It’s often said that in order to make money, you have to be willing to spend a little. That may be true, but the savvy marketer spends wisely and not at all when possible. On that note, here are nine powerful marketing tools that won’t cost you one red cent to use.
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Twitter
There are a number of social networks, but many marketing experts will agree that Twitter is the best for business. The information on this site flows fast and freely, making it possible to quickly build a huge following and create a viral impact with your efforts. And while Twitter is now offering premium advertising solutions, there are businesses successfully leveraging the basic service for all its worth. -
YouTube
Video has ascended to all new levels of power, and YouTube alone is a big reason why. You’ll need your own camera, but YouTube pretty much has everything you need to get your content online, including a video editor that allows you to spruce it for a viewing audience. There are other platforms out there, but recognition and activity makes this one a favorite of video marketers. -
Vine
Speaking of video, Vine is quickly emerging as a powerful video marketing tool. Brought to you by the creators of Twitter, the app lets you engage your audience through six-second videos that can be easily shared across the social landscape. Six seconds isn’t a lot, but combined with all the cool features, a little creativity can help you make the most of it. -
Tumblr
Blogging and social media are two of the biggest forces in the internet space. One startup decided to capitalize on this by merging the best of both in a little service called Tumblr. This platform allows you to create conventional blog posts as well as build a community with social features such as following, likes and sharing (reblogging). Now a property owned by web giant Yahoo, the future of Tumblr looks very bright. - Online Broken Link Checker
Broken links can cause you a lot of problems, including loss of search engine rankings, loss of traffic and if you’re heavily dependant on your web presence, loss of revenue. Online Broken Link Checker helps you identify those broken links by digging right into the HTML code to find the source of the trouble. There is also a premium version of this tool, but the free one works pretty well for basic link validation needs.
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Pingdom Website Speed Test
The speed at which your pages load can make or break you. If they load fast, users will love your website. If they load at the pace of a snail, then visitors won’t be very happy. Page speed also influences search rankings, which is why tools like Pingdom’s Website Speed Test are so important. This tool is very handy as it accesses the performance of your website and even helps you figure out what might be slowing things down.
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Mozbar
Toolbars have a long grueling history of being the most worthless piece of internet technology ever created. Okay that may be a bit harsh, especially when we’ve got options like the SEOMoz toolbar to choose from. Mozbar proves highly useful as it lets you measure link performance across multiple search engines, create custom searches, and quickly access a variety of other powerful SEO tools from your browser.
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Bit.ly
Link shortening tools seem pretty useless until Twitter’s 140-character limit leaves you with little to no room for descriptions after sharing a link. Luckily for tools like Bit.ly. One of the most widely used services of its kind, Bit.ly allows you to optimize those links and also provides a way to track their activity, which comes in handy when it’s time to analyze your marketing results.
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics may not be robust enough to handle big data needs, but when it comes to tracking web-based marketing efforts, it’s one of the best around. This software offers a number of powerful features to help you measure those efforts, including tools that are specifically designed for websites, mobile apps, and social media marketing campaigns. With all this on the menu, you may consider Google Analytics a steal.
Online marketing can be a costly endeavor. You’ve got your web hosting service to pay for, search advertisements, and other efforts that help you create visibility and simply exist in the digital space. Luckily, there are tools like this that prove some of the best things in marketing truly are free!