There is no shortage of companies asking small businesses to shell out hundreds if not thousands of dollars to promote themselves. But if you’re like most small business owners, you could really use some free tools to jumpstart your marketing. That’s why we’ve begun a weekly blog series featuring free tools for SMB owners to help you with your various marketing needs.
There are many free word cloud generators but Tagxedo stands out from its competitors. Aside from having the basic functionalities of a word cloud generator, this free tool has a high level of customization that aren’t available in popular word cloud tools like “Wordle”. The site is easy to navigate around, and gives you endless options for creating unique images for your small business marketing needs. Although Tagxedo isn’t a tool that you’ll need to use on a daily basis, it’s a powerful instrument to convey a message through imagery.
Tagxedo’s Unique Features
1. The app allows you to wrap text inside your own image. This allows you the flexibility to create more customized images using your logo or any ther image you want to upload.
2. Along with over 100 appealing color themes and fonts to pick from, you can also upload your own font or create a custom color palette to use.
3. Word cloud generators use an algorithm that determines which words to emphasis. The higher frequency the word appears in your content, the more pronounced in size the word appears in your word cloud image. Tagxedo allows you to adjust the size of words, allowing you to emphasis the words you want.
4. Unlike other tools that offer you limited options on how to save your image, you can save your word cloud as a png or jpeg file, as an html, and adjust how many bytes you want to save the file as. You can also directly share the image to Twitter and Facebook.
5. Most word cloud generators can only create abstract cloud shaped images, but Tagxedo has over 30 different shapes to wrap your text inside. The images have a broad appeal with everything ranging from pigs to stars.
How to Generate a Word Cloud Using Tagxedo
Choose the content you want to shape into a word cloud and go to www.tagxedo.com. You can create word clouds from words in a blog, Twitter, online search, RSS feed, and insert your content from any body of text and URL. Load your content by pull your content from an URL, or manually entering in the content you want to illustrate.
Next, choose a theme under the “Respins” toolbar. You can play with the color, themes, fonts, orientation, layout, and the shape. Under each option, you can each select a pre-made color palette, theme, font, and shape or upload your own.
Under the “Options” the toolbar, you’ll see “Words | Layout Options” which allows you to change emphasis on words, maximum word count, tightness, color variations, etc.
After you’ve created an image that you’re satisfied with, select the “Save | Share | Print” button at the top of the toolbar and select your preferences.
If you need more ideas on how to use Tagxedo, check out Tagxedo’s post on 101 unique ideas on how to use the tool or visit the Tagxedo gallery.
Try out “Tagxedo” for yourself here. Looking for more free online marketing tools to help you with your marketing? Subscribe to our blog to receive email updates or download our free guide,“45 Free Marketing Tools to Promote Your Business” to find more tools to help you research, create, and publish your marketing content.
