Right now, you have access to an Aladdin’s Cave of freely available marketing, business development and professional development tools. In today’s post, I am going to share just 9 of them with you.
Free marketing and educational resources
Here are my 9 free resources. Remember to add yours at the end:
- Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, will give you a blog for free and host it for free, too. Many of the world’s top blogs started off on this free platform and some have stayed with the free version of the service. I started this blog off using the free version of WordPress and today, around 60,000 people get updated when I publish each new post.
- The people at TED have made thousands of educational and inspirational videos available to you, for free.
- Microsoft offer you Skype for free, so you can easily collaborate with colleagues or clients via speech or video conferencing. So long as they have downloaded Skype, you can now work with people, with no geographic limitations and it won’t cost you a penny.
- Twitter, Google+ and Facebook welcome you to use their services for free and Linkedin offers a useful, free version of their service too. Years ago, you paid an organisation to attend physical networking events, and lost a huge chunk of your day travelling to the events, attending the events and getting back from the events. You were lucky if 100 people attended and even luckier if you made regular, meaningful contacts. Now you can network with thousands of people anywhere in the world, for nothing more than the time you’re prepared to invest.
- Seth Godin digs deep to come up with something useful to say, via his daily blog posts. These are essential reading.
- Christopher Penn and John Wall turn up on an almost weekly basis, to share ideas and opinions on the world of marketing, in their Marketing Over Coffee podcast. I reviewed it here.
- You can now give your online and offline marketing photos and images more impact, with free image editing software. I use picmonkey.
- It has never been easier to capture ideas than it is today. If you use a smartphone, Evernote provides an extremely useful free version of their service, which allows you to collect ideas, sounds, images, webpages and more – and then work with them.
- If you have a website or blog, you need to measure what’s happening on the site and by far the most popular tool for this, is Google Analytics. Google Analytics lets you track everything, from how many visitors your site receives and what your most popular pages are, to what words people use when looking for you on a search engine and what type of devices they use to access your site. This free package offers far too many features to mention here and is extremely useful, especially if you do not already have any analytics software.
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About Jim Connolly: I help small business owners grow their business, make more sales and boost their profits. To see how I can help you and your business, read this.
December 17, 2012 at 19:33
Great list!
If it was my list I would also add:
Instapaper, Lastpass, Quora & Buffer…
I use Instapaper to capture things in a second which I later go back to once-twice a week & do one of the following: Delete, Read, Add to Evernote, Share. This app alone has saved me so much time.
Lastpass to collect all of my passwords.
Quora for a bit of random learning as I normally read books or listen to audiobooks of a chosen interest… I use TED also for the inspired randomness.
I use Buffer so that I can leave Twitter alone whenever ever I like but can still add the links that I am interested in & want to share with my followers.
December 17, 2012 at 20:46
Thanks for all those suggestions, Ben.
December 17, 2012 at 21:36
Am I allowed to add Jims Marketing Blog to the list?
After all, you’re the only blog I visit every day.
December 17, 2012 at 21:39
Holly, not only CAN you add my blog to the list, it’s obligatory
Thanks for reading.
December 18, 2012 at 03:26
Jim,
Thank you for those excellent resource suggestions. I’ll return for more.
December 18, 2012 at 07:32
You’re welcome, Monty.
December 18, 2012 at 13:11
Jim,
I wouldn’t be without Evernote, as listed above, for clipping interesting web pages while doing research. Also DropBox so I can access vital files wherever I am and whatever computer I am on.
Nicola
December 18, 2012 at 14:16
Hi Nicola. Thanks for the suggestions!
December 19, 2012 at 08:21
I really enjoyed this post. I did not know I could host a free blog on Automattic. I’m gonna try it in the next coming days. Thanks for the pro tips.
December 19, 2012 at 12:44
You’re welcome, Hillary.
December 19, 2012 at 12:03
Hey Jim, you’ve made a solid list. Internet Marketing has really improved in the last couple of years. I think you could put Instagram on your list as well. Keep up the good work.
December 19, 2012 at 12:43
Thanks Darrin.
December 19, 2012 at 16:22
I’d add Survey Monkey and don forget those all the free social tools and analytics
December 20, 2012 at 09:21
Honestly Jim, where do you get your inspiration and how many hours do you work in a day? Amazing stuff.
December 20, 2012 at 10:06
Hi Tirivashe. Great to see you again.
I get my inspiration mainly through studying my craft. I don’t watch TV, so I use that time to create content, rather than consume it.
Good questions and thanks for the kind words, sir.
December 20, 2012 at 20:10
I can recognize when i read a meaningful article and this one is no exception, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.
December 20, 2012 at 20:15
You’re welcome, Kathleen. Thanks.
March 6, 2013 at 23:01
To Jim and to all of you who have commented, thank you very much. I have learnt alot from you guys… I am grateful.
March 13, 2013 at 07:28
Excellent and much useful resources. Well, all these 9 resources are awesome, especially Skype and Google analytics. Thanks for sharing and tweeted, Liked and +1’d
March 13, 2013 at 07:30
Thanks Nizam. I’m glad you found them useful, sir.
April 5, 2013 at 10:48
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the great information as always. I would add Mint for financial planning and tracking.
April 5, 2013 at 10:49
You’re welcome, Aaron. Thanks for the suggestion.
April 5, 2013 at 14:09
What a great list! I’ve added 3 to my “tool box”. Thanks, Jim!
For those who want to create a quality newsletter, I recommend Mail Chimp. It is free (a very generous number of emails before the paid version is required), and they provide a variety of ready-to-use templates. You can also create your own customized templates as well.