Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this digital marketing guide, you're going to learn about 12 free marketing tools
you can use to build your email list, to engage with your subscribers and run your virtual
team.
Timestamp table of contents in the description, along with some links, including affiliate
links to several of these software.
So let's go ahead and dive right in.
I'd put these into four different categories based upon our four digital business quadrants,
sales funnel, content, product, and team.
So first up sales funnel, and we're going to kick things off with the most valuable
free piece of software on this list.
And that is mailer light.
So when it comes to generating leads online driving traffic from your content marketing
or your Facebook, Google, or YouTube ads, mailer lite has you covered with not only
the email marketing automation, it also has you covered on landing pages.
So here are a couple of quick examples of landing pages.
I've been able to put together in under 30 minutes and I'm actually going to link up
in the description to a tutorial, where I walk through how I put together a full blown
lead generation funnel start to finish in less than 40 minutes.
Mailer lights free plan allows you to have up to a thousand subscribers.
You do need to confirm your business and the type of marketing that you're doing.
And this is ensuring that the people on their platform aren't doing spam.
Now, unlike mailchimp, you are allowed to do affiliate marketing.
Although I would be very careful in making sure that all of the contacts you have on
your email list have actually opted in, because as with all email service providers, you need
to be very careful with your affiliate marketing, but mailer lite does allow you to have affiliate
marketing.
Now, the next one up we have with our sales funnels.
Now that you're covered with your landing pages and your email list, which is kind of
the most important part when it comes to building your sales funnel is actually your analytics,
your data and your tracking.
And this is where the Google marketing platform comes in, because Google analytics, Google
tag manager, the Google remarketing tag, I'm going to squeeze that one in here.
And Google optimize has you covered when it comes to figuring out what the heck is working
with your business and marketing online.
So Google tag manager is a free tool that allows you to put all of your tracking codes
in one easy to find place.
So if you're doing Facebook advertising or Pinterest or LinkedIn advertising, they're
going to have tags and pixels, even Snapchat wants you to put a pixel on your website.
Well, it can get really, really cumbersome and confusing trying to keep track of all
those things.
So tag manager is your virtual file cabinet, where you put all the tags in there and you
only have to put one piece of code on your website.
Then we have Google analytics, which is another free software.
I'll link up in the description to a deep dive tutorial that shows you how to use Google
analytics.
But the TLDR here is UTM parameters allow you to track everything that goes on.
So you're able to see exactly which ads, which pieces of content, which blog posts specifically
are driving the most traffic to your landing pages and sales pages.
Finally, we have Google optimize, which is a little known free tool, but this allows
you to do split testing, which is really cool, which even though mailer light has a native
function for split testing, we actually like using Mailer Lite landing pages and Google
optimize, and you can actually use it with any page builder and you can split test your
headlines, your images, your body, copy your bullet points.
You can literally split test anything.
So it's really cool, especially if you're using another budget solution for your website
or your landing pages that doesn't allow you to do split testing or charges you twice as
much to do AB split tests.
You can use Google optimize for free.
And of course the Google optimized code goes inside of tag manager and it keeping things
nice and clean.
So that does it for the two big things.
I know Google suite has a lot of little ones in there, but those are the two big marketing
softwares that you should be using for free in 2020 for your sales funnels.
Now, when it comes to content, there are a lot of paid tools out there that offer all
of these bells and whistles in terms of helping you find content ideas and key words and trending
topics.
But the good news is you don't need to pay for any of them.
So whether you're trying to create content for YouTube or you're doing your own blog,
or even maybe coming up with podcast ideas, buzzsumo still has a free option where you
can type in your keywords or topics, and you can see the content that's trending at the
top across social media.
If you want to get a little more deep dive and you're doing search engine optimization
for Google, with your blog posts, then there are three tools that have you covered.
First, we have Yoast, which is a SEO plugin that goes onto your WordPress site or your
blog site.
And what this allows you to do is actually customized what your preview looks like when
it is showing up in Google.
So typically what happens is if you write a blog post and then it starts to rank on
Google search, well, Google chooses what the headline looks like and what that little excerpt
of text is to preview your blog post.
Here you can actually tell Google specifically what that should be, and that should help
you with your search rankings.
And it also has some free features where it will actually analyze your blog posts and
tell you what is missing, these next two deal with keyword research.
First, we have Uber suggest and then we have the SEO analyzer.
These are both available for free@neilpatel.com.
Uber suggest is really, really powerful when it comes to keyword research, you can actually
get away with just using this free tool and not having to pay for other things.
Keywords anywhere used to be on this list.
Of course, now they want money for everything that they do.
So Uber suggest is now the new winner when it comes to a free SEO keyword research tool.
And then the SEO analyzer will go through your entire site where Yoast SEO is just kind
of a post by post.
This one will go through your entire site and let you know where the red flags are that
you need to fix in order to improve your Google rankings.
And if you're creating content for here on YouTube, and you're trying to come up with
more ideas, even though I personally think the suggestions box is the best place to find
content ideas, you can also use the free version of tubebuddy that will actually give you what
all those YouTube suggestions are and show you other videos that are ranking really well.
So you can get content inspiration.
Now this next section deals with your product.
And this is specifically going to be, if you're doing any sort of digital product, teachable
actually still offers a free plan.
It's a little hard to find on their website, but if you just go to Google and type in teachable
free plan, you're going to be able to find a pricing comparison table like this that
actually shows you the free plan option.
Of course, they do charge a 10% commission on top of some other fees for every single
sale that you make.
But what's really cool is you can get started with your online course for $0.
And this is definitely much better than posting your course for free on Udemy.
I've made several reviews of Udemy, but at the end of the day, it comes down to control.
Udemy, you don't have control, whereas teachable, even though you're paying a higher fee to
start, at least you have complete control over your course platform and of course your
actual students.
And the other free tool here is actually going to be Google forms, which is part of G suite.
And we really like using this for our clients and sometimes during our sales process, but
it's very easy if you have a clients based business to set up Google forms so that it's
very easy for your clients to request services or ask questions.
And this is of course, much more preferable to having all of your clients just email you,
because email just becomes this jumbled mess.
So it's a very clean way and you can actually go in every day and see specifically what
your clients are asking for and what questions that they have.
And that way it ensures that none of your client's stuff gets mucked up with everything
that's going on in your inbox.
Now the final category, number four, here is going to be team.
And this is going to be all about project management and making sure you and your business
actually runs smoothly.
And we have two main softwares here.
The first one is going to be G suite for business or just Google suite if you're not going to
pay $5 a month, you can always upgrade.
Google drive sheets and documents are the lifeblood of our agency.
It is an absolute, incredible free tool that allows you to collaborate with pretty much
anyone in the world.
We're across three or four different countries right now.
And we can all in real time edit the same word document, the same Excel sheet and the
same slide.
So I definitely recommend using Google drive for all of your actual files.
And of course, if you're using the free version, all of the Google docs, Google spreadsheets
and Google slides you use, don't actually count towards your limit.
So if you go ahead and use what Google provides to you, you're not really going to have to
worry about storage limits.
And even though you only get 15 gigabytes for free, you'll find that you'll be able
to create all of the documents and spreadsheets that you need.
The next tool on our list here is going to be a Asana.
They still offer a free plan for up to 15 people.
And up until recently, this is the tool that we used for our agency.
We recently upgraded to Basecamp, but that was only because we had so many clients we
needed to actually move to a different solution.
But if you're just getting started and you're looking for a project manager for free, that
you can invite people to, you can use a Asana, I’ll link up in the description to a detailed
video that goes through how we use Asana to run this channel and our agency.
So that does it for all of the free tools.
I sincerely hope you have at least one or two, on this list that are going to be very
helpful to you and growing your business.
Go and comment below with any free tools you think that I missed and your feedback and
experience with any of these tools, because your experience is going to help other entrepreneurs
and business owners figure out which tool is right for them.
So go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe, check out all of the links below.
And until the next, key building the business you love.