10 Online Freemium Tools for Start-Ups and Entrepreneurs
I often hear this question “what tools and platforms do you leverage to get your website, application, and marketing work done?” I recommend them the best applications all the time but start-ups, specifically young entrepreneurs don’t have a big marketing budget. They can’t afford monthly BigCommerce subscriptions (for their eCommerce stores) or can’t buy WooRank package to get done with their website audits.
In this post, I am going to cover 10 best online tools and applications that will help you in a variety of uses and needs, from website creation to SEO audit to SMO, email marketing and lots more. Without blowing time, here are the 10 freemium tools for your online marketing needs:
1. Keyword Tool
We are all aware of Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool but I don’t prefer and suggest newbie marketers and start-ups to only rely on it. The reason is obvious – the search numbers (volumes) are not accurate and it leaves lots of long tail search terms which could be the real gem for you.
Keywordtool.io should also be your go-to tool while researching best profitable keywords for website content, Meta writing, blogging and PPC ad copies. You just need to enter a search term and the tool shows a long list of keyword opportunities in the alphabetical order.
Search results for my input “Shopify SEO” returned me a list of 84 handful related search terms. To check the search volume and CPC metrics, I had to go for their trial version but I had the option to check volumes and CPC metrics from Google Adwords. So this is how both tools in a conjunction can give you the more profitable search terms, right?
2. Grammarly
Content is the currency of this modern web. We’ve heard thousand times that it is content and usability which makes a website rank higher in search engines. Here comes Grammarly to shine your content without having spelling and grammar mistakes. It will also help you finding plagiarism issues with-in your content if a specific segment matches with any pre-published content.
Most of the web copywriters exert it but if you’re going to write web copy or blog post for your website your own, pass it to the Grammarly first. You’ll surely get powerful insights to polish it further.
Write with much more clarity and confidence. You can install the add-on with Mozilla, MS Word, and Outlook.
3. Site123
Not only giant groups but small businesses also need a corporate website in this digital era. We all need it – a freelancer writer, or a graphic designer, a bookseller, or even a plumber. In most of the cases, young start-ups hire a designer from their local city or post a project on Upwork/Freelancer. A high hourly rate is always a resistance to them. Free web builder application like SITE123 is a good move to proceed with.
You do not need to have coding skills, graphics software knowledge, or Photoshop – the tool will let you easily create a responsive and elegant website for your needs. Choosing a ready-made template and uploading your content will be the only thing you’ll need to do and thus, you’ll get a responsive website for your start-up.
When it comes to SEO optimization and configuration, Google Search Console is a must-have handy application. It’s a free service for webmasters by Google, and thus, you’ll be able to make configurations for Google bots only. For Bing and Yandex, they also provide similar service free-of-cost. But here we’re talking only about Google Search Console:
You first need to integrate your website and to prove that you’re the owner (or have website access), you need to verify it with one of the five methods – Meta Tag, HTML file, Google Analytics, C Name record, or using Google Tag Manager.
Once you verify it, you’ll be able to:
- Define your target country (where you want to rank higher in Google, i.e. your geographical location)
- Submit XML Sitemap location
- Test Robots.txt file
- Check Crawl Stats, Crawl errors, Server errors, and HTML improvements area
- Test Rich Snippet embedded on your website
- Check malware impact on your website
- Check manual penalty (if any)
Unlike Google Search Console, Analytics property will not help you configure SEO tweaks nor it will give you messages from Google, but it will let you see diverse traffic statistics.
When you will go to integrate your website with GA property, you’ll need to add JS code to your website (and on every page/post). The execution of this JS code will report everything in your GA property’s dashboard.
You’ll be able to see traffic from Organic Channels, Social Platforms, Referrals, and Emails. It will also show you geographic and demographic insights, and based on these insights, you can intelligently plan your next marketing moves.
6. Canva
Visuals speak more than anything. They’re an integral part of website + social media posts. There is a scientific fact – human minds process visual media 10x faster than the textual information. Someone can’t get creative over Photoshop unless he is an experienced designer. So, Canva does the work for us!
Canva lets us design blog graphics, LOGO, Poster, Photo Collage, magazine cover, resume and lots more. It’s a must-have toolbox for start-ups.
A website needs powerful relevant links to get higher rankings in Google. True, and getting promising link opportunity is one of the prominent priorities of a marketer. It might be a blogger interview opportunity, a guest blogging stuff, or even broken link possibility.
MOZ’s link research and backlink checker tool will give you the inbound link profile for any domain. You can see the referring page’s URL, anchor text used, link pointing to the specific URL, and DA/PA metrics for each referring page.
You can request a CSV file including all the backlinks for any domain. You just need to do a free registration over there:
8. Hootsuite
Now the post contains a social media management dashboard system which lets you integrate and manage all social media pages at one single place. The timing of posts is a critical factor when it comes to post reach and getting remarkable responses to your social media posts. Hootsuite lets you schedule your social media posts and manage up to 30 social media platforms from a single dashboard will save you time and efforts. Isn’t it exciting?
But we’re talking freemium here and with the individual plan, you can manage three social media profiles for one single business.
9. Blog Ideas Generator (Hubspot)
I do not need to tell you that evergreen content doesn’t only give you strong rankings but also converts visitors into customers.
The concerned thing is the lack of post ideas. Writers (specifically after writing a lot) get burned out and can’t think of new post ideas. This Hubspot’s application is quite helpful in such spots.
10. MailChimp
Last but not the least, MailChimp! More than 80% B2B and B2C firms rely on email marketing. Without delaying it, start this strategy from the day one and build your email subscribers.I had to include one free tool for email marketing purposes, and I don’t find any other tool more reliable than MailChimp.They’ve served 12 million customers worldwide and their free plan allows sending less than 12K emails per month and to less than 2K subscribers.If you’re just starting out, their free plan is enough to capitalize the initial phase.
The success of your online marketing activities depends upon the use of the right mix of tools. These freemium tools will trigger you start aggressively with your specific marketing needs. Do you use any other tool? I would love to hear back from you guys. Share your thoughts.
Tags: entrepreneurship, google webmaster tools, seo, web analytic, web app, web development resources