idealmike
Level X3
Write the reason you're deleting this FAQ
Every successful Internet marketing campaign makes use of some free online tools somewhere along the line. Whether it's for researching, gathering data and information to automating your social media posting. And some of these free tools are an absolute must for the newbie Internet marketer to perform tasks that can help you on the road to success and are even used by the pros today! Here I want to share and discuss what I think are the some of the top 5 free online marketing tools that any newbie Internet affiliate marketer should use for those reasons. Some of these you may already know of but aren't sure how to use and some I hope will be new to you and you will find them very useful as others that have gone before you have done too.
1. Google Keyword Planner (adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home)
Quite simply the Google Keyword Planner Tool lets you see how many times things are searched for in Google. So if you want to know how many times "video editing software" or "luxury cars" or "funny cat videos" are searched it will show you. For most successful Internet marketers and affiliates, it all starts/started here with the Google Keyword Planner Tool. Because to be a success, you need to find a product or something that is in high demand (high search volume) and is selling or there's a way you can monetize it. And the Keyword Planner Tool will let you see whether it's worth trying to target something or not based on search volume and how much competition that you'll be up against.
(The Google Keyword Planner Tool showing search filters and volume for a search)
By using this this you can find high search volume keywords that have low competition although these are rare now, and the results are not 100% accurate, they are generally fairly close depending on the age and trend of the keywords you're using. These are only the basic features of Google Keyword Planner Tool but it's a very useful tool that will help you come up with ideas on new website ideas and is the tool that has helped many big names to launch their successful websites and companies because of it.
A tip, you can integrate it with your Webmaster Tools account to find out the search results for some of the things your site might be ranking for telling you which keywords and pages to work on or which direction you should be heading in with your site.
2. Google Alerts (google.com/alerts)
Google Alerts are email notifications alerting you to anything you want. So if you wanted to be alerted any time a certain word was found on a website while it was crawling it, it will send you an email with the link to that site so you can see what's being said about it. This is particular useful for many reasons. Firstly because you can find out if anyone is talking about your brand name or website so you can keep an eye on your reputation around the net. This includes any positive or negative feedback you might be getting so you can do something about that such as respond or appraise. But more than this, Google Alerts let you keep track of anything that is going on or being said about anything in your industry or market area such as any words that were said about a product you're selling or promoting. You can choose to receive an instant email alert about it or receive them all at the end of the day in a digest so you can see what sites are talking about it, blogging about it etc which will give you many ideas and insight into what your competitors are doing and also helping you to find sites where you might be able to get a link as well. A lot of Internet affiliate marketers, webmasters and bloggers use Google Alerts for these reasons and it's how they stay one step ahead in their game!
(Screenshot of Google Alerts homepage and the alert filter settings)
Here's a tip for using Google Alerts. Create alerts using both "quoted" and non quoted words. Sometimes it can return a lot of stuff not necessarily about your word or words if you use a long tail. For shorter one, two keywords it's fine but for long tail keywords it works best in quotes and make sure to select "Best results" as well.
3. LinkedIn Advanced Search
If you don't know much about LinkedIn's history then you probably don't know much about their Advanced Search which is about the best thing that's left on the site after they tried and consequently failed and broke the site trying to monetize the platform. But the LinkedIn Advanced Search is a very powerful free and functional part of LinkedIn for finding people and businesses with. That includes people you can network or partner up with or even pitch your product or services to.
Now mastering LinkedIn is an art in itself, it's all about professional business and good business ethics. But if you have some skills in a certain area as a freelancer or know your product well, you can use LinkedIn to drum up business, sales, clients and revenue. The best thing to do is follow people and message them, ask them questions about their site, product or industry and let them get to know you first then later on you can pitch to them as well as do lots of other things on LinkedIn too and there's millions of guides out there today on how to use LinkedIn for business or personal reasons but more for the business minded entrepreneur or affiliate marketing newbie to grow from strength to strength. Are you using LinkedIn yet?
(The LinkedIn Advanced Search page showing all the different filters you can set)
Here's a little unknown about tip. Check out Linkedin Pulse which is an excellent part of LinkedIn that lets you discover and find things that are relevant to your of your skills, interests, passions or hobbies you have saved on your profile and then show you tons of trending articles and content that's personalized for you.
4. Similar Web
Ah now we're getting into juicy stuff! Similar Web has been around for a few years now since 2013 and makes Google's Keyword Planner Tool look like child splay. Similar Web will tell you virtually everything you need to know about any website you want. Whether that's your own website or your competitors website to get an idea about that websites statistics and metrics. There are other sites like this out there (WooRank, Compete, Alexa etc) but Similar Web is far superior to all of them and is a very handy and useful free online tool for Internet marketers and affiliates to get a complete overview of a website, it's referrals and search traffic is, its social count, display advertising and on-page content, bounce rate and time on site to what mobile apps it has what similar sites there are to it and more. You can download a free generated PDF report or view it all online which is handy and convenient.
There is a Similar Web Pro version that lets you benchmark your competitors and see what some of the marketing strategies of your competitors might be that kind of stuff but it's not really needed for just getting a quick overview of a sites stats or for doing research with as well as showing you all the most important stuff about any site, including your own for telling you things about your site you need to work on!
5. Hootsuite (hootsuite.com/en-gb/plans/free)
Managing a lot of social media channels, pages and profiles can demand a lot of your time and effort. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a free and easy social media management tool online that you could use to help you automate the task? That's what Hootsuite is for and can do for you. Hootsuite is by far the most popular free and easy social media management tool you can use to schedule your social media posts. Even a free Hootsuite account will boost your productiveness and speed up your day! Plus you'll get access to some sweet free analytic tools and can help you to identify and spot new trends in your niche as well as helping you keep your followers updated!
(Screenshot showing a typical Hootsuite dashboard)
The free Hootsuite account is fine and is enough to manage a handful of social media sites (3 sites for free account) but if you want to upgrade that is fine and the price is quite reasonable and it does make Hootsuite very powerful too as you can effectively use it to schedule posts weeks and months or years into the future on more social media sites so it can be a very valuable tool but even the free version is quite powerful. Do you use Hootsuite?
My Final Conclusion!
So that's 5 free and very powerful and very effective free online tools for Internet marketers and affiliates, webmasters and bloggers, WAHM's and WAHD's (because I know there's both on SEOClerks!) to take advantage of in these ways to help you become a better, smarter, faster, more efficient, lean mean self made successful marketing machine of unstoppable force and power. Probably. 
What other free online tools for marketing campaigns do you use and why?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post?
TommyCarey
Google Alerts: I love G alerts!
Hootsuite: This is a definite must if you have multiple social profiles for your business or website. Automation is key and if you're not doing it you're already falling behind
One thing that I use every week is scrapebox. Now I don't use it for posting to blogs, I use it for many other things. It has a ton of features that can put together enormous lists and compress them by filtering out certain things you don't want. Want to get a list of websites email addresses from the web design niche? You can do that by adding certain footprints and filtering out duplicates
Are you sure you want to delete this post?