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9 Amazing free resources to help you grow your business and feed your mind
By: Jim Connolly

Right now, you have access to an Aladdin's Cave of freely available marketing, business development and professional development tools. In today's post, I am going to share just 9 of them with you.

Free marketing and educational resources

Here are my 9 free resources. Remember to add yours at the end



1. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, will give you a blog for free and host it for free, too. Many of the world's top blogs started off on this free platform and some have stayed with the free version of the service. I started this blog off using the free version of WordPress and today, around 60,000 people get updated when I publish each new post.

2. The people at TED have made thousands of educational and inspirational videos available to you, for free.

3. Microsoft offer you Skype for free, so you can easily collaborate with colleagues or clients via speech or video conferencing. So long as they have downloaded Skype, you can now work with people, with no geographic limitations and it won't cost you a penny.

4. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook welcome you to use their services for free and Linkedin offers a useful, free version of their service too. Years ago, you paid an organisation to attend physical networking events, and lost a huge chunk of your day travelling to the events, attending the events and getting back from the events. You were lucky if 100 people attended and even luckier if you made regular, meaningful contacts. Now you can network with thousands of people anywhere in the world, for nothing more than the time you're prepared to invest.



5. Seth Godin digs deep to come up with something useful to say, via his daily blog posts. These are essential reading.

6. Christopher Penn and John Wall turn up on an almost weekly basis, to share ideas and opinions on the world of marketing, in their Marketing Over Coffee podcast. I reviewed it here. 7. You can now give your online and offline marketing photos and images more impact, with free image editing software. I use picmonkey.

8. It has never been easier to capture ideas than it is today. If you use a smartphone, Evernote provides an extremely useful free version of their service, which allows you to collect ideas, sounds, images, webpages and more – and then work with them.

9. If you have a website or blog, you need to measure what's happening on the site and by far the most popular tool for this, is Google Analytics. Google Analytics lets you track everything, from how many visitors your site receives and what your most popular pages are, to what words people use when looking for you on a search engine and what type of devices they use to access your site. This free package offers far too many features to mention here and is extremely useful, especially if you do not already have any analytics software.

So, what would you add to that list? What are the free resources that you value the most? Share them, with a comment.

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