7 Free Online Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

A successful online presence requires effective Internet marketing. Some businesses spend fortunes on Internet marketing, and it can be a very costly exercise. Fortunately for small businesses, there are a number of free, high-quality tools available today to get them started. Here is a list of 7 free Internet marketing products and services that can strengthen your new or existing small business without making you see red.

1. Email Marketing: Infacta offers a free version of their award-winning email marketing software, GroupMail. It has everything you need to start building personalized relationships with your customers via email.
2. RSS Marketing: Nooked offers a free RSS Marketing service to get your feet wet. You can manage up to 5 feeds with their free FeedWizard, which integrates with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and many other services.
3. Blogging: WordPress offers free blog creation and hosting services that are used by many top bloggers today. You can start dropping content into your new blog in minutes.
4. Podcasting: Audacity offers a free podcast creation and management application that will give your content a new dimension.
5. Press Releases: PRWeb, recently acquired by Vocus offers a free online Press Release distribution service that will help get your announcements out there.
6. Desktop Publishing: Open Office offers a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Complete with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database applications.
7. Website Analysis: Google offers a free website statistics utility (Google Analytics) that will help you to measure the success of your online marketing efforts, providing website traffic analysis that is easy to interpret.

This suite of tools will give you an arsenal for content creation, distribution and management. In addition to the high-quality freeware above, you can also take advantage of other opportunities for free marketing on the Internet.

Visit forums and get involved in dialogs relevant to your expertise or interests.
Comment on industry blogs
Network on social networking sites such as LinkedIn.
Add your knowledge to wikipedia.
Tag your blog posts for Technorati.
Submit your informative blog posts to digg.
Bookmark your posts on del.icio.us
Trackback to conversations relevant to yours.
Regularly add content to your site.