To kick off the new collection of free online tools for writers that we’ll be releasing here at All Freelance Writing, I’d like to officially announce the launch of two new word count trackers. Yes, two (long story). If you don’t like one, you can play with the other.

I was lucky to find two guys who created two very different, but very cool trackers for you to play with. Whether you’re kicking off NaNoWriMo in a couple of days and working towards your 50,000 word novel or you just want to set a blog posting or income goal to share on your own site or blog, our new trackers can help you out!

Word Count Tracker #1

This is your basic word count tracker if you don’t want to customize things too much. That’s not to say it doesn’t offer plenty of features though! If you know a little bit about CSS you can use the advanced options to easily change the color and size of your progress bar to match your own site or fit any space (and without having to play with the final embed code to do it!).

You can use this word count tracker to track your NaNoWriMo progress, word count on an e-book you’re working on, or for a book (or pretty much any writing-related project) at any time during the year. You can either customize the size or you can choose from two presets — a small version that’s perfect for a narrow blog sidebar or a much larger version that you can use in a forum signature to share your progress with the world.

Word Count Tracker #2

Our second word count tracker is a cool little tool that you can use for much more than tracking your word counts. For example, if you set an income goal as a freelance writer and you want to keep your blog readers updated on your progress (for the year, month, or however long you choose), you can choose to track a dollar amount by entering that into our custom field. Or you can use our preset options to track words, pages, or posts (such as a certain number of blog posts each month). Do you know what’s really great about the custom field though? You can use this to track anything, even if it’s not writing-related! Need a weight loss tracker? Here you go! Want to count down until a vacation or other event? You can do that too! You can track just about anything you want!

After deciding exactly what you want to track, you can decide whether or not you want to display the percentage or just your progress level. You can also choose between three different output sizes for your progress bar (and if you know a bit of css and html, you can certainly adjust that manually in your embed code).

For right now our word count tools are pretty simple. We aren’t going with heavy image-based ones due to the fact that they’d likely crash the server. I also opted for word count trackers that have to be updated manually (also to cut down on admin work and load — you won’t be able to login and simply update your tracker, but instead will visit the tracker page and enter your new info each time). Down the road I may release a more advanced version of one or both of these tools, but for now I wanted to get them in your hands before NaNoWriMo for writers taking part, but also before the New Year when you’ll be setting new writing goals to track.

I hope you enjoy these word count trackers. If you have any problems while using them, please comment on their page and I’ll see what I can do.