When you are just starting out, there are times when you just have to wear a lot of different hats (webmaster, copywriter, graphic designer, ninja…) for your business. However regardless of what hat you are wearing at any given time you need the right tools to get your work done. Here’s the list of tools I personally use that doesn’t cost a dime and more importantly, gets the job done.
Publication
Open Office – An alternative to Microsoft Office (if it’s too expensive for your needs).
Foxit – A fast and free pdf reader.
Bullzip Pdf Printer – Install this as an additional printer on your system. You can make any pdf file (ebook) with this.
Web Development
NVU – A web authoring system for Linux, Windows and Mac that rivals Dreamweaver. This is a WYSWYG system that’s very handy for beginners.
ScitE – An open source tool popular among hard coders, it’s lightning fast and has a lot of useful text based features.
Graphic Editing
GIMP – An open source graphic editor, it doesn’t completely rival Photoshop but it can do most of the work.
IrfanView – This is my old time favorite. I love the batch processing capability of IrvanView. A very handy tool specially if you handle a lot of images.
Audio Editing
Audacity – A professional audio editing tool. The best part is that it’s free.
mp3DirectCut – When you need to slice and dice your mp3 files, this is the tool for you.
Keyword/Niche Research
Google Adwords Keyword Tool – If you want to rank for Google, this is where your keyword research starts.
Traffic Travis – If you need to do a competition analysis for the search terms you are after, this is the tool for you. There’s a paid version but the free version should be enough for your needs.
Rank Checker – This is a tool that checks where your site ranks for a given keyword.
MSN Online Commercial Intent – Sounds complicated but it’s a very simple tool. It determines the probable monetary viability of a search term. The higher value the better.
SpyFu – When you need to spy on your cute neighbor… seriously, this tool will let you know the approximate cost per click (CPC) of a search term.
FireFox Plugins
I have a lot of plugins installed on Firefox but these are specific to web development.
Firebug – If you are debugging websites on the design end, YOU WILL NEED THIS. This is a huge time saver for web designers.
WebDeveloper – It adds a menu and a toolbar that let’s you do a LOT of cool stuff like disabling cookies on a specific site on your browser.
MeasureIT – A handy tool that measures distance on your browser by pixels. I use this together with Firebug.
These are all the FREE tools I have on my computers that I can’t live without. Well actually, it would still be fine but it would be a lot harder on my work if I don’t have these tools. How about you, what tools do you have in your arsenal that you just need to have?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Jeedo
Came ove from Ari Hertzog via your comment.
Great list of free tools.
I don’t use any of them but I have heard a lot about Gimp.
I use Fireworks for my graphics editing, never got to grips with Photoshop.
Started to see you around the web – have you just started up?
Hi Keith,
Thanks, yep just started online. I’ve had a good deal of experience with corporate and offline businesses. I’d like to apply that on my online venture
I’ve also heard of Gimp but have never used it. The only one out of this list that I’m currently using is FireBug. I’ve never really worried about keyword research until recently and now that I’m thinking of taking it more seriously I’ve bought Market Samurai. For me it has to be easy to use otherwise I won’t bother with it at all, which is why I never worried about keyword research before, it was all just too tedious.
Hi Sire,
For blogs that already has a good amount of traffic, yes keyword research may be tedious. If you however want to optimize your traffic and go after your target audience, this will be required. Understanding your traffic and its behavior can go a very long way in terms of providing more value to your audience.
More so when you just jump in to a fresh niche, to get traction and traffic at the earliest time possible you want to go after search terms that are relevant to your niche (targeted and converts) but has low competition.
Once you’ve accomplished that you can start working your way up to the tougher keywords that require a lot more work but has a larger ROI should you rank for those keywords.
Good list of free software Jeedo.
I would have added: notepad++ (way more powerful that Windows notepad), freemind (great mind mapping soft), wordpress (obviously), dropbox (to share documents), some antivirus/firewall (comodo and avast – or Microsoft Security Essentials – being my choice), tweetdeck (for twitter), skype, and feeddemon (to keep track of your favourite blogs.
Hey Leo,
Thanks for dropping by. I’ll definitely look it up. I have freemind actually installed but haven’t used it much since I have Visio. My wife does use dropbox extensively.
Thanks to you now I have to update this list
Cheers!
These are great tools. Thanks for sharing