So, you have decided to launch you own online business. You have come up with an unbelievable idea that the whole web community should appreciate when trying. However, an awesome idea and unparalleled desire for great achievements are all that you have at your disposal. Money? ... Hm ... Well, there is some, but it should be better spent for other purposes rather than acquiring costly tools. Solution? There are quite many! In this blog post, you will find a list of the most recommended free productivity apps & resources for entrepreneurs.
The best thing about most of them is that they are available for free use. Interested? Let's start off with the top 20 free online courses for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Free Online Courses
The web is abundant with sites selling online courses. But how can you know that the selected set of lectures is exactly what you are searching for? How can you know that ordering premium lectures won't be a waste of money? That' the problem that I have come across with so many times. Solution? Opt for freebies! Free doesn't mean bad. Here is a selection of free online courses recommended for entrepreneurs.
- Skillshare is an online platform with more than 13,000 free classes covering multiple topics including design, business, writing, photography, crafts, etc.
- Traffic 1M is a series of 17 free lessons that will teach you how to get your first 1million visitors to your site. A team of 17 experts from different segments is ready to share their experience at absolutely no cost.
- Khan Academy is an absolutely free online academy targeting a wide web community. Teachers and parents can learn and sharpen their skills in computer programming, economics, art, etc. while completing interactive exercises.
- Jumpstart Your Email List is a 6-part free online course teaching how to grow your email list, double traffic, and sales even if you are a beginner.
- Email 1k is a free 30-day course on how to double your email list. A team of 11 email marketing experts gathers to share knowledge on how to grow email lists with over 1k subscribers.
- Coursera probably boasts one of the richest catalogs of online courses. The topics vary from personal development to business and computer science.
- Affiliate Marketing Course includes an explicit amount of data needed to get started as an affiliate marketer. These are videos, MP3 audios, PDFs, and more.
- The Facebook Advertising System is a series of audio/video/PDF files revealing how to set goals and track results every month.
- Pinterest Power Free Course targets those entrepreneurs who want to get more traffic, leads and paying clients through Pinterest.
- The Webinar Marketing Funnel System tells how to turn a regular online marketing plan into an evergreen webinar funnel system that will bring more leads and sales.
- Instagram Marketing: Quick Growth Hacks For Beginners includes the basics that one should know for a massive growth and engagement on the platform.
- Email University: Become a Better Marketer is a free online course intended for beginner marketers and startup founders to boost their email marketing campaigns.
- Start a Blog is an easy-to-follow beginner's guide on how to start a WordPress blog.
- StartupTalks is a free series of videos for startups covering such topics as investors, business, design, marketing, etc.
- Charge What You’re Worth is a free set of 9 lessons teaching freelancers how to get reasonable charges for their work.
- Primer is a set of marketing lessons from Google. This is the place where you can combine learning and practicing new skills when you have 5 spare minutes. There are also iOS, Android and Windows apps available for free download.
- EDX is a cool educational resource containing lectures and courses from the world's top universities. The topics of courses vary from art & culture and food & nutrition to design and economics & finance.
- Curious is a free resource delivering customized CQ (Curious Quotient) Workout to your email inbox of smartphone every day. You can spend as much a 5/15/30 minutes learning every day. The collection includes over 25,000 lessons on multiple topics.
- Royalty Free Images - this is a free resource telling you how to find quality visuals for your online project.
- Mixergy includes a series of interviews with top entrepreneurs, which will be delivered to your inbox as soon as you leave your email address on the site.
Free eBooks
Next comes a compilation of eBooks for entrepreneurs and small business owners who are either taking their first steps in online marketing or simply look for some more advanced, innovative techniques.
The eBook includes a series of the best practices, tips & tricks on how to retain customers and maximize your Customer Lifetime Value.
This is a free eBook that covers all aspects related to building a landing page that converts. Downloading it, you will learn how to design a landing page layout and write a persuasive copy.
The book teaches how to change your way of thinking in a way that you can omit tons of obstacles on the way to becoming wealthy.
Discover the basic aspects that you need to take into account when building a blog. Learn how to create content that converts and find out ways to monetize a website/blog regardless of its niche.
The book tells how to prepare a perfect elevator pitch, how to structure it properly, what mistakes should be avoided, etc.
These are two separate eBooks available for free download. While the former tells how to break bad habits and master behavior changes, the latter explains how creativity works as well as teaches how to overcome the mental blocks that most of the artists face.
The eBook will be of interest to everyone planning to join the affiliate marketing business. It highlights the key aspects of the affiliate store development and promotion.
The eBook tells how to build an email campaign in a way that it keeps the users engaged and help you grow your business even further. It reveals how and when to use emails within your broadcasts as well as includes 10 step-by-step email templates.
Here is one more free eBook that reveals how to manage business email campaigns properly. With its help, you will discover actionable tips on how expand and maintain an email list, learn about content strategies that work, etc.
The eBook will be especially useful to freelancers looking for the tips on the effective time management.
Content is the king. How to make it work to its full potential? How to improve your writing style so that it sounds more appealing and thought-provoking? Download the freebie to find it out.
The eBook targets startups and those entrepreneurs taking their first steps in the industry. The book includes tips on" marketing, growth, design, and customer support.
The book tells how to build a strong presence on Instagram. It provides insight into several of the most effective strategies that the most popular brands and companies from all over the world implement.
- Influence. Psychology of Persuasion
As the title implies, the book reveals the weapons of persuasion that you can use in your own business, when developing an online marketing strategy.
This is an extensive guide on how to provide the users with the most relevant content by means of long-tail keywords.
The book solves a very old problem of how to escape the 9 to 5 everyday schedule and prevent our lives from being all about work.
The book tells how to target your audience property by means of social media. It also highlights the most common mistakes and steps that should be avoided when building a social media campaign.
The book includes a couple of tried-and-true tactics on how to attract the first 1,000 followers to your Twitter account.
WordPress has grown far beyond just a common blogging solution. On the basis of this CMS, one can feel the ease of building a powerful eCommerce solution. How? Find it out from the eBook.
Whenever you plan to launch an online project, make sure that you choose a CMS that matches its purposes ideally. The eBook contains detailed descriptions of the popular CMSs, as well as the major pros and cons of each of them.
Content Promotion Tools
Building just good content is enough no more. You need to promote it wisely. May these 10 free tools come in handy to you.
- Flauntt - a free social content promotion tool, encouraging tweets to your online content.
- Quora is the place where you can get a lot of traffic targeted back to your site. This is one of the most popular placed to share and grow the world's knowledge.
- Little Bird is intended to help get in touch with influencers in different circles, thus attained a more targeted approach to outreach.
- Snip.ly is a free online tool, which allows you to put CTAs with links to your site on every piece of content that you share.
- Issuu is a free digital publishing platform for everything starting from magazines to books on every topic possible.
- Blogengage is an online community where all bloggers are welcome to submit their articles for the public exposure, backlinks, and traffic.
- LeadGrab is a tool that resembles snip.ly yet a bit more powerful. With its help, one can build an email list by simply sharing articles.
- Quuu is a tool for promoting content that targets the like-minded people in social media.
- Bizsugar targets small business owners who need t get their content promoted in a niche-specific community.
- SlideShare is all about making eye-catching, informative presentations about the things that you enjoy and specialize in.
Keyword Finders
Proper keyword optimization will make your web project more findable. May these 10 freebies help you come across the right search requests for your content.
- Google Trends reveals the most-searched topics within a specific are or globally.
- Google Keyword Planner makes it easier to come up with the trendiest low- and high-competition keywords in various segments.
- Long Tail Pro is an online tool that, making it so much easier to find competitive long-tail keywords.
- BizzSumo makes it easier to run in-depth analysis on what specific type of content performs better for any topic/competitor.
- Ubersuggest provides an extensive list of additional keyword ideas that are not available in Google Keyword Planner.
- Audience Overview is a free tool, providing detailed reports on the demographics of specific web resources.
- KW Finder makes it possible to find long-tail keywords with low competition in various segments and locations.
- Moz Pro is one of the most popular keyword research and SERP analysis tools making it possible to prioritize important keywords as well as check their volume, difficulty, competition, etc.
- WordTracker is a free online tool that is generally accepted to be far more powerful than Google KeyWord Planner. With its help, you will get a deeper insight into the performance of long-tail keywords, as well as find related keywords, watch SERP preview, etc.
- SERPWoo targets to help you dominate your SEO while monitoring SERPs for your keywords with the help of third-party integrations and social media signals.
Landing Pages
Make your brand/company more recognizable by building an appearing landing page. This is where you can apply all the aforementioned tool into practice, as well as introduce the web audience to an explicit information about the top reasons to deal with you. Here are a few suggestions on the ready-made landing page designs.
Intense App Landing Page Template
This is one of the multiple Intense child themes. Intended for building landing pages for software companies, it is fully responsive, comes pre-loaded with a selection of font icons, working worms, and other handy elements.
Financex MotoCMS 3 Landing Builder
The theme is integrated with a drag-and-drop page builder, which makes it so much quicker and easier to customize the layout. A number of pre-made design blocks are ready to go out-of-the-box.
Online CV MotoCMS 3 Landing Builder Landing Page Template
The theme is perfect for building personal pages. It also comes enhanced with an intuitive page builder. Designed with simplicity in mind, the theme is pre-loaded with a host of useful widgets providing for a more effective presentation of the data.
Photorson MotoCMS 3 Landing Builder
This is an impressive, ready-made solution for building landing pages of photographers and other creatives. It is rich in visuals and cool animation effects. A drag-and-drop page builder speeds up the process of the theme's customization.
Consulting Landing Page Template
This responsive landing page is suited for promoting a variety of business-related web projects. Its sleek and stylish design is spiced up with a series of working forms and functional design elements, boosting the page's performance.
Here we go. We hope that you will find this collection useful and most of the free tools & resources that we have provided will help you reach the desired heights.
Are there any other tools/apps/resources that you recommend entrepreneurs to check out. Please comment with your suggestions.