Are you an author, journalist, academic, or student who's responsible for writing original pieces of work? The Grammarly plagiarism checker may save your career. In today's world, with so much content published and read online, you're at risk of inadvertently committing plagiarism by writing a sentence found somewhere else. Even if the chance of this is low, the backlash can be high. One instance of plagiarism can sink your career or graduation prospects. Luckily, you can protect yourself with the Grammarly plagiarism checker. Read on to learn more and start using this powerful tool.    

​The Grammarly plagiarism checker is a feature of the Grammarly writing platform that compares a user's text to over 16 billion web pages, plus ProQuest-stored academic papers, and triggers an alert if any part of the user's text matches anything someone else already wrote. 

If you want to try the plagiarism checker, visit Grammarly's website, open the "Tools & Guides" section, and click "Plagiarism Checker":

​Yes, Grammarly is a good plagiarism checker. User text is scanned for matches against 16 billion web pages, plus databases of academic papers. Grammarly, a platform with over 30 million daily users, is trusted by individuals, academic institutions, and companies.  

Yes, Grammarly offers a free version of its plagiarism checker. It will inform you if a body of text contains content published elsewhere. The Premium version, however, offers many more features, such as visibility into specific sentences that contain duplication issues.

The cost of the Grammarly Premium version is very affordable, starting at just $12 per month.

​If avoiding plagiarism is important to you, I'd recommend you opt for the Premium plan and take advantage of Grammarly's full capabilities. At just $12 per month, the price is well worth the advantages. You'll also get access to other helpful features (outlined below in this article).

To get a Premium account, visit the Grammarly website, open the "Compare Plans" section, and choose the "Premium" option: 

Key features of the Grammarly Premium plagiarism checker:

• Duplicate passages are highlighted, making them easy to spot
• All instances of duplication are scanned for, even if just a few words
• Proper citations for duplicate content can easily be added to your piece
• An overall "originality score" is calculated for your piece
• Integrations are available for the apps you write in, like Microsoft Word, Gmail, and Scrivener  

Though certain writers intentionally commit plagiarism, many don't. However, even if you engage in plagiarism unintentionally, serious repercussions are still likely. Your reputation as a writer can be ruined. And you can face intellectual-property infringement issues.

​Writers tend to read in the genre or niche they write in. Let's say you read something and particularly like a certain metaphor. Six months later, you're writing an article on a similar topic. You might include the metaphor, forgetting you originally read it somewhere else.

Another unintentional plagiarism mistake can arise from improper citation. You may purposefully quote another writer in your piece, copying and pasting text, while forgetting to include quotation marks and the source.

To safeguard against unintentional plagiarism, just create a Grammarly account. Though I recommend the Premium plan, you can of course begin with the free plan to get a feel for the platform before deciding to upgrade. Visit the Grammarly website to get started:

The Grammarly plagiarism checker is a great feature. However, when you create your Grammarly Premium account, you'll also gain access to many other tools that are helpful for authors, journalists, academics, students, and anyone else who wants to write clear, engaging, error-free sentences.  

Spot spelling and grammar issues. 

Receive suggestions for making sentences clearer and more concise. 

View recommendations for replacement words.

See instances where your writing tone diverges from what's intended.


To use these helpful features today, visit the Grammarly site and create your Premium account:

Though Grammarly is often used by individuals, it's effective in a collaborative environment as well. Over 50,000 teams use the platform every day.

Grammarly's Business package is geared toward teams. Individual team members will receive their own accounts, equipped with Premium features. Additional, team-oriented features are available too:

• User roles with access permissions
• Single sign-on
• Style guidelines team members can follow while writing
• Brand-specific tone checking
• Aggregated analytics on team writing patterns

A Business package starts at $15 per team member per month. Billing for all accounts can be consolidated to one payment source.

The packages are useful for companies of any size. Grammarly can not only help employees create error-free emails and documents, but stay consistent with brand tone, something that isn't always intuitive to everyone.

The Grammarly plagiarism checker can also be very valuable to a company. If, for example, one employee inadvertently commits plagiarism in an industry report with the company logo on it, the entire company can suffer serious reputational consequences.

To get your team a Business package, visit the Grammarly website, open the "Compare Plans" area, and select "Business":      

One of Grammarly's best features is its ability to integrate with the apps you're already writing in. Whether you're using the plagiarism checker or the writing-enhancement features, Grammarly seamlessly works in the background. Easily use it with these apps and more:

• Gmail
• Outlook
• Apple Mail
• Slack
• Microsoft Word
• Scrivener
• Google Docs
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Salesforce
• Discord
• Notion

​This post contains affiliate links.

​Are you a YouTube video creator looking to get more views? The vidIQ browser extension for Chrome can help you skyrocket your video performance. Easily conduct keyword research and optimize your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags. Read on to learn how to download the vidIQ extension and how to leverage it to enhance your presence on YouTube.

​The vidIQ extension is an add-on to the Chrome browser that surfaces analytics and recommendations while users upload, browse, or watch videos on YouTube. Use it to optimize a video's title, description, and tags, and view engagement data on videos and search terms. 

​First, you need a vidIQ account. The Basic plan is free. Three premium, paid plans are offered, which provide a wider variety of features than Basic. You can browse the plans and see which is right for you on the vidIQ website:

Here are vidIQ's collection of plans, their prices, and the extension features that come with each:

• Basic is free. Get access to a video scorecard for any video, with engagement figures, a live stats bar, with key metrics for your channel, and comparative analytics to other channels.

 

• Pro starts at $7.50 per month. Get the Basic features, plus a keyword research tool and the ability to find trending videos by keyword.

 

• Boost starts at $39 per month. Use all the Pro features, plus receive data on YouTube's most viewed videos. Get SEO-optimized title and description recommendations for your videos, suggested tags, and thumbnail previews.

 

• Max starts at $79 per month. Its extension features are the same as Boost's, however, it comes with additional capabilities within vidIQ's web portal.

​Once you sign up for a vidIQ plan, you'll not only gain the ability to install the Chrome extension, but get access to vidIQ's web portal, which is loaded with additional tools and reports to help you grow your YouTube views.

Once you create your account on the vidIQ website, you'll be asked to link your YouTube channel. This is simple - all you need to do is enter your YouTube email address and password and click a button to approve vidIQ.

You'll be taken inside the vidIQ web portal. If you click the three horizontal lines beside your profile picture, at the upper right of the page, a menu will open, with "Download Extension" an option.
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Once you click the "Download Extension" link, a page on the Chrome web store will open, with an option to add the extension.
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Once you install the add-on, whenever you open YouTube on the Chrome browser, the vidIQ extension features available on your plan will automatically show up on your screen as you browse, watch, and upload videos. 

​vidIQ offers various features through its Chrome extension and web portal that help you choose high-reach topics for your videos and optimize their metadata for YouTube SEO. To start using these features, visit the vidIQ website and get your account.

Enter a phrase - ex "thriller books" - in the web portal and vidIQ's customized ideas feature will suggest topics for new YouTube videos you can make. The "View prediction" column provides vidIQ's assessment of how many views a video about the suggested idea could generate.
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​Within the web portal, you also have the ability to check the search volume and competition level of any keyword.

Search volume is an estimate of how many times per month the keyword is entered into YouTube's search bar. Competition is a measure of the difficulty level for a video to appear high in the search results for the keyword. The value is reflected as a number from 1 to 100, with 100 corresponding to the most difficult.

A keyword's overall value is a function of its search-volume and competition metrics. The overall number's aim is to help you identify keywords that receive a high amount of low-competition searches. Videos optimized for these keywords are likely to generate a lot of clicks via YouTube search, and therefore, views.

The overall value is measured from 1 to 100, with 100 referring to the highest potential for search success.
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Another effective vidIQ feature for topic research is the video analytics component of the Chrome extension. If you visit any video's page on YouTube, you'll instantly see performance statistics for it.

These metrics span engagement on YouTube - ex, views over time - and other social channels, such as shares on Facebook.

If you're considering making a video on a certain topic, you can check out these statistics for existing videos about that topic to gain a sense of how strongly YouTube users are engaging with the concept. 

Once you've chosen a topic for your video and create the video, you want to make sure you optimize its metadata so it ranks as high as possible for your target keyword.

​The vidIQ Chrome extension can help, providing an SEO score with two components - actionable and performance.

​The actionable score refers to metadata elements you enter while uploading the video, specifically the title, description, and tags. The score ranges from 0 to 50, with 50 ideal. The higher the score, the more your video is optimized for search, according to vidIQ.

The performance score - also from 0 to 50, with 50 ideal - is relevant once a video has been uploaded. It reflects how well the video is performing in search results across the tags added to it. If a video is performing poorly, you may consider editing its metadata.

As you upload videos, vidIQ will assess how well they perform across various metrics, like views and subscriber growth. This data is leveraged within the channel audit feature.

vidIQ provides aggregate performance trends of your videos, plus offers insights into your best performing ones. You'll even get custom-tailored suggestions for performance improvement.

​I'm an author who's been using vidIQ for marketing. Mostly, I've used it to optimize the metadata of videos about books I've written and writing advice I give.

The vidIQ platform is easy to use. And for the depth of data provided, the price for paid plans is very low. Overall, I recommend vidIQ for anyone who wants to boost channel engagement on YouTube, whether you're just starting out or already have a large following that you hope to grow even more.

Though the free plan is helpful, if you want to take advantage of vidIQ's more advanced technology, I suggest you sign up with the lowest-cost paid plan, Pro, which starts at just $7.50 per month. You can always upgrade from there if you need even more capabilities. 

Are you an author, blogger, marketer, or content creator who leverages YouTube as part of a broader content strategy? If so, you could benefit from other tools for digital analytics.

​One that might be of interest is BuzzSumo, especially if you write text articles in addition to creating videos. It lets you easily identify trending article topics across many verticals.


This post contains affiliate links. 

​Are you responsible for a lot of tasks in your professional life? How about your personal life? Todoist is a productivity app that can help. You can get started totally free. Todist recurring tasks is one of the app's best features. If you're responsible for the same task week after week, you can easily add it to the app. Instead of juggling multiple recurring tasks in your head, Todoist will do all the work for you, helping you avoid forgetting anything. Read on to learn more about the benefits of Todoist and how to get the most out of it.

Todoist is a productivity app that keeps track of any task in your professional or personal life. You can quickly create one-time or recurring tasks, set due dates, schedule reminders, and share tasks with your colleagues, friends, or family members. The app has a mobile and desktop version.

You can start using the free version of Todoist by signing up on their website, in just a few seconds:

​Todoist also offers a Pro version. It only costs $4 per month, billed annually. With the Pro plan, you can create up to 300 projects, share tasks with up to 25 others, create reminders, and set an unlimited number of filters for your tasks.

Todoist also offers team accounts, designed for bigger projects with multiple stakeholders. A free version is available, which caps at 5 projects. A paid version - the Business plan - allows up to 500 projects, unlimited stakeholders, and the reminder feature.

The Business version costs $6 per month, billed yearly.

Todoist paid plans provide a lot of value for a small price. If you're already a Todoist user, you should consider upgrading - learn more.

​The recurring tasks feature is available on both the free and paid plans. Follow these steps to create a recurring task in Todoist:
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Todoist relies on natural language processing to define recurring tasks as opposed to dropdown menus with scheduling inputs.

When you're naming a task, if you'd like it to recur weekly, simply type in "every" after the name, followed by the scheduled day of the week, followed by "at" and the scheduled time.

​You also have the ability to set up non-weekly recurring tasks. For instance, create a task that repeats every month or every other week. Simply type your conditions into the field for task name and Todoist's machine learning technology will try to make sense of your entry.  

Once you start entering information that Todoist recognizes as scheduling inputs for a recurring task, the app will highlight what you've written.

If you don't notice a highlight, Todoist couldn't make sense of the entry. Try rephrasing it. Simple, direct language is best.    

​Once you save the task, it will be reflected on your task list as recurring. Todoist indicates this with a small icon (two arrows pointing at each other) beside the date and time.

If you indicate that you've completed an instance of a repeating task, that instance will be cleared from your to-do list and the next instance will appear.  

Todoist offers various features to help you manage and complete recurring tasks.

​You can create projects and organize tasks within them. For instance, you may add a project called "Launch new product." Various tasks can be grouped within that project, both recurring and one-time. You may have a recurring task called "Review current prototype," for example, which happens every Thursday.

​The app's sub-task feature lets you further define a one-time or recurring task by breaking it into sub-tasks, each with its own due date and time.

Todoist's filtering and labeling features are additional organizational tools, which let you easily search for tasks. These features are particularly helpful if you have many tasks and need a quick way to find certain ones.

The app's collaboration abilities let you share one-time or recurring tasks with others. This feature is extremely useful is you're part of a virtual project team. You can delegate tasks and easily keep up on their progress, even if your team is spread out in multiple cities across multiple timezones.

Todoist's commenting feature is very effective for team accounts. You and your colleagues can comment on any task, raising questions, providing context, offering suggestions, etc.  

Though you can create recurring tasks on a Todoist free plan, you can't set reminders for them unless you upgrade to a paid plan. If you have a schedule with various recurring tasks, you likely would benefit from the reminder feature, which will help you avoid missing any instances.

​The Todoist Pro version only costs $4 per month. Missing even one instance of an important task - like attending a client meeting - can cost you way more than $4. The value from the premium version of the app can far outweigh its small cost.

​You can get a Todoist Pro plan by logging into your free account and selecting the "Upgrade" option:   

Todoist offers two types of reminders:

• Time reminders
• Location​ reminders

When you create a task on the Pro or Business plan, Todoist will automatically set a time reminder - 30 minutes before the set time of the task, you'll be notified of it.

You have the option to change the default time reminder. For instance, instead of receiving a notification 30 minutes before a task, you can get one 60 minutes prior.

You also have the ability to select how you'd like to be notified of the reminder. Your options:

• Mobile push notification
• Desktop notification
• Email

Even if a task does not have a due date or time, you can still set up time reminders for it.

A location reminder is a feature of the Todoist mobile app. You can input certain physical locations, ex an office. Each time you arrive at that location, the app's geotracking technology will recognize your arrival and send you a relevant reminder.

For instance, every time you go to a certain office for work, you may have to collect a signature from a colleague. You can set up a reminder to get the signature whenever you show up at that office.

If you're an individual, I recommend spending $4 per month to take advantage of Todoist's full range of features for your recurring tasks.

If you manage a business team, spend just $2 per month more to streamline recurring tasks for all of your colleagues.

​Check out these affordable paid plans on the Todoist website: