4 Free Internet Marketing Tools You Should Already Be Using
Software tools that help marketers pop up every single year, and now at a far more rapid pace than ever before. Luckily more and more of these tools are taking on a freemium approach, meaning that marketers have access to better tools without spending much (or anything at all!).
Let’s take a look at some of the tools you can be using for free, right now, to boost your business.
Canva – an incredible free design software that purports to make anyone a designer. To be fair, it’s not far from the truth; Canva is a drag and drop editor filled with thousands of free images, backgrounds, and elements that you can piece together, resize, and recolor, along with text elements, in order to make some seriously snazzy logos, content images, and more.
You can use premium elements for $1 each in any design, but it’s fairly easy to create professional looking images without ever using a paid element. Plus, Canva allows you to upload your own photos and incorporate them into your designs, further eliminating the need to pony up any cash for your design needs.
Unsplash.com – In need of stock images? This site is one of the best royalty free, no BS sites you can find for stock images that are actually free to be used for any purpose – even commercial! Unsplash uploads a limited number of new images each week, but it’s been around for a while so there’s a healthy batch of material up there at this point.
Unsplash doesn’t have everything, however, and you might have trouble finding images of people in various scenarios (though there are many useable office/work environment type photos). Where Unsplash really shines is in environmental, landscape, and architectural images, so if those will work into your material, you’re definitely in luck!
Infogr.am – Inforgram allows you to quickly and easily create infographics for your business. You’ll be able to create a number of free infographics per account, and then you have to pay to create more. If you’re really strapped for cash, you could theoretically create more than one account to garner more free creations.
Infographics are a hugely popular information consumption format right now, and it’s no wonder why: Infographics are able to quickly and easily demonstrate complex concepts and figures visually. Because so much of the world learns well from visual input, and infographics keep people from having to skim through writing and research to pull out statistics and talking points, infographics can get shared like crazy.
Buffer – For many delving into social media for the first time for their brands, their barrier to entry is either not wanting to pay for software to manage many platforms, or for not having the time to even manage a couple on their own. Buffer is a platform that allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple channels at once, and you’ll be able to do it all for free if you’re only managing a few different platform. If you’re looking to manage a whole bunch of channels at once, however, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription.
Top Google Executive Says Link Building May Actually Harm Your Rankings
When Google launched its’ Penguin and Panda updates to its search engine algorithm, it became pretty obvious that the gig was up when it came to using backlinks to improve an individual web page’s site ranking. For years, black hat IMers had been packing their pages with inorganic backlines because – up until the updates, anyway – having tons of backlinks in general could land you on the front page for your keywords. And if you included links from authoritative sites – such as About.com or Wikipedia – you had a very good chance of landing in the top spot!
Panda/Penguin was a response to that flaw in the system. But there’s still been a lingering belief among Internet marketers that backlinks were still important, regardless of what Google said. And because Google keeps the details of how its algorithm work so hush-hush, no one ever knew for sure.
I mean, backlinks couldn’t hurt, right?
Wrong.
At least that’s the impression John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst, gave during a Google+ Hangout session on February 13. Googlle hinted that if you bet all the ranch on backlinks to improve your web rankings, you’re in for a rude awakening.
‘I’d Try to Avoid That’
When asked by a Hangouts participant whether backlinks had any value for improving rankings, Mueller quickly replied, “In general I’d try to avoid that.”
Loose lips sink ships and Google has protected the inner workings of its search engine algorithm as if they were state secrets (and given the recent revelations from the NSA, they may actually be!). But Mueller may have tipped the Internet giant’s hand slightly – either by accident or on purpose – by revealing what may be the first glimpse inside the inner workings of the search engine.
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth?
Here’s the full text of Mueller’s answer:
“So that you are really sure that your content kind of stands on its own and make it possible for other people, of course, to link to your content,” Mueller continued. “Make it easy, maybe, put a little widget on your page, ‘If you like this, this is how you can link to it.’ Make sure that the URLs on your web site are easy to copy and paste. All of those things make it a little bit easier
“We do use links as part of our algorithm,” he said. “But we use lots and lots of other factors as well. So only focusing on links is probably going to cause more problems for your web site than actually helps.”
Game Changer?
This could be the clue that marketers have been hoping for about the way the Google search engine actually works. It certainly will have aftershocks for those people still selling automatic link-building software.
It’s not often that a Google executive lets something as revealing as this drop. And it’s going to be interesting to watch the consequences among top Internet marketers. The most logical interpretation of Mueller’s remarks is that too much link building – such as stuffing your blog or web pages with links or including inorganic links that are truly relevant to your content – eventually will be sniffed out by the Google algorithm. But that’s something we already knew, or at least suspected.
But the bottom line is that if, in fact, link building does actually cause your rankings to tumble, you probably will just have to wait a few more months before Googles’ next rumored search engine algorithm drops.
If there’s one thing Google’s successful at – other than owning the Internet’s most important search engine – it’s keeping people guessing on how to outsmart it.
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