Best free software and tools for your IM business?

[Ralf Skirr]

Hi,

what free tools and software do you actually use for your IM business?

Software meaning things you install on your PC like NVU or open office.
Tools meaning things you use online like google keyword tool etc.

Ralf

[winebuddy]

Adwords, NVU, Open Office, FileZilla, Wordpress and plugins, my brain (although I have to feed it every now and then so i guess it's really not free)

[Asher]

I think this thread will answer most of your questions:

All-In-One: Free Software You Can't Live Without

Asher

[Ralf Skirr]

Originally Posted by Asher

I think this thread will answer most of your questions:

All-In-One: Free Software You Can't Live Without

Asher

Thanks for pointing me to that thread, quite a list!

Ralf

[Asher]

You're welcome =)

Asher

[Rob Maggs]

Here are all the tools I use to expoit a niche

Amazon, Ask, Ebay Pulse, Google insights/trends, forums, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag, Google Adwords Tool ,SEnuke, Market Samurai, Nichegenerator for discovering and exploring a Niche

Once I've discovered a need then I'll create an information product in Ebook or software format.

To create an Ebook
Google Docs for the text
Picnik,for screengrabbing
Picnik and the Gimp for editing images

Video creation
Wink creates great free Flash videos and quick tutorials for software

Software creation

Autohotkey - Very powerful free Macro recording/scripting language. Just find a problem and solve it.

Artisteer for making beautiful unique blogger/Wordpress blogs, well worth the money.

Blogger for creating great looking sales pages and Adsense based automatic blogs.

I never pay for a website anymore, stuff Wordpress! (Don't get me wrong, I love it! but why pay to host a blog when you can do it for free) I just create products and put them on free blogs. I also get more Adsense revenue from my free blogs than my paid ones.

Ebay...Occasionally I sell my products there and do well because my products are unique. I'm not a great fan of Ebay though, because it is not as kind to the seller anymore.

Promotion

Create a good product and make it available to the people who want it in Forums,Yahoo Answers and Twitter at a good price,make sure you provide genuine value and excellent customer service. Sure you'll get a few buyers who will "try it on" but the majority of your customers will be good people and return buyers.

Ezinearticles for recurring income from articles.

You know, I've never made a dime from Affiliate Marketing and I can see it's not hard, but I really prefer making my own products and seeing my "Thoughts become reality"
I've only got to contribute a little on Twitter, Yahoo Answers and in forums and I'll sometimes make a couple of hundred dollars overnight.

Sorry if I've gone off in a tangent, but it just blows me away how easy it is to make money with a little bit of passion and a load of free (or pretty cheap tools)

[rlpruitt]

Lots of good software on the list.

I'll add a couple that I haven't seen anywhere.

XMind - Minid mapping software. Not quite as good as MindJet Mindmanager, but not $300 either. The free version won't export to PDF but I use a PDF printer driver so I'm good.

trakAxPC - Video/Audio post production. It's not as intuitive as other programs but once you figure your way around, you can do all kinds of really sweet editing.

And I just have to put in a vote for WordPress and Open Office as my two most unbelievable free values.

Ralph

[shaddai]

PHP.

Because if I can dream it up, I can make it work.

Todd

[TrafficMystic]

Some other good im tools I use..

for article spinning I use the free jet spinner article tool
for finding blogs to comment on.. comment kahuna is pretty good and free..
Keyword research the free market samurai modules are very good..

for link finding our good old google is very good... specially for edu and gov links..

Steve

[Nelson Guedes]

I just started a fan page on facebook about free internet marketing tools. I have a whole plethora of them, to be honest. They do all kinds of stuff.

If you want to check it out, here's the link:
Free Internet Marketing Tools: Grab This ?No-Work? Traffic Tool | Facebook

As I said, it is new, so there's not much going on yet. I had the idea yesterday and I will try to get it going this week. I hope it will be helpful for all of us...

TrafficMystic, thank you for those, btw, I will check those, specially the article spinning one, to see if these are better to share then the ones I currently have.