Patricia's Planet

Today I was just about to get into the shower when I heard a once familiar call and the clip clop of a horse. I couldn’t believe what I heard and had to look out of the window to check that I was hearing right. I saw a sight which I haven’t seen for many years – a scruffy man with horse and cart collecting other peoples junk from which he was planning to make money – a rag and bone man.

It reminded me of Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son in the US) the popular sit com from the sixties and seventies, the rag and bone man even looked like Harold Steptoe from a distance. Harold and his father Albert ran a scrap yard and the rag and bone men went out on their rounds daily collecting junk, some free some paid for, the junk was recycled for profit proving the saying that one mans rubbish is another mans treasure.

I used to love watching Steptoe and Son and I’ll never forget the phrase “You dirty old man” said by Harold to his father in such a despising way. The humor probably wasn’t politically correct, but sometimes I think that PC has gone too far anyway.

Seeing the rag and bone man made me think about entrepreneurship and Internet marketing in a roundabout way. It made me realise that just as he collects free products for resale you can use free products and free tools and resources to help build your Internet business and there is no better time to start than now.

We keep hearing about the recession and how it has affected the lives of millions. When recessions hit many people lose their jobs and struggle to find other employment, but it is also a time when entrepreneurs rise from the ashes of high unemployment. Some create empires from real world businesses like my rag and bone man. Others get involved with business opportunities on and offline. Many don’t succeed but some do and it is because of those success stories that so many try.

New businesses need different levels of start up capital depending upon the type of business that is being launched. Real world businesses generally need more start up capital. For instance the rag and bone man would need a horse and cart and somewhere to store his ‘stock’. He would also need the know how to renovate or recycle his ‘stock’ and where to sell his goods.

An Internet business can be started with nothing except a computer, an ability to search and learn, a commitment to hard work and patience and little or no investment capital – but that could weaken your chance of success. However, there is no need to throw your life savings into Internet marketing because there are an awful lot of free products and free tools and resources waiting out there for you to make a start, learn or make money with providing that you realise that it takes time and that you have a lot of patience.

Once you have acquired enough knowledge and confidence in what you are doing then is the time to spend money, but with caution. Throwing money at programmes with claims of high earnings is generally a mistake. Those who make the high earnings are usually those who start the programmes up, but we are talking about tools and resources and it costs nothing to learn using them, a way of earning while learning.

I have a penchant for software, but the majority of what I have paid for I use on a regular basis and most of my purchases have come from profits. The only mistake that I’ve made was spending hundreds of pounds in 2007 on the Memberspeed software. It just didn’t work out for me for various reasons. I’ve still got access to it and may try again but I know that I can use WordPress and free plugins to build a membership site and probably more easily.

Following you will find a list of the types of low cost or free tools of resources available on the internet to help you to build your internet business:

Webspace (hosting, blogs, Squidoo, Hubpages)

However, once you have found your feet I would not recommend building your main money sites on anything but paid for hosting space. Domains and hosting are not a large investment and the free sites can be used to build backlinks to your main site.

Website and Blog Templates

Usually when you use freebies there are links in the footer of the templates placed there by the designer. Fair enough repayment for the use, but make sure that the links aren’t to sites that Google may blacklist, for instance porn or gambling sites.

Products (ebooks, software, templates, graphics and scripts)

My last article Where Can I Find Free Ebooks, Software, Templates And Graphics To Sell At A Profit? reviewed a couple of the sites where you can get free products.

Product & Service Affiliation 

My favourite is Amazon, but there are an awful lot of companies out there offering affiliation. Just type your main keywords into a search engine and add affiliate to the search.

Free Advertising

Again a search for ‘free advertising’ will bring in lots of results. You might not get any traffic from most of the sites but it’s worth a shot

Search Engine Submission (limited)

I used to use the free version of WebCeo which was pretty good, and there are free tools that you can use for limited submissions. Now I just let Google, Bing and Yahoo know I’ve set a new site up because sooner or later the rest of the search engines will find your sites so it isn’t such a big deal.

Article Directories (mostly free to submit articles)

Despite Google’s recent Farmer changes article directories still have a place in marketing your sites. What we need now is the submit for links junk to stop and higher quality articles for visitors to grow.

Auction Sites (small fees)

Ebay is a great place to start, you can sell almost anything on there and the fees aren’t that bad despite the moaning of some sellers.

Forums (For knowledge & marketing & contacts)

There are a lot of Internet marketing forums out there but I mostly use the Warrior forum

Marketplace (Payloadz & Tradebit – small fee)

You can read about Tradebit in one of my previous articles Where To Sell Your Resell Rights Products Free

Free Content, Images & Videos

The search engines love content and you can improve the experience of your visitors by adding good relevant content. I have a couple of sites that I’ve never built backlinks to but they get a good amount of targeted visitors and sales because I update content regularly. We don’t always have time to create our own so there are plenty of sites where you can get free content on the Internet. You can get free content from article directories providing you retain the links. There are many sites offering free images, but you do need to be careful about copyright. YouTube is the most popular video sharing site giving you a massive choice.

Free Informative Courses

The best one that I know of used to be called ‘The 30 day challenge’ and is now called ‘The Challenge’. I built my all time most successful blog after following the course in 2007. I followed some of it again in 2010 and learned some new things, but as the course is quite substantial and time consuming to make the videos they understandably want to make money from it, so there are free trials of some resources available, the only one that I would recommend paying for is Market Samurai.

Link directories

Most link directories don’t charge to place your links, but it’s debatable just how much benefit they give unless they are directories for local services. As a small part of your link building efforts fine.

Email Marketing

I did dabble with some sites that offered free email marketing to part of their list and a charge to email the whole list and made some sales. However, you become part of that list and your inbox quickly gets filled with mainly junk offers so you need a separate email account for this that you empty regualarly.

Autoresponders

There are companies that offer a free service but personally I would only build a list with a paid for service like Aweber and Get Response.

Google Publisher Tools

Google have all sorts of free tools to help webmasters including Analytics where you can get lots of different stats about your website visitors.

Social Bookmarking

It doesn’t cost anything to bookmark your site to the many social bookmarking sites and the link juice is still pretty good from them. There are free tools that you can use to do the job quicker, such as Onlywire but don’t bookmark too many times or you can get blocked from the sites.

Backlink Builders

Backlinks are important to our websites and the more variety the better. I’m testing the free version of Social Monkee at the moment which offers 25 automated backlinks every day on social network sites and I’m finding the backlinks 4 days into my testing, so if that continues I may upgrade and get more submissions a day.

Social Monkee Update

It was doing ok, but just as I was considering paying to upgrade so that I could have 300 submissions a day they added a spinner. Previously you input 3 different titles, descriptions and sets of keywords, fine. Now you have to input in spinning format. I don’t understand that, nor do I want to. After seeing the junk that comes from spinning software I won’t use it on principal, also because anything that they send out is representing my business and I don’t trust it not to jumble things up. A shame that they have to add tacky tools to what could have been a decent thing.

Just do a search for any of those and you will find that there is a massive amount of free tools and resources for Internet marketers out there, plus more than I have listed.

Be Warned

This is sad but the other day I read a forum post from somebody new to Internet marketing. In his late fifties he had just been made redundant and believed that at his age he wouldn’t get another job. He was planning to blow every penny that he had on starting up an Internet business. I don’t think that it was because he believed in himself, more likely that he believed the BS ‘you’ll make a fortune’ sales spiel that you see everywhere.

I wanted to tell him not to be an idiot, that only a small percentage ever make fortunes, that those who blow all of their money on pipedreams and without knowledge are the ones who go away broke and disheartened, but hey somebody got there before me!