Start Digital Marketing for free

During the early days of my digital marketing career, I had to work with little to zero budget. As such, free and open-source resources was very valuable for my digital marketing efforts and they served as an opportunity for me to perform experiments as well. In other words, I was looking to start digital marketing for free. Over time, I have come to discover a way to set up an effective online presence on Google with free resources. This includes a fully functioning website integrated with analytics tools like Google Analytics.

Here’s a sneak peek of what we are trying to achieve:

Seriously, you don’t even have to enter your credit card details.

Here is a list of free tools that I used and how I used them:

InfinityFree
WordPress Plugins
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Google Business
MailChimp

InfinityFree

Technical introductions for nerds like me

InfinityFree is such a godsend to get hands-on experience for creating and managing a website. They provide web hosting, access to the cPanel, and a sub-domain name for no cost at all. To provide some context, web hosting cost ranges from S$36 per year to S$1000+ per year depending on the business’ requirements and domain name adopts a similar cost range as well subjected to the keywords used in the domain name.

InfinityFree provides this for free! Although the web hosting package is not the most attractive and they are only providing a sub-domain name.

How is it used?

InfinityFree is a web hosting service provider who provides free web hosting services as well.
I signed up with InfinityFree and created a WordPress website for free. The website was able to rank on Google’s Search Engine, which came as a surprise to me as I did not expect results from a completely free website.

WordPress Plugins

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system that allows me to build web pages and install more plugins to my website to achieve certain objectives.

Security plugin

A vanilla WordPress website does not have security features that protects the website from malicious attacks. Basic versions of plugins like WordFence is sufficient to protects my website against unsolicited logins and spam comments. I do not actively checkup on the plugin dashboard but just knowing that WordFence is protecting website gives me a peace of mind.

SEO plugin

These plugins simplifies the process of doing Search Engine Optimization for websites. I am using both Yoast and All-in-One SEO plugins for my websites to optimize keywords and meta tag writing (header and description).

Design plugin

Starter Templates (formerly Astra Starter Site) should be a default plugin that comes packaged with WordPress upon installation. This plugin basically provides design templates for my website and I usually start with one of their templates, and add in my own flavors as I work on the website.

Google Search Console

Monitor keyword ranking

Google Search Console is a free tool developed by Google to aid website owners like myself, to keep track of my search engine optimization progress by monitoring the ranking of my keywords.

Google Search Analytics

Observe web visitors

Google Analytics is another free tool developed by Google to monitor users interaction within our website to help us understand which pages or content to optimize.

Google Business

Tell Google about your brand

This is one of the best things you can do for your brand on Google. A knowledge panel about your brand will show up at the top of the page when users search for your brand’s name once you verify your business with Google.

More importantly, it is really not difficult to set up your Google Business Profile. It takes very minimal effort and you can get so much more visibility for your brand in return.

MailChimp

Good to have email marketing platform

MailChimp is an effective email marketing platform that I am frankly underutilizing. I am only using MailChimp to build a list of user’s email list by integrating MailChimp to my website. If you are using WordPress, you can use the MC4WP to simplify the integration process.

Summary

It will take some time to learn and utilize all the tools and services in this article, but they are really good options to help users get some hands-on digital marketing experience at no monetary cost.

Feel free to reach out to me for any inquiries on any of the above tools or services, and leave a comment on some of the free and helpful tools that you are utilizing.