If you are starting a new online business, then it’s easy to get bogged down in things to pay for. But not everything needs to eat into your budget. Here are 7 free marketing apps to help you promote your new business, without breaking the bank.
These apps range from social media, to email marketing, to analytics. All are quite useful for a range of businesses, whether you are setting up in eCommerce or offering web-based services.
1. Mailchimp
Mailchimp has a desktop application and a phone app to give you stats and prompts along the way. You can set up and schedule your email newsletters from your desktop, and then wait for your stats to come through on your phone later.
It even allows you to resend your email to those who didn’t open it directly from the phone app.
2. Later
Later.com is a really user-friendly tool for scheduling Instagram posts. Planning ahead with a scheduling tool is particularly useful when you have a sales deadline or a particular promotion coming up.
You want to make sure you have enough posts counting down and keeping momentum going through that period. And scheduling makes sure that happens.
Later also has both a desktop application and a phone app. As a single user, you can connect one set of social profiles with a free account. This allows you 30 free posts per profile, per month.
While there are of course paid upgrades within Mailchimp, the free account is plenty to get your started.
3. Google Analytics
While there are a great many singing and dancing website analytics apps on the market, I’m going to suggest you keep things simple. Google Analytics has its own phone app, which shows you a great deal of what you can see via their desktop tool. And yes, it is free.
If you want to keep an eye on your web traffic, then don’t miss out on this.
4. Canva
For creating social posts on your phone, or via your desktop, then Canva is a great free design tool. Again, there are paid upgrades available, but you don’t need them.
Canva allows you to upload your own logo, and set your brand fonts and colours. This makes life a lot easier when you are creating promotional graphics for social media.
Try a free tool like Logo Creator, then upload your logo design into Canva, to be added to the graphics you create in there.
5. Tweetdeck
If you are creating a new online business while managing an existing one, then you probably have a lot of social media to keep up with.
Tweetdeck is a desktop application that allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one place. This is totally free, and can be a great time saver.
6. Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator
When you need to create consistent content to support your online marketing, it is easy to run out of ideas.
This Hubspot tool is a desktop application that will give you five free blog post ideas per search. To get more there is a paid upgrade.
This is a quite simple tool, so don’t expect too much creativity. But it can give you a jumping off point to develop your own ideas from.
It’s worth a look if you find yourself feeling creatively blocked.
7. Ahrefs Website Authority Checker
This last one takes us into the land of SEO. But don’t panic, we are not going too deep. SEO is a big topic, and we want to keep things simple here.
But this is a useful tool, and it relates nicely to the last topic of content creation.
When you are creating blog content for your business, you want to give it as good a chance as possible of ranking on Google. One way to begin optimizing your blog content for SEO is to include several ‘high domain authority’ links within your content.
For example if you look back over this post you will see there are several hyperlinks. These have been checked through this application to make sure I have only linked to ‘high DA’ sources.
These links must be relevant to your content too – you can’t just go linking to any site for the sake of domain authority alone. Google will know if you are linking inappropriately.
But for an example of good practice, just look at how it’s been done in this post. The links are to sites relevant to this content, and they have high DA (domain authority).
All you need to do is head to the application and enter the link of the site you want to check. If the DA is over 50 it is good, over 70 better yet. The higher the number, the better.
Play the long game
Consistently creating good content with high DA links is definitely beneficial. But SEO, and content marketing in general, is a tactic that takes time to pay off. So starting now at the beginning of your new business is ideal.
As you can see, there is plenty of free help out there in the form of online applications.
Many of these services will show you their paid upgrade offerings. But often, if you use these apps wisely, you can get enough use out of the free versions.
In the early days of your business you really want to hang on to as much budget as you can and pace yourself. So getting free help with aspects of your marketing is a smart move.
