Hot Ideas & Hot Air

Some of the best things in life are free - and that includes some fabulous new small business marketing tools.  Some of these tools are free at the entry level, and once you fall in love with their offering you pay to upgrade - and others are just plain old FREE. I don’t know how they stay in business, but I’m not complaining!

For Small Business Press Releases

• http://www.PressReleaseGrader.com - A free offering from Hubspot, you can put your press release through their site to see how well it’s optimized for the search engines.
• http://www.PRweb.com - Publish your press release for as little as $80.
• http://www.PRlog.com - Publish your press release your PR for FREE.
• http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/Instant-Press-Release.htm - This tool guides you through the steps of writing your own press release. 

For Small Business Blogging

• http://www.Twitter.com - A free micro-blogging software tool.  How much can you say in 140 characters?
• http://www.WordPress.com - Hosting Wordpress on your own site can provide your small business with great SEO
• http://www.TypePad.com - Starting at only $10/month, TypePad is a great option if you want to integrate with Vertical Response or other email systems.
• http://www.FeedBurner.com - A great way to get metrics about your blog, as you give people an easy way to subscribe via email or RSS.

For Small Business Organizing

• http://jott.com/ Call your phone to create lists, write notes to yourself, write blog posts, and send text messages to your friends and family.
• http://basecamphq.com/ Organize your projects online.

For Small Business Marketing

• Duct Tape Marketing Coaching Excellence Series Tape Hear John Jantsch interview a variety of small business and marketing gurus like Seth Godin and David Allen.  Free.
• VerticalResponse Get a free trial for this easy-to-use email marketing system
• Queensboro Shirt Company Mix and match as few as 4 shirts with no embroidery charge 
• Social Media eBook - Free from Microsoft
• And not free, but well worth the money for the do-it-yourself small business marketer, check out the new and improved Duct Tape Marketing Ultimate Marketing System.  The system is now broken into booklets, making it very easy to use.  And it’s only $399. 

I’m sure I missed lots of my favorite free small business marketing tools, but this is a good list to get you started.  If you have small business marketing tools you think other small business owners would LOVE to know about, add your suggestion to the comments.  If I get enough submissions and I pick your small business marketing tool, I’ll write a “Free Small Business Marketing Tools Continued” post giving you credit and a link back for the submision.  Share the free tools love!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Requirements of every small business, Small Business Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.