Lee McIntyre went from overworked high school teacher to full time marketer in just 56 days. He is the founder of Aim Higher Marketing where he shows others how to use honest marketing to build profitable Internet businesses in record time.
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28 Free Marketing Tools I Couldn’t Live Without - Part III
By Lee McIntyre | January 14, 2008
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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….
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Topics: Marketing Tools |
January 15th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Great posts about the free marketing tools. I write a blog about free stuff and software you can get off the internet and I’d love to do a small write up and link to your site since you list a good amount of them. Since I write about the site that lists them and don’t link back to the free item itself and considering the fact that your site looks so great it would be perfect to add to my blog. Thanks and once again I really enjoy your articles.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Thanks for these posts Lee! A lot of the tools/programs I already use but some of them I haven’t heard of so I’ll be having fun checking out some new business tools
Angela Wills
January 15th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Hi Kristen
Thanks for the post and I’m glad you like the free tools.
Hi Angela
Fingers crossed part IV should be ready tomorrow and hopefully you’ll like this too.
It’s been a fun series to write and I’m glad so many people have enjoyed it.
Thanks for the comments!
Lee McIntyre
January 19th, 2008 at 4:41 am
I Lee,
You really do a service to people who do a lot of work on the internet. Some of these tools I know about, but the majority I don’t. Thanks a million.
Anne Y. Williams
September 6th, 2008 at 2:08 am
Thank you for the information. I always appreciate it when someone feely shares their knowledge with others. You have a useful blog and I will certainly return.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Great List!
Just wanted to let you know that Zoho Docs, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer, Zoho CRM ,etc too would fit your bill.
Please checkout zoho.com for the variety of online services available. Note all services are FREE for individuals.
Thank You,
Shankar
November 21st, 2008 at 12:51 am
Very good post i know most of the tools you have mentioned but i am going to check out the ones i dont know about