There’s an abundance of free or inexpensive tools to help you with marketing. Corey Perlman, president of eBoot Camp, an education company that helps people market their business on the Web, suggests looking at the following.
Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
Free
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
You might think that “remodeling, Denver, Colorado” is the phrase you want to get ranked for, but you’d have to try it in a range of contexts to know for sure. Before spending too much time on that, use this tool to have Google tell you how often a particular phrase is searched.
SEO Chat
Free
seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density
This keyword density tool analyzes a Web page and tells you how frequently each word is used on that page. If “Connecticut” appears most frequently on one of your pages but you do the bulk of your business in New York, you’ll know what you need to fix.
TweetDeck
Free
Perlman’s favorite Twitter management tool, TweetDeck, organizes your tweets so you can see them based on the phrases you’d like, so you can go directly to the people who share your interests. E.g., if someone tweets “Anyone know a good remodeler in [your area]?” You can watch for that phrase. Or if you like a particular sports team and one of your clients tweets about that, you can make a connection — the true use of social media.
Google Analytics Free
This is a dashboard for everything going on on your website: how many people viewed a page, where they came from, which pages they looked at, etc. It lets you gauge whether your marketing plan is doing what you want it to. Are you on Facebook? This tool can monitor Facebook for six months, for example, and see if what you’re doing is working.
AWeber
As low as $19 per month
An e-mail marketing tool that helps you capture e-mail addresses from website visitors, pre-populate a queue with newsletters and tips, for example, and automatically send them.
—Stacey Freed, senior editor, REMODELING.
