Top Free and Simple Online Tools to Improve and Grow Your Online Business

Are you looking to improve and grow your online business but don't have a huge budget for fancy tools? No worries! There are plenty of free and simple online tools available that can help take your business to the next level.

From social media management to SEO optimization, these tools will save you time and effort while improving your online presence. This blog post'll showcase some of the top free and easy-to-use online tools that can help skyrocket your business growth. So let's dive in!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze website traffic. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, including how visitors find your site, what pages they visit, and how long they stay on each page. One of the most useful features of Google Analytics is its ability to track conversions. This allows businesses to see which marketing channels are driving the most sales or leads, so they can optimize their digital campaigns accordingly. Another benefit of using Google Analytics is its real-time reporting capabilities. This means you can monitor website activity as it happens, allowing you to identify issues or opportunities for improvement quickly.

Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite Insights is a powerful analytics tool that offers real-time social media monitoring and analysis. It tracks brand mentions, conversations, and hashtags across multiple social media platforms. With Hootsuite Insights, you can gain valuable insights into your audience's behavior and preferences. One of the key features of Hootsuite Insights is its sentiment analysis capability. This feature analyzes the tone and emotion behind each mention or conversation about your brand or industry. You can use this information to gauge how people feel about your business, products, or services.

Another useful feature of Hootsuite Insights is its customizable reports. You can create custom reports based on engagement rate, reach, impressions, and more metrics.

E-signatures

In today's digital world, businesses are moving towards paperless transactions. One way to achieve this is through e-signatures. An e-signature is a legally binding signature that can be made electronically. Using free e-signatures saves time and money for both the business and its customers. It eliminates the need for printing, mailing, and faxing documents back and forth, which can take several days. With an e-signature, everything can be done in just a few clicks.

Security is also a major concern regarding electronic signatures but these online tools use encryption technology to ensure document security. Incorporating e-signatures into your business processes will save time while providing convenience, speed of execution, and improved customer experience and ensuring legal compliance with any signed agreements.

Social Media Management Tools

Social media has become an essential part of any online business. It is a great way to reach potential customers, engage with existing ones and promote products or services. However, managing multiple social media accounts can be time-consuming and overwhelming. This is where social media management tools come into play. One of the most popular social media management tools is Hootsuite. It allows you to manage all your social media profiles from one dashboard, schedule posts in advance, and monitor conversations about your brand.

Another excellent tool for managing social media accounts is Buffer. Like Hootsuite, it lets you schedule posts across different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can also create engaging content using its built-in image editor and track performance through advanced analytics.

SEO Tools

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial for any online business that aims to rank high on search engine result pages. Various SEO tools available online can help businesses optimize their websites and improve their search engine rankings. One of the most popular and effective SEO tools is Google Search Console. It provides a range of helpful features like website analysis, keyword research, backlink tracking, and more. This tool also helps identify crawl errors, indexation issues, and other technical problems affecting your website's ranking.

Another useful platform is SEMrush which allows you to monitor your keywords' performance across different locations globally or locally. In addition, it has powerful competitor research capabilities that allow you to see what your competitors are doing regarding SEO strategies.

Content Creation and Marketing Tools

Creating and marketing content has become an essential part of online business success. However, it can be overwhelming to handle everything from ideation to publication on one's own. This is where content creation and marketing tools come in handy. Firstly, Canva is a great tool for creating stunning visuals such as social media posts, infographics, or even presentations without needing any graphic design skills!

With its vast library of templates and graphics, one can create professional-looking designs in minutes. Secondly, Grammarly helps ensure that your written content is free from grammatical errors or typos before publishing. Its browser extension integrates with platforms like Gmail and WordPress making editing a breeze.

Thirdly, BuzzSumo allows you to track what's trending online by showing popular topics within various niches alongside their engagement statistics across different social media platforms. This way you can keep up-to-date with what's happening in your industry while developing ideas for new content.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is a crucial aspect of any online business strategy. It allows you to communicate directly with your audience and build lasting relationships. However, managing an email campaign can be time-consuming and overwhelming without the right tools.

Many free and simple email marketing tools are available that can help improve your campaigns' effectiveness and efficiency. One such tool is MailChimp, which offers customizable templates, A/B testing, segmentation options, automation features, and detailed analytics.

For those looking for a more comprehensive solution that covers multiple aspects of digital marketing in addition to emails, HubSpot may be the perfect fit.

In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is essential for the growth and success of any business. Fortunately, many free and simple online tools are available to help you improve and grow your online business. By utilizing Google Analytics, Hootsuite Insights, e-signatures, social media management tools, SEO tools, content creation, and marketing tools, as well as email marketing tools effectively; you can optimize your website traffic, and increase brand visibility on social media platforms while saving time and money.

Let's keep deeping this with more information we gathered over the years. 

What are the TOP 10 Free CRM Tools?

Certainly, here are the top 10 free CRM (Customer Relationship Management) marketing tools available as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021.

1. HubSpot CRM: This free CRM offers an extensive suite of incredibly user-friendly services. It allows users to manage contacts, track customer interactions, monitor sales funnels, and even build web landing pages. HubSpot CRM also has email marketing tools, social media management, and many more features.

2. Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM's free version is perfect for small businesses with a comprehensive CRM but a limited budget. Zoho allows users to manage leads, deals, contacts, and companies and provides a document library, reporting, and forecasting tools. Plus, it integrates well with the suite of other Zoho productivity tools.

3. Freshsales: Freshsales is a free CRM by Freshworks. It offers AI-based lead scoring, built-in phone, email, activity capture, and more. It has an integrated email inbox, which means you can send and receive emails directly from the CRM, making it easier to manage all communications in one place.

4. Bitrix24: This free CRM includes features, including contact management, quotes, invoices, projects, time tracking, and many marketing tools. It also provides unlimited storage and is designed for collaborative work, with a built-in chat and video conferencing.

5. Insightly: This CRM tool provides robust contact management, project management, and detailed reporting. Insightly is a great option for small businesses seeking to understand their customer journey better, as it tracks touchpoints from initial interaction through sale and beyond.

6. Apptivo: It offers a variety of tools to help manage leads, create automated workflow processes, track contact communications, and create digital marketing campaigns. Apptivo can be a great starting point for businesses new to CRM systems.

7. Streak: This CRM is a plugin for Gmail. It allows users to manage leads, track email communications, and monitor deal pipelines from their inbox. It's a fantastic choice for small businesses or solo entrepreneurs who prefer to handle everything from their email client.

8. Capsule CRM: Capsule provides a simple, flexible CRM for keeping track of contacts, sales, and tasks. It has a visually pleasing user interface that makes managing your customer relationships a more enjoyable task.

9. Agile CRM: This CRM tool provides sales, marketing, and service automation in a single platform. It offers contact and deal tracking, telephony tools, appointment scheduling, project management, and integrations with a variety of third-party applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, and social media platforms.

10. Mailchimp CRM: While Mailchimp is primarily known for its email marketing services, it also offers a free CRM with features like contact management and segmentation, behavioral targeting, and detailed analytics. It's an excellent option for businesses with a heavy focus on email marketing.

These CRM tools are free, but many offer premium versions with additional features, integrations, and customizations. Be sure to consider the specific needs of your business when choosing the CRM tool that's right for you.

 

What are the TOP 10 AI tools for Marketing?

For more than 5 years at Codedesign we've been working with AI and Automation to optimize internal processes and campaign management (inventory, media, bidding, control features). Here are some of the ones we've tried:

1. Google AI Platform: Google's AI Platform is a unified suite for machine learning developers, data scientists, and data engineers. It allows for sharing predictive models, collaboration, and fast deployment of these models. It also integrates with many popular Google Cloud tools.

2. TensorFlow: Developed by Google Brain, TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source platform for machine learning. It has a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries, and community resources that lets researchers and developers build and deploy machine learning applications.

3. Keras: This user-friendly neural network library is written in Python. Keras is designed to enable fast experimentation with deep neural networks and it focuses on being user-friendly, modular, and extensible.

4. Scikit-learn: A popular machine learning library in Python, Scikit-learn provides a selection of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. It’s built upon some of the technology you might already use, like NumPy, pandas, and Matplotlib!

5. PyTorch: Developed by Facebook's artificial-intelligence research group, PyTorch is a deep learning framework that provides maximum flexibility and speed during implementing and building the machine learning models.

6. Pandas: This is a software library written for data manipulation and analysis in Python. Offering data structures and operations for manipulating numerical tables and time series, it's an indispensable tool in data munging/wrangling.

7. NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit): NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning.

8. OpenAI Gym: OpenAI Gym provides a large collection of environments for testing reinforcement learning algorithms. It's a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, and it’s compatible with any numerical computation library, such as TensorFlow or Theano.

9. Weka: Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. It contains tools for data preparation, classification, regression, clustering, association rules mining, and visualization.

10. AutoML: Automated machine learning (AutoML) tools like Google's AutoML, AutoSklearn, or H2O's AutoML, provide methods and processes to make machine learning available for non-machine learning experts and improve efficiency of machine learning experts. These tools automate the process of applying machine learning end-to-end, making it easier to build models.

So, AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) can do wonders in optimizing digital campaigns. Let's say you're running several marketing campaigns and you want to determine which ad is going to perform best. You can use an AutoML tool to predict click-through rates (CTR), optimize the cost per click (CPC), or categorize your customers for targeted advertising, all based on your historical data.

Here's a simple example using Google's AutoML Tables, a tool designed for structured data, which is often what you get from digital campaigns.

Assuming you've got a dataset with columns for ad_id, demographic_info, day_of_week, ad_type, and clicks, and your goal is to predict which ad_type gets the most clicks.

Here's how you'd get started:

First, you need to import the necessary libraries.

from google.cloud import automl_v1beta1 as automl


Next, you have to set up your GCP credentials and initialize your AutoML client:

# TODO: replace these with your project specifics
project_id = "YOUR_PROJECT_ID"
dataset_id = "YOUR_DATASET_ID"
model_id = "YOUR_MODEL_ID"
client = automl.TablesClient(project=project_id)


Now you need to train your model. This process can take several hours depending on the size of your dataset. Google's AutoML handles all the feature preprocessing, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning for you!

model = client.create_model(
model_display_name=model_id,
dataset_display_name=dataset_id,
 train_budget_milli_node_hours=1000)


Once your model is trained, you can make predictions on new data like so:

#let's assume you have a new ad with the following details
new_ad = {
"ad_id": "1234",
"demographic_info": "25-34, female, urban",
"day_of_week": "Monday",
"ad_type": "banner"
}

response = client.predict(
model_display_name=model_id,
  inputs=new_ad)

# let's print out the predicted number of clicks
for result in response.payload:
 print("Predicted number of clicks: ", result.tables.value)


And there you go! Now you can use this predicted data to guide your digital campaign strategies.

Please keep in mind that this is a very simplified example. In a real-world scenario, we would want to do more extensive exploratory data analysis, consider more features, and carefully evaluate the performance of your model.

All these tools are freely available, but it's important to note that some may require significant coding knowledge or computational resources to use effectively. The right tool will depend on your use case, available resources, and level of technical expertise.

What about Analytics and Big Data with some examples? Let's get to it. 

1. Apache Hadoop: This is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

Here's a quick example of running a MapReduce job on Hadoop (BASH):

$ bin/hadoop jar share/hadoop/mapreduce/hadoop-mapreduce-examples-2.7.1.jar grep input output 'dfs[a-z.]+'


This command copies the input file into the Hadoop's distributed file system (DFS), runs the grep job, and then retrieves the output files from DFS to the local file system.

2. Apache Spark: Spark is an open-source, distributed computing system used for big data processing and analytics. It provides an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance.

Here's an example of using Spark to count the number of lines in a text file (this is python):

from pyspark import SparkContext
sc = SparkContext("local", "Count Lines")
lines = sc.textFile("text_file.txt")
line_count = lines.count()
print("Number of lines in file: %i" % (line_count))


3. Elasticsearch: Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine that can handle a large amount of data and can be used to search all kinds of documents.

A simple example of indexing a document in Elasticsearch with Python:

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
es = Elasticsearch()
doc = {"author": "John Doe", "text": "First line of the story"}
res = es.index(index="test-index", doc_type="tweet", id=1, body=doc)


4. Pandas: Pandas is a powerful data manipulation library in Python, providing data structures and data analysis tools.

Here's a simple example of using Pandas:

import pandas as pd
# Create a simple dataset
data = {"Name": ["John", "Anna", "Peter", "Linda"],
"Age": [23, 21, 29, 18]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
# Display the data
print(df)

5. Apache Flink: Flink is a stream processing framework that can run in various modes, including standalone and distributed. It's capable of running a variety of applications, including batch processing, interactive queries, and more.

6. Tableau Public: This is a free software that connects any data source, whether it's a corporate Data Warehouse, Microsoft Excel or web-based data. It's a visual analytics platform transforming the way we use data to solve problems.

7. Google Analytics: It's an indispensable tool for web analytics. Google Analytics tracks and reports website traffic, providing insights into how users find and use a website.

8. RapidMiner: RapidMiner is a data science platform that provides an integrated environment for data preparation, machine learning, deep learning, text mining, and predictive analytics.

9. MongoDB: MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas.

Here's how to insert data into MongoDB using Python:

   from pymongo import MongoClient
# establish a connection to the database
client = MongoClient('localhost', 27017)
# select database
db = client['mydatabase']
# select the collection within the database
test = db.test
# create a new document in the 'test' collection
   test.insert_one({'name': 'John', 'age': 30, 'city': 'New York'})

This Python script connects to a MongoDB instance running on localhost (your computer), selects a database (or creates one if it doesn't exist), then selects a collection (similar to a table in relational databases), and finally inserts a document (similar to a record) into the collection.

Remember, these are just basic examples and in real-world scenarios, you would need to handle more complex data structures, manage connections more carefully (particularly in distributed environments), and take care of many other factors related to data analytics and big data processing. But these tools and examples should provide a good starting point. Good luck with your big data journey!

About CodeDesign

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