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Getting Into Marketing Your Business
Free tools that can push your business to the top
What do you need to do, minimum, to stay on top of social media marketing for your design or development business? In this article, Linda lists free tools that can push your business to the top. The drawback? Your time for learning curves and to maintain activity.
How to Do It All for Free
If money is a worry (and, when is it not a worry?), then you have access to open source and/or free tools that can help you accomplish your marketing goals. I've repeated the list below, along with links to at least two tools within each category that you can use to make your life a little less worrisome (links are in no particular order):
- Blogs: Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, Blog.com, Posterous
- RSS: In most cases, you can get free RSS through the blog platforms listed above. But, you can use Friendfeed, FeedMarklet or FeedYes to accomplish syndication for your blog or a portion of that blog.
- MicroBlogging: Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, Yammer, Tumbler, Posterous
- Social Bookmarking: Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Diigo
- Social Networking: The variety here is endless. But, look to a previous DMX article to seek designer networks, or use one of these platforms to start your own network: Ning, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook
- PhotoSharing: Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa, Photobucket, MyPhotoAlbum, and a variety of Twitter photo-sharing tools.
- Podcasts: Podcast Alley, Digital Podcast, All Podcasts, GCast
- Video Sharing: Some podcast and photo-sharing sites also carry venues for free video sharing (such as Photobucket). Other sites include: YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, Viddler and Blip.TV.
- Wikis: In last week's article, I pushed a new graphic and Web design wiki at Wiki Spot (Graphic and Web Design Wiki). This is one venue (Wiki Spot) to use to create a wiki, but you also can use the following free formats: Wikispaces, Wiki Site, Wikia and WetPaint.
You can find many more free or open source projects out there as well, and you may be using something that I don't have listed. If so, please share with other readers, especially if you like what you're using.
If you notice the repetitions included on the list above, then you're already on top of organizing your marketing time. For instance, you can use Twitter as a microblogging platform as well as a photo-sharing venue. And, Google has an amazing number of tools to use to accomplish blogs, RSS, social networking (through development of a back-end site that includes emails and Google docs), photo-sharing (Picasa), video sharing and wikis.
Why use five different venues when you can accomplish many of your tasks in one place? This trick can help you to save time with learning curves and with activity levels as well as headaches in remembering user names and passwords. The drawback is that if that venue is hacked, then everything is hacked. Plus, you also want to reach others who use tools that I have not listed above. One way to learn about those other tools is to search for articles like Top Social Media Sites to learn more about what others are using.
In all cases, the point is to use someone else's server so that you don't end up paying for bandwidth on your own server. Additionally, the advantage here is that you can use any one of those sites listed above from any computer in the world, provided that computer is hooked up to Internet service (and broadband, if you want to gain access to video) and provided the user has not blocked that service from his or her computer (some libraries or schools may not allow photo-sharing updates among other updates on any free service, for instance).
Linda Goin
Linda Goin carries an A.A. in graphic design, a B.F.A. in visual communications with a minor in business and marketing and an M.A. in American History with a minor in the Reformation. While the latter degree doesn't seem to fit with the first two educational experiences, Linda used her 25-year design expertise on archaeological digs and in the study of material culture. Now she uses her education and experiences in social media experiments.
Accolades for her work include fifteen first-place Colorado Press Association awards, numerous fine art and graphic design awards, and interviews about content development with The Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Psychology Today, and L.A. Times.