-related video content creators who can use that to create ads for displaying in mobile or on the sidebar of websites.

The first two options have some pre-made templates in the shown custom platforms and formats, which is pretty cool – as it saves a good lot of your time.

If you have used Canva before, then you will pick this up pretty quickly. If not, don’t worry, I will still walk you through in detail on how to create a video quickly in InVideo.

That being said, they also have an extensive FAQ section if you have any questions on how to use any of their available features or even find out what are some of the features that you may be missing out.

Alright, so, now let’s go to the InVideo home page, and use a pre-made template to create an intro video.

This video has animation, let’s me show my logo and the website link. Perfect for an intro or an outro alike, and it’s also really short.

So, now let’s pick this one.

Before proceeding, am going to add this to my favorites, so you can revisit this later if in case you want to browse through other designs to get some inspiration. You can add a video to the favorites by clicking on the ‘heart ❤’ icon.

Once you are ready, we can start using this template, but before doing that let’s set up some defaults such as the social media handles, logo, company name, URLs, etc. This is where we will make use of the Brand Presets section we saw at the starting of this article.

This step will be really helpful as one-time setup variables which will then be picked up by the template fields when we create and edit. It’ll be definitely a huge time saver.

However, on the other hand, I feel more options could be given here as something I would call ‘Profiles‘ to create multiple presets if I have more than one website or logo to create videos for. It’d be especially useful to have multiple presets if you are an agency creating videos for your customers. Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

Moving on…

Click on ‘Use this template‘ – upload your logo on the left side pane which automatically fits it into this video template, thus making your editing time far lesser. If you already uploaded your logo using the universal Brand Presets section, then you can skip this step.

After selecting the template, we can see the media asset features on the left-hand side and the editing options on the right-hand side.

There are different tabs here to add different types of content elements in your video, such as text, image, video, effects, shapes, etc.

Speaking of images and videos there are more than 3 million Standard Media Library assets from Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash in addition to 1 million premium media content that is copyright free for you to add to the project and produce.

Just search for them using the search bar provided on the left side of the InVideo interface.

Remember that the InVideo Unlimited plan gives us unlimited everything – such as Premium Templates, HD Video Exports per Month, more than 1 million Premium photos, and videos from Storyblocks and Shutterstock to be used in our projects. Whereas the InVideo Business plan offers 300 premium photos and videos and 60 HD Video Exports per Month at the time of making this review.

Okay, so the bottom section has the project’s timeline – you can either choose to have a basic timeline or an advanced timeline by clicking here to change your view. You could modify the way the layers are stacked as per how you want it.

Just ensure to unlock certain layers that are locked by default such as the background and the overlay elements.

Of course, we can also rename the layers (right side of the editing interface) to suit our video projects. We also get to change the colors we want in the video.

Speaking of adding the suitable music tracks, InVideo’s technology adds the music track that is best suited for the theme of your video. But you can always have the option to change it by uploading your own track using the Upload button option. You can change the music track for your video either on the ‘Preview’ screen or on the ‘Advanced Editing’ screen – all under the ‘Music’ tab.

One thing to note here is that you will be able to hear the music only when you play all scenes by clicking its button. We won’t be able to hear any music when clicking on the ‘Play Scene’ button.

Important Tip:

One unique feature in InVideo is its Intelligent Assistant button. Clicking this will analyze your scenes to look at it from different angles, timing, and setup and lets you know if you have a pixel-perfect scene, LITERALLY!

The sample video we saw doesn’t need to have any voice-overs but if you have that specific need, it can be done using this button here.

You can upload an already recorded voiceover track, or record a live one, or it has a very cool automated Voiceover feature that lets you just type some text and have the computer read it out in the accent of your choice. It could be American, Indian, British, German, and so much more. that’s really cool!

Alright, now we’re all set to export our video – clicking on this Export button will instantly export the video into a 1080p video format.

How to Create Short Intro Videos for YouTube using InVideo 18

It provides a jobID to make note of so we can revisit them later. This can also be renamed. The rendering process takes a few minutes depending on the number of elements added in the video and the duration of all the scenes.

Once done, we can download and use it wherever we want. It’s as simple as that.

One of the cool things about InVideo is that they never get tired of creating new video templates. As you can see from the What’s Hot section, there is ALWAYS something new to pick from.

I also observed that they pretty much release a video template for every occasion or event – be it Teacher’s day, Labor Day, and every single celebrated holiday around the world. This is not only great to be current but also saves us time in creating a video on the hot topic or subject to release it to our related audience.

InVideo also has templates for almost every industry – regardless of which you belong to, you can access anything and everything.

As you can see here, there are templates for Finance & Loan services, Social Media Marketing, Bloggers, YouTubers, Yoga, Property Portfolios, Photography bloggers, Fitness, sales, marketing, production, health, education, travel, medical, electrical – the list goes on.

I hope this in-depth article provided a good walkthrough of how to use InVideo video maker app with adding your own music, adding scenes and bringing your creativity to life within a few clicks and a few minutes.

Don’t forget to use the InVideo coupon code ‘arun50‘ to get it for 5 bucks a month paid annually. I have been using it for a while now and it has become a part of my video creation tools that I cannot live without.

FreshBooks Suite of Financial Products – Let it Snow Sale!

December 21, 2019 by Arun Leave a Comment

If you are into any business, chances are more that you already know the pain of maintaining your business’s expenses, sending invoices to your clients, creating tax reports, managing and remembering to pay your bills on time, tracking the time spent on a particular client, setting up payment system to receive payments from your customers, and the list is endless.

FreshBooks, makes all of these and more, a cakewalk from the get-go.

Related: Have you tried the FreshBooks Business Name Generator yet?

If you haven’t tried out FreshBooks yet, here’s a sweet news for you during this festive season!

FreshBooks is offering a massive discount of 70% off for 3 months on its Plus and Premium plans. This offer is valid only until January 9, 2020.

With all these important financial records, rest assured, we can be at peace for its security systems are pretty solid.

Just remember that if you would like to take advantage of this offer, get straight to either the Plus or the Premium plan instead of signing up for the trial period. Otherwise, this discount is not applicable.

Note: the links in the post may be affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase.

Instamojo Review: Free Online Store to Sell Any Product (2018)

December 3, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

How to sell your eBooks directly on your very own online store, we will see exactly how to do that in this article.

What is Instamojo and what are the benefits of using it?

Instamojo helps us in creating our own online store to sell unlimited products online and earn passive income on the side.
The online store comes with in-built payments enabled so we can collect payments from our customers.
The payments are processed in Indian Rupees and deposited directly into the bank account in approximately 3 working days’ time.
If you are the creative types making crafts or paintings, writing books, or wanting to sell any physical goods or digital courses and tutorial videos, then you could do all of those using Instamojo without spending anything.
You could practically sell anything on your store.
You could also offer up products for FREE or let customers pay what they want for a particular product.

I have been using Instamojo myself since more than an year now to sell my eBooks, both for free and at cost.

Here’s a video demo to show you exactly how to sell your products online using Instamojo:

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The best part is selling digital goods through them like eBooks, which is also what I did, where they allow to host the files on their server for free. Now this is a huge deal if you see, because as you might know, the only issue with Amazon KDP is that selling our eBooks for FREE is not easily doable on Amazon.

Even if you get it to sell for free, the eBook becomes permanently-free on Amazon (which is called Perma-Free) and we cannot sell it again for a price later on.

If you ever want to just give away your eBook for free, but also want to CHANGE your pricing model later on, you would want to sell your books on your own website, and that’s where using the Instamojo integration will help you.

Just remember that eBooks should not be on KDP select if you want to do that.

Now, how to sell digital goods online for free?

As I said, the best part is ‘hosting‘ your digital files like PDF eBooks, or any eBook formats, or software, etc. Instamojo offers file hosting for free.

All you need to do is just:

upload your files to Instamojo and
use the embed link from product settings to
send to your customers or post it on Twitter, Facebook, or WhatsApp.

Let’s now see their pricing structure in detail-

No setup fees, or no maintenance charges,
No minimum commitment to get started – you pay their fees only when YOU sell.

And you can get started in just 2 to 5 minutes. They have quick and reliable transfers where you can automatically receive money in your bank account within 3 days of your sale date.

Instamojo charge ZERO transaction charges for collecting payments from your buyers if you want to use their NEFT/Bank online transfer facilities.

And the charges for collecting credit or debit card payments is just 2% per transaction + 3 rupees, as a convenience fee, at the time of writing this blog post.

They also support wallets, UPI gateways, and EMI options with some top banks through their payment gateways.

There is also a fee calculator tool (locator in the footer of their website) if you want to find what exactly you will earn from each transaction.

Let’s take some action now, and see how to sign up-

Go to their sign up page.

And if you use this special referral link when signing up (https://techlibrary.tv/instamojo – opens in a new tab), Instamojo gives you a bonus Rs. 500 after you make your first sale.

Follow the 6-step process to provide necessary details required to create your free Instamojo account as shown in the screenshots below:

Once your Instamojo account is created – complete the KYC steps by uploading documents for address and id proof to get your account verified, create your online store and start selling.

It’s that simple.

Caution: just remember that without getting your account verified by uploading the KYC requested documents, your account might have some monthly limit of ₹10000 and some limitations on your admin dashboard.

Let me now walk you through the settings pages and all the available features.

Once your account is setup, you can login to your dashboard. The Dashboard page shows you the recent transactions, and past sales.

This is the Payment Links page where you can simply send this link to your customers, friends, or family to receive any kind of payments.

Just click on ‘Send link‘ button to share it with whoever you want to request payment from.

You can see a preview of how it looks by clicking on ‘preview‘ button, or send the link by WhatsApp, or a button or link on your website, or just simply as a QR code for others to scan and pay directly to you.

Next is the Products and Store page:

This is where we can see all our physical and digital products we have in our online store.

Once a successful transaction is done, the details of the transactions reflect within your dashboard.

How to add a product to your online store –

Once you create your account – go to your online store from your profile menu – click on ‘Add product‘, choose the type of product you want to sell, upload your file – preferably a single file or a zip file if you have multiple files – you can leave this blank if you are not registered with GST or key these in if you have these codes, then input the cost, or check the box that shows you want to sell it for free.

If you want your customers to pay any amount as they like, then choose this option.

And then add product description and images, choose Advanced and SEO settings (which are all optional), and click on ‘Add Product to Store‘ button to list your products to your online store. So, that’s how you setup your store to sell digital goods.

Now what about refunds?

When I started selling online, I wondered what if a customer requests a refund that I need to initiate and give them their money back!

As per their website, refunds are possible with Instamojo. Sellers can issue a full or partial refund for any of the payments received by him within 180 days of the date of transaction.

The company will then execute the refund within 24 hours of the case creation, however, the final credit of the amount in buyer’s account is subject to the acquiring and issuing banks internal policies, and it may take several days to credit back the amount.

When a refund is initiated, no additional transaction fee is charged for transferring the money back into your customer’s account.

Here’s a Pro-Tip:

If at all you don’t want to bear the convenience fees, just disable the convenience fee option in your account settings, so your buyers will bear that nominal fee at the time of payment.

This is usual with some merchants where the customers pay extra for certain kind of payments, thus you receive your full retail price for your product. You can also have customers pay you with Instamojo NEFT and have no convenience fees charged at all for anyone.

You need not even share your bank details for getting paid through NEFT with instamojo – https://www.instamojo.com/blog/launching-instamojo-neft-direct-bank-transfer/

Selling physical goods with Instamojo

If at all you want to sell physical goods, you can setup your shipping options from their MojoXpress Shipping logistics service provider. You can also read through their detailed FAQs section (https://www.instamojo.com/apps/details/com.instamojo.vamaship/faq/) or just call them up if you want any help.

Next “API and Plugins” page is for people who are integrating Instamojo with Android or iOS mobile apps – so i will skip that section for now.

Then App store is a place where we can ‘subscribe‘ to some pretty good add-ons from Instamojo to enhance our experience and our customers’ experience like we can start our own affiliate network – so if you have a good customer who wants to help you in selling your product, you can offer them a part of your earnings as referral commission.

This is really a great feature to make your product go viral in sales. Then you have other apps that you can use to integrate with your email providers, payment retry options, sms alerts, generate professional invoices for payments you receive, send payment reminder emails, create business cards, and much more. There are some apps that require credits that you can also buy from them for a cost.

Next comes our:

Sales and customers,
payouts,
spends, and
analytics sections.

Here’s where you can see all your sales and customer details, and export them as needed in .CSV format to your computer if needed.

Now, all said and done, here’s another word of caution: always refrain from selling others’ copyrighted works and be aware of copyrights, Please also be prudent and don’t buy from anyone if the seller is not the author.

Finally, here’s a question for you – so based on what you just saw, what support do you need to get started in selling your creations online – let me know in the comments below.

How to Remove Background from an Image (no Photoshop)!

July 31, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

There are times when we want to remove background from an image file to give it a professional looking feel.

Now, here’s how to do that in just a few seconds without installing any software like photoshop.

Watch a demo here!

Simply Go to remove.bg website, and click on ‘Select a photo’ button. Alternatively, you could also pick the photo from a URL.

Choose your image to upload – after instantly processing (about 3 seconds later), you can see the resultant image alongside the original image.

Finally, just click on the download button to get your image without the background.

That’s it.

I even tested this using my mobile phone and it works perfectly on mobile devices too!

There is one caveat though. Currently, this service only works for photos with at least one person in them. Nevertheless, they are working to improve it further and soon we may get this to work on a variety of images hopefully.

As you can see Remove.bg is a free service and a simple tool that removes the background of any photo in 5 seconds. It works 100% automatically: You don’t have to manually select the background / foreground layers to separate them – just select your image and instantly download the result image with the background removed!

For people who are concerned about the privacy of your image you upload to their website, there is no need to worry because the images are only temporarily stored to process and to enable us to download the result. After that, approximately an hour later, they delete our files for good.