Attention small business owners, entrepreneurs, home-based businesses, and start-ups! Whether you’re web-based or brick and mortar with a web-presence, we all need to know what online services are available to benefit our businesses. What if you could take advantage of FREE services? Yes, that’s right… F, R, E, E. As I like to say, “Free is good”! Free is at least good for the start-up time period anyway. Once you have cash flow, upgrading from FREE is definitely something to think about if necessary. But until then… FREE is still good.
Sifting through the web to find free services is not always effective time management, nor is it easy. For myself and my business’ start-ups, thankfully I had quite a list of services I already knew about. Either that or I picked them up as I went along, wishing I had discovered some options sooner. How about I save you some time and let you know what I’ve learned so far! Ready?
Free Stock Photography: Got any presentations you need to create? EBooks that need some color? Marketing materials? Photos for Blog posts? Then you need stock photography. There are several stock photography sites that will allow free downloads, either in their “free section” or allow a small number of initial downloads free as a teaser.
Affiliate Programs: Monetize your websites and Blogs with content-appropriate affiliate ads. If you don’t want to attempt an online store yourself, but are interested in having product options and brands (that you select) for your site visitors to browse, you have options now! How does it work, you ask? Companies with products to sell want you to sell their stuff for them. That’s where their affiliate program comes in. You place their logo or a specific product of theirs on your site, and you receive payment if a customer purchases. Here’s the flow: Link on your site to their product – customer clicks it – new window opens and customer is brought to the other site – customer purchases something – you receive a percentage of the sale as a referral fee. Nice!
I have one caution about affiliate programs for you though. Try not to go wild with the thousands of product and vendor options that will be available, although you’ll probably be tempted to. Be very specific about which products and or companies you want to promote. Ads need to very closely match your site’s content. Some affiliate programs will allow specific products that you choose to be listed individually. Other affiliate programs will show banner ads for companies, also of your choosing. The newest option is to turn pages of your site into a mini-storefront! If you are a company selling a product, you can sign up to sell products via online affiliate program sites too.
Shopping Cart Systems: Free shopping cart system downloads generally have steep learning curves, but they’re free! Although not free, using PayPal as your checkout option is the most economical. There are no fees associated with the merchant account except an approx. 3% credit card processing fee when a customer purchases something.
Mailing List Management: Do you have an e-newsletter or e-zine available for customers and potential customers to receive? If not, you should! It establishes you as an expert, and keeps a steady stream of contact going between you and your target market. There are mailing list scripts and services available on the web that will help you organize customer e-mails, opt-ins, opt-outs, and your outgoing mailings. DaDa Mail is what I use, and it’s free!
Photo Galleries: The inclusion of good photos with descriptions – and especially photo galleries – can generate massive traffic for your site. There are some really fun photo gallery services out there. Whether you want static pages full of pictures, or narrated slide shows, free options abound! Note – these services organize YOUR photos.
Conference Calls: Business conference calls are often a necessity for many businesses – small and large. There are lots of free conference calling services on the web now. The services themselves are free, however expect to pay regular long distance rates on your phone service unless you use calling minutes on your cell phone. Businesses can take advantage of conference calling sites to offer topical and informational teleseminars, customer calls, internal project discussions with company staff, etc.
Publish Articles, Presentations or eBooks: If you’re a writer or topic expert, get your info on the web ASAP. My favorite writer’s site is EzineArticles, where you can publish your first 10 articles free! Their SEO is excellent, so you’re sure to get noticed via search engines. EBooks are a slightly different story, since they are downloadable files. Some sites will allow you to publish your eBooks with them if they are free books. Others will let you post ‘for fee’ eBooks if they can keep a percentage of the sale. Either way, those give your books more exposure!
Sell EBooks or Other Downloadable Goods: Got some e-information to sell? Check out the service from payloadz. They have some excellent features, and you can have a basic account for free!
Blogs: Search engines like Blogs, because the content is ever-changing and niche-relevant. You can find a myriad of sites offering the option to set up your own Blog for free, hosted on their servers. Also, if you have your own website, you can easily create a Blog section within your own site.
Social Networking: There are a massive amount of social networking sites on the web now, in almost every niche. Of course you’ve probably already heard of the biggies, such as My Space, LinkedIn and FaceBook, where anyone can upload a profile to for free. However, you must consider your target market when jumping into network marketing sites. No one has time to tackle them all, so get data on where your customers are at, and then spend your time connecting and creating your profiles on those sites. You may discover some smaller niche online communities where the topics and members are more specific to who you want to reach. Nearly all of the online social networking sites that I’ve visited are free to use, and some offer upgraded options.
Website Evaluation Tool: Ever wondered how your website is doing in comparison to other sites, SEO and with general website best practices? Check out websitegrader’s site. Their service is fun. Test your site with this tool every-so-often to see how you’re doing in various categories of evaluation and in comparison to competitor sites.
Creating Surveys: If you own a business, from time to time you may need to survey your customers and vendors. If you own a website, you may also want to create fun surveys for site visitors! Free surveying services can be both fun and functional for collecting data from your business’ stakeholders. Several free survey services are available, depending on your survey purpose. For an example of survey services, visit surveymonkey.
Keyword searches: Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past two years, you’ve most likely heard a lot about keyword optimization and keyword searching. It’s important for a web business to be found amongst the billions of sites on the web, and one of the big ways to be found is via the keywords in your site’s text or “content”. For example, if you have a website for your plumbing business in Olympia, Washington, chances are your potential customers will search for you by typing in something like this: “plumbers olympia”, “Olympia plumbing company”, or something similar. If you want your site to come up in their search results, be sure you have appropriate keywords on your site near the top of your site’s pages!
Free keyword search sites will give you helpful keyword information. Some sites offer real monthly numbers of actual searches for your chosen keywords and related phrases. Others will simply recommend phrases to use if you type in a word (e.g., “plumbing”).
Sell Stuff or Advertise: My #1 recommendation is to use Craigslist, of course… Craigslist is a hugely popular site for sellers and buyers alike! They have listings for every major metropolitan area in the U.S. Follow their listing rules though, or they’ll deny your ads. The only listings that Craigslist charges for are job and employment listings. Warning – use .org, NOT .com!
Website Stats: If you need to know how many visitors are checking out your site or Blog, you may want to find a website stats service. Keep in mind that your web host’s control panel may be keeping track of site statistics already! If not, free stat counters are widely available. If possible (and it is possible), use a service that doesn’t place a bunch of extra stuff, wording or ads on there to clutter up your site!