How Not Knowing About These Free Online Marketing Tools Makes You A Rookie

There is an old saying, “The right tools can make a man,” and that also conveys well to businesses where the right tools can make you successful. For some businesses out there that don’t have a large pool of resources to draw from, free tools are necessities for things line online marketing. As a top web development company, we have worked with a number of small and medium sized companies and have shown them how not knowing about these Free Online Marketing Tools makes you a rookie.

Rather than staying in the minor leagues longer than necessary, check out these great tools to help elevate your game to the next level.

Top Free Online Marketing Tools

• Title Maker – Crafting good or great titles to articles, blog posts and the like can be hard. Let’s face it; the creative spark just isn’t always there. Luckily the nice people at Portent have a solution in the form of a Content Idea Generator that will quickly give you some great ideas. As an added bonus each idea includes indicators as to why you would use a particular phrasing which can be informative.
• Chrome SEO Page Review Extension – Another gem from Portent is this nifty extension for Chrome that can review basic SEO elements. It is very sleek, quick and allows for fast testing of basic things like Title Tags, Meta Description, Twittercard and more. You can find it HERE at the Chrome Web Store.
• Posting and Reviewing Social Media – Hootsuite is a fantastic tool for posting and reviewing social media updates and it can be used as a personal social media management tool. They have a paid version as well, but the free option provides enough juice to help most anyone to post quickly and review conversations and messages easily. Another nice option is Buffer which allows for scheduling posts ahead of time. This is a nice tool for people who like to load up posts ahead of time with a specific release schedule.
• SEO Spider Tool – Website crawlers are very useful to help you find broken links, check redirects and look at other SEO elements. The people across the pond at Screaming Frog have a very nice SEO Spider Tool that does all of that as well as finding duplicate content. While they do have a paid version, the Free version can crawl up to 500 URLs which is typically enough for most smaller businesses.
• Keyword Research – Keyword.io is one of the best free keyword research tools available. They can provide highly relevant keyword suggestions for article writing, SEO or marketing campaigns. The interface is simple and they offer searching based on a few platform options.
• Website Optimizer – Hotjar is one of the best free options to show you how people actually use your website when they are there. With options like clickmaps, scrollmaps, and heatmaps they can narrow down where people are going to help analyze the flow of the site from a variety of angles.
• Free Social Media Images – While we have often discussed the importance of using original images, it can take time and energy to regularly create your own. Pablo by Buffer is a great site that offers over 50,000 royalty-free photos. They have nice options for text overlays, options to use your own backgrounds, and logos. Canva is another great option if you need larger images or use a variety of social media platforms because of their built-in templates.
• Content Ideas – The website answerthepublic.com is very fun and useful at providing content ideas based on keywords. The basic words are translated into basic categories sorted by the standard 7 key questions (who, what, where, when, why, etc) and transformed into an easy to understand graphic which provides quick inspiration for the marketer on the go.

The bottom line is that tools can always be useful and just because something is free does not mean it won’t provide as much, or more, value as a paid counterpart. For those smaller businesses, not knowing about these free online marketing tools makes you look like a rookie, which is something anyone who plans on playing in the big leagues should avoid.

Be sure to check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for great new Lounge Lizard blog articles.