Free Resources
Online Blogging sites to help you blog like you have never blogged before:
Writing content
Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is great for basic keyword research and to help you decide the most popular topics to blog about.
Wikipedia
http://www.wikipedia.com
Wikipedia has millions of articles on a variety of different topics. Each article can lead you to additional sites should you need more information or content.
QueryCat
http://www.querycat.com
QueryCat is the web’s largest database of frequently asked questions. The questions are compiled from other websites so you will have to do your search by particular key phrases. If a word appears up to half a dozen times in any topic, it is probably an important word.
Free mind
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Free Mind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java If you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you've been and where you are heading; Free Mind will help you stay on track.
Blog commenting
www.backtype.com
BackType.com will notify you when your designated search term or keyword is mentioned in a blog post. You can opt to have the notifications e-mailed to you immediately (as we do here) or in a daily/weekly digest format.
www.socialmention.com
Social Mention.com is a search engine that aggregates content from blogs and blog comments, as well as social media services like Digg.
www.twilert.com
Twilert is a bit like Google alerts for Twitter. You can also use Twilert.com to find blog commenting opportunities. Twilert. And you will be pleasantly surprised.
Miscellaneous aids
Keywordspy
www.keywordspy.com
In our free e-book: ‘Getting Jiggy with Google’, we talk about specialized research tools including Keywordspy. This tool will help you see what keywords your competitors are using.
iStockPhoto
www.istockphoto.com
This is not free and you will have to buy credits to purchase photographs. However the stock of photographs is generally very good.
Email marketing tools
www.ejunkie.com
E-junkie.com is not free (neither is it expensive) but it is extremely easy to use. It is a site that facilitates a sale by giving your customers a download link. These links are dynamic and will expire after a certain period of time. The E-junkie system interfaces with PayPal, Gogle Checkout and Authorize.net
Ecommerce with auto responders
www.1shoppingcart.com
1Shopping cart is also not free; however it is an industry leader which comes with auto responders and a range of very good value e-commerce facilities. More expensive than e-junkie.
iContact
www.icontact.com
iContact is the permission based email marketing system used at www.ihubbusiness.co.uk
for sending newsletters to members. The tutorials are extremely valuable and the system fairly intuitive.
Mailchimp
www.mailchimp.com
MailChimp is a newsletter and auto responder service which is free for the first 500 addresses. Good reliability.
Data backup
www.Carbonite.com is an online data backup system that quietly runs on your system. It will automatically back up any new or changed files on your computer. It is not free but you can try it risk free for 15 days.
Social Media
Tweepi
Tweepi is a great tool for managing Twitter followers. The free version helps you follow who follows you , with the option of 'unfollowing' those who you are following but who are not following you back. A great feature is the ability to follow a user's followers which could help you get more targeted followers.
Marketmesuite
www.marketmesuite.com is a tool which will create backlinks to your website with every tweet or update you send. This is not free, but neither is it expensive if a large part of your marketing strategy involves social media. And when it comes to Search Engine placement, backlinks are what it’s all about…
Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit
Rank Checkers
· Rank Checker – find out where your website ranks for target keywords in the three major search engines
· SEO for Firefox – get a host of useful, marketing data points for websites, including inbound link stats, PageRank
Keyword Research
· Google AdWords Keyword Tool – generate target keyword lists using the actual search data from Google
· Market research
Google Insights for Search
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. …
Link Analysis
· An easy way to look at which links point to a site is simply to plug in to Yahoo the following command:
linkdomain:mywebsite.com to use Yahoo’s Link-Domain and find out who’s linking to you website, or more importantly, who’s linking to your competitor’s websites.
· Yahoo! Site Explorer gives a pretty deep and thorough analysis of incoming link data.
