Lee McIntyre’s Honest Marketing Blog

28 Free Marketing Tools I Couldn’t Live Without - Part III

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Over the past few days I’ve been documenting my 28 favourite free marketing tools, and in part I and part II I described plenty of tools that will help grow your business and which won’t cost a cent.

Well buckle up, because the series continues today with free tools 15-21….

15. Thesaurus.com

There’s hardly any task that I can think of that has the potential to give me brain freeze than writing copy. Whether I’m writing a short email to my list, or producing a sales letter for an upcoming product, you can pretty much guarantee that my head will go blank for a minute or two before I get to the send button.

Thesaurus.com is a great tool for those situations when you just can’t think of the best word to use. Simply type the word you have in mind into the box above, hit search, and you’ll be presented with a pile of alternatives.

This is a great tool that should be in your bookmarks if you ever suffer from similar brain freezes.

16. Gigasize.com

Do you ever find yourself with huge files that are simply too big to send via email? Yeah, me too! Normally I’d just upload to my server, but when I find myself without FTP access I often use Gigasize.

It’s a cool tool that allows you to upload and share big files super fast. Next time you find yourself with a huge file that needs transferring, then have a look at this nice little free tool and you’ll have those files sent before you know it!

17. Alexa

For those who don’t know, Alexa is a free tool that allows you to find out the traffic levels of any site online. It can be a tad unreliable, but it does give you a good indication as to how many hits a site is getting.

Now, making money online is all about traffic AND conversions, and there’s plenty of people with lots of sites who have low traffic levels but high conversions at high price points.

But if you’re ever a bit suspicious that a marketer is exaggerating claims about their success then you can learn a lot by snooping around Alexa. For example, there’s one semi prominent marketer who’s always banging on about how amazing he is, and how many sales he enjoys every day.

The guy has one site, selling one product at a modest price point, and yet Alexa barely gives him a second look. Now before any marketing wannabes, and self proclaimed internet millionaires start complaining in the comments below, I agree that Alexa does have its quirks.

Having said that, when a marketer is claiming to have made seven figures of direct response sales of a $27 product, and yet Alexa shows them as having a minuscule amount of traffic, it’s time to join the dots and not look back.

If you understand its limitations, then Alexa can be a fantastic free marketing tool that helps you quickly cut through the online hype.

18. Stock.XCHNG

Do you ever want to brighten up your sales pages? Want to add some life to your blog? Then head to Stock.XCHNG and grab some photos completely free of charge.

I use this site an awful lot, and there’s a huge amount of quality pictures that you could start using today. Some of the pics come with some restrictions from the author (check before you use them), but most have unrestricted right attached.

This is my first stop whenever I need images online, and my niche sites would be a lot more sad looking without it.

19. Mailinator

Do you ever come across a squeeze page and they want you to enter your email address just to see their offer? Generally speaking I don’t mind giving up my email address to get something of value but having to opt in to see a sales page is just plain crazy.

One tool that I use from time to time to overcome this issue is Mailinator.

It’s a free tool that allows you to create disposable email addresses for those moments when you really don’t want to give up your address. In fact, you don’t even have to sign up in advance and you can even create new disposable email addresses on the fly.

20. Blogpulse

Blopulse is a fantastic free research tool that allows you to discover what’s hot and what’s not in the blogsphere.

You can track conversations in blogs, and see the trends of particular keywords over a period of time. It took me a while to get my head around this at first, but if you just dive right in you’ll quickly discover that this is pretty powerful free tool that helps you keep track of the latest happenings in the blogshere.

21. Google Docs

Have you noticed how many Google applications are in my list of the best 28 free online marketing tools? Their model of giving away such services for free and then making money off the adverts is simply brilliant, and I think we could all learn a lesson by watching how they do this.

Google Docs is one of my favourite online tools, and it really does make my life so much easier. It’s basically a place to store your documents online, with the added benefit that you and others can edit files at the same time.

You don’t end up with lots of different versions of the same file flying around, and you don’t have to download your file each time you want to open it. In short, it’s brilliant and once again it’s 100% free.

To give you an idea of one of the ways that I use this tool, I have a checklist of activities that my customer support manager performs each day. After each task she ticks a box showing it’s been done for the day, and I can quickly login and check that we’re upto date and on top of things.

In the past I had to download the file before checking, and we ended up with out of sync versions, so this way is much easier for everyone.

I can also check my spreadsheets on the move, and there are lots of other powerful features. Can you tell how much I love Google Docs yet?! If you’ve not already using it then check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below.

And we’re done once again…

I hope you’re still with me because tomorrow I have the final instalment and another 7 killer free online marketing tools to help increase your profits today.

Let me know what you think of part III of this series in the comments below, and make sure you check back for the final part soon…

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