I thought I would write this top 5 (which aren’t actually in a formal order really) of tools and alternatives that are free so that any guys new to internet marketing could join in the fun that we all have online.

If you are new to internet marketing, you may not understand what some of these tools do, or where they fit into the general scheme of things, so I highly recommend bookmarking this page for future use, cos these little bad boys are quite a collection.

Top 5 FREE alternatives for those new to Internet Marketing

Screen Capture Software – One of the best ways to share information online is by having an online presentation. I do a lot of screen capture videos to explain exactly what it is that I am doing in an over the shoulder look at my screen while I do it. The industry standard for screen capture software is Camtasia (which is really quite expensive, but really, really good) but there are a couple of free alternatives that are definitely worth a mention.

BB Flashback Express – Great piece of kit which really works well. It’s only downfall, I find, is that it records in a non compressed format (so recordings take up a lot of space on your hard disk). Tbh, it is the software that I use as it is just as good as any other.

Jing – A smaller screen capture software than its elder brother Camtasia, which I use for still image screen capturing, can also be use to record 5 minutes of video. I don’t personally use it for that, but I know a lot of people who rave about it. (I think I just like to waffle for longer than 5 mins at a time ;p)

Blogs – It’s no secret, but for the guys who are new to internet marketing, it will become apparent that the main arsenal of your internet action plan is more than likely going to revolve around websites. The best and easiest way of having and maintaining a website is to have a blog, although they are cheap to run, there are free alternatives.

WordPress.com – The best blogging software on the planet is WordPress. You could say that I am biased, but then so is every other marketer that I know then. WordPress eats up the competition (in the self hosted version) but you can start a blog using, for all intents and purposes, ‘WordPress Lite’, at WordPress.com (don’t look for WordPress Lite by the way, just start a new blog at WordPress.com). The reason I suggest using this software, for those new to internet marketing, is because at any later stage, when you want to move on to the bigger, badder self hosted version, you can simply export all of your conent and upload it to your new site. (If you want to learn how to set up the bigger, badder version I did a training which shows you how to do all of it – How to set up a self hosted WordPress blog)

One other idea that you might want to take to heart and try out, bearing in mind it is not something that I do, is to start a blog on a niche specific site. The example of a good platform that springs to mind, taking into account that I am in the internet network marketing niche, is Better Networker. If you start an account there you can post videos that you make (using your new screen capture software ;p), post articles and write a blog. The thing that I believe is good about doing things that way is that you will get better exposure straight from the off, as your content will be posted in a public space. When setting up a new blog it can take some time to get much traffic to it, so best post it where the traffic already is

Social Syndication – It’s no secret that I love TribePro, but what with that twinned with Onlywire, can prove to be quite expensive (esp if you want to syndicate everyone in TribePro like I do), and it is not always necessary when you start. Now, getting your content syndicated across the internet is great for your rankings and SEO, but when you start you may not want to spend out on easy ways to do it.

On the smaller syndication end, yet a cool little tool is SocialMonkee. With the Free version you can submit your URLs to 25 different sites (thus creating 25 backlinks) all in one quick shot. If you are new to internet marketing I highly recommend SocialMonkee to give your content a bit of credibility when it comes to the search engines.

In fact I wrote a post detailing the difference between the two and that shares a bit more information. Find it here – 25 Backlinks a Day for FREE

Auto Responders – Now, I’m going to be honest here and let you know that I have not trialled the alternative here so can’t give you a recommendation on it really, I’m just letting you know that there are free alternatives out there, and the one that I’m going to give you looks good from the outside.

For those of you new to internet marketing and don’t know what an autoresponder is, quite simply put, it is an email management service that will let you send out emails to your own database in a variety of different ways. Fortunes have been made with email marketing and I firmly believe that once you understand how to get peoples’ email addresses out of them, you will want to learn how to build a relationship with your list, using email.

The industry starndards in this department are Aweber and GetResponse. I personally use Aweber as there are a whole host of integration type stuff that you can do with it, but I just Googled ‘best free autoresponder’ and, apart from the terrible sales video, ListWire‘s list of features looks pretty good. Let’s just say that if I were looking for a free autoresponder service this would be the one that I would trial first.

Capture Pages – You will find that often when selling something online, especially as an affiliate marketer, all of your ‘pages’ will be set up for you. There will more than likely b, a funnel (capture page, sales page and follow up emails) all ready to go, which you simply need to drive traffic to.

If you want to become a good internet marketer and stand on your own two feet, you are going to eventually need to know how to set some of this stuff up. You can pay people to do it for you, in all honesty, but it is always useful to understand most parts of stuff. You don’t necessarily need to become an officionado, but I do recommend understanding the processes.

The new to internet marketing route that I would suggest though, if you don’t have any money to invest, is to build up your ‘presence’ on a network like Facebook. Facebook ‘Pages’ provide an amazing online solution for pretty much any business. Take a look at my page for instance (which is an ongoing project) The4thMarketeer. What you have here is the opportunity to create a collection of tabs that can teach your visitors about your subject, show training videos and also collect their email information.

When you look at internet marketing this way round, you start to think, ‘why on earth do I need a blog or website anyway?’ One CRITICAL factor that you must keep in mind is that if you are using someone else’s website, for instance Facebook’Remember, you do not own the site and it can be taken down at any point without your say so. You could build up a Facebook presence over 3 years and wake up one morning and no longer have a business because Facbook have changed their TOS perhaps, or any such like. Always best to have your own site and be completely independent. That is not to say don’t have a dominating Facebook presence, just have a place of your own that you can call home.

Here’s a training that I did on how to set up a Facebook Page, but I was just using an app this morning (you will understand when you watch the training what I am on about) called Static IFRAME tab, which appears really quite simple to use and also gives you the option to add multiple tabs.

New to Internet Marketing? – The Lowdown…

The simple truth of the matter is, and something that I really love about the modern world, is that everything is out there for you, and in this case it costs you nothing. Using the tools that I have given you above, you can create an international brand based around what it is that you DO. You can chisel out your own space in the world and educate people in what you know, and all you need is your computer and time (and effort too).

The world really is your oyster! Let’s link minds and start building the future that you want and make the world a better place for all.

If you don’t know what to sell, I recommend starting here

Vive la Resistance

The thing with Facebook is that it is such a Goliath that it appears to be taking over WordPress too. More and more you find blogs with Facebook comments installed (often without the original WordPress comments software) and full integration of Facebook is probably soon on its way

If you want to keep up with the Joneses and help your cross-platform user appreciation, you are going to want to get you fanpage installed into your WordPress sidebar.

Here’s how to do it -

Simple to do and it will hopefully get you page ‘liking’ up too

In Lak’ech

Benny

There are a lot of paid pop-up programs and this one has a paid upgrade, but the free one works really well. I have personally been using an Aweber lightbox, but alas no video.

That is all change with this little bad boy

Here’s the link to get the download – WP Super Pop Up

Give it a go, just know that you will need to use the old HTML code to be able to put in video from YouTube, not the new iFrame one (there’s a box you can tick when you get to the embed section of YouTube)

Take a look -

SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, Geekery, Web Ninja Conjuring, whatever you want to call it is an art that the online marketer is going to need to (faintly) understand if he/she wants their blog to do well with search engine traffic. My SEO for Dummies for WordPress video is here to give you that (faint) understanding.

The truth of the matter is that natural search engine traffic is quite possibly the most robust form of traffic. If you have a site that is receiving a lot of traffic from natural searches, search engines will continue to love you and feed you more. The prob arises when you are starting out as you need to get your site positioned as best you can to start the free traffic rolling.

SEO for Dummies for WordPress is an overview of the principles of SEO and some cheeky ninja stuff to rank your pages as high as possible, all optimised for WordPress.

It covers -

• Keyword Research
• Plugins for WordPress
• Url Optimisation
• Keyword Density
• Allsorts

SEO for Dummies for WordPress

To get the most out of the video I would suggest watching it a few times, cos there is actually a lot of theory in there, but hopefully you will understand the idea of what we are trying to do. If you do not understand why SEO for Dummies for WordPress is doing something don’t worry it is not the end of the world.

These principles can be used for a serious shot into the SEO world, but SEO for Dummies for WordPress was really created for you to be able to passively optimise your blog posts with keywords.

SEO for Dummies for WordPress

I’ll be honest, I should really be selling this, as much of the information you would normally have to pay for elsewhere. I’ll let you into a little secret, I was going to make a caffeine product with all this info, but haven’t gotten my arse in gear to do it so thought I would bust out this quick SEO for Dummies for WordPress to get the info out there to my readers. No point having useful info in my brain and not share it, how does that help everyone?

Please let me know is SEO for Dummies for WordPress has been useful to you in the comments section below.

Any probs you know where I am

Vive la Resistance!

Benny

I have created a video below to show you how to create a post signature (using a plugin) which you can set and edit globally on all of your posts from one spot. That’s pretty cool to me

Take a look below -

Benny

If you have a WordPress blog, you should have your permalinks (which can be found in the settings box) set so that the post name shows up in the URL. If you are using a keyword in your heading, for best SEO results, you will also want it in your URL. This is easily changed by just ticking a box. See Below -

So to get here, just go to your WordPress Dashboard then find the settings box on the bottom left and follow Settings—>Permalinks.

I have underlined the default setting which shows you that if left, WordPress will number your posts (ie via p=123) in you URLs. If we pick either of the 2 other boxes pointed out, WordPress will use your post title (with hyphens instead of any spaces) in your URL for that post. Obviously, if you have your keyword in your title (which you really should!), it will now be in your URL too, which is a Hi5 for your SEO.

But let’s take this one step further.. Now, I’m not sure whether this will be useful for general bloggers as the date of a post may be highly relevant, but if we take the date out of the post’s URL, I reckon that Google will be less picky about the age of your post. If you have a date in your URL from 2007, Google may look at it at think it to be less relevant than someone elses dated 2011. Tbh, I’m not sure if it will work but it might and I would reckon that, bearing in mind Google has some of the worlds premier Mathematicians who work on their algorithms, it may keep your post up there for longer

Check the settings below -

You may need to put a / in in front of the first %

Vive la Resistance!

Unfortunately, we do appear to living in a time where our freedoms are being taken away, but there is an avenue opening up, where we can alleviate the new world pressure and focus on what we love.

I was reading a report the day before yesterday, and it really pointed out, although I have really been trying to say this to my mates for a long time, that you can earn a living following your passion. This report, by the lovely Katie Freiling, just put the whole concept into better perspective for me.

I am a firm believer that television is for the ignorant, there are some good shows, but your whole existence (outside of work and sleep) to revolve around the box should really be considered a cardinal sin. First off, in my opinion, there is pretty much no true value to any of the prime time shows, they are just wasteful and gluttonous of time. If you spend more than an hour of your free time in front of the television and have the audacity to complain about things in your life, you need a real big kick up the arse! Get off the settee and change whatever it is that is pissing you off!

This is where I get to the good bit that Miss Freiling so eloquently backed up for me. If you spend an hour a day focussing on your passion (and if you say that television is your passion please do not visit this blog again, this is not for you) you can build an income structure around it, with the help of a few tools such as the internet and wordpress.

Take this as an example:

You love hillwalking (could be anything really) and you sign up for a free wordpress blog to write about your stories, what the best trails are for instance. You include a few pictures of the views, maybe a little video or two (hosted on YouTube, again free) and give the website address to a few of your buddies who couldn’t make the walks in question. All very nice..

Then, you think about adding a few more of your outdoor trips but like the idea of moving your site up a notch and get your own hosting account so that you can beef up your blog a little (gonna cost no more than $10 a month). You join a few hillwalking groups on Facebook, maybe start your own page on Facebook to promote your blog and experiences, so that others can choose which out of the trails you have been down to go try out. Slowly your site is growing in popularity!

Next, you have bought yourself a new pair of hiking boots and you love them. So, you write a blog post about them and include an affiliate link to a shop where your visitors can purchase a pair…. Now you start to make a few commisions on a few sales of those boots that you love.

This kind of behaviour continues for more things that you can recommend that you use on your hillwalking trips. Your income increases…

Next, you start to align your new blog with accomodation near to the trails that exist on your blog posts, again earning more commission for referalls.. You start to see that you can essentially create a package deal for the visitors to your site to save them having to crawl the internet for solutions to fix up their next hillwalking weekend, all creating commissions..

I think you get the gist of what I am talking about! What if you were to keep documenting all of the good trails that you go on, a few abroad (capturing an international market for your brand) and think about creating a membership to your site that has regular weekly bulletins via email… If you have 10,000 members worldwide at only $1 a month… You do the maths!!

Question is….. Will you do it?

Vive la Resistance

Benny

Ps. Shoot me an email if you want any help formulating a plan, that’s the kind of thing I love!

What you might also like to do is look a little bit at the functionality of the themes, just to get a bit of a grounding and exposure to some of the more technical sid3es of blogs. It really doesn’t matter if you understand that much of it, it will just get you used to the language a little more so that you feel more confident.

So take a look at ‘How to Install WordPress Themes’ and admire the pedestrian laptop that I so dearly love!

Top 5 WordPress Plugins

1. Gravatar Favicon – This choice might seem a little odd as a favicon is a 16×16 .ico image but it is seen in all the right places. By simply having your site’s email address as one that you have a Gravatar linked to (goto www.gravatar.com and you will understand) you have the same square image on your sites page tabs and also in the url bar… Too cool and very simple!

2. Facebook Comments for WordPress – Now I should really promote my website more on FB than I do, but I do love the idea of people being able to post comments through their FB Id rather than having to register for the site here… Registering always seems a ballache for commenting.

3. TweetMeme Retweet Button – Simply does as it says on the tin, lets people quickly tweet the title of the post to their followers and posts the link with it.

4. Simple Facebook Share Button – Does pretty much the same as TweetMeme but for FB

5. Page Meta – Gotta have an SEO nerdy one in there. This plugin gives you a simple box under your add new post dialogue box so that you can enter your Meta Title, Description and Keywords.

I could go on and probably list most of the plugins that I use but I won’t bore you lol