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Starting and running a modern business can be challenging to say the least. There are so many things to juggle. So many tools and services. So many people to meet and contacts to make. Business plans, marketing– you name it.
As busy and as hectic as the business world is, there is one huge benefit we can all use – free online resources aimed at helping small business owners and entrepreneurs. There’s a stack of great stuff out there; if you know where to look.
To help you, we’ve compiled an extensive list of all the best free resources (including guides, tutorials, articles, tools, & services) to help you take another step towards success.
Business Ideas
Coming up with a viable business idea is not always that easy. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be a fun learning experience. SpringWise looks at innovation around the globe with a focus on high-tech stuff that, unfortunately, tends to be out of the reach of a solopreneur-type startup. Nevertheless, keeping tabs on what’s coming onto the market is still hugely valuable.
Not every idea you see on Springwise will be a viable startup option for you, so you might want to look at something like SME Pals’ Small Business Ideas resource page, which offers a vast, growing list of unusual, innovative, and quirky ideas with a focus on low startup costs and great online potential.
Business Plans
Whether looking for investors, approaching the bank for a loan, or doing extensive marketing research, a good business plan can give you the knowledge and industry insight needed to take advantage of new business opportunities.
Bplans offers hundreds of freely available business plan templates on their Free Sample Business Plans resource page.
There are over 116 business plan outlines for retail and online startups alone, which makes an unbeatable business plan resource for home-based or small business startups that want to do everything from blogging to selling things online.
Websites
Every modern business needs a website. But not every modern entrepreneur should have to learn programming, HTML, CSS, MySQL, DNS, SSL, and every other piece of technology that goes into making a website.
Free yourself from complicated and expensive custom Web design issues by following SME Pals’ How to make a website guide for complete beginners. See how easy, fast, and cheap it is to create a professional, cutting-edge website for yourself.
What’s nice about this resource is that it is organized into sections you can dip in and out of depending on where you are creating a website. Access everything from essential concepts and basic definitions to costs, guidance, advice on domains, and hosting. Step-by-step beginner guides to building a website on all the major Web platforms.
Analytics
Having a great website is only the first step. Next, it’s essential to monitor Web traffic to understand where visitors come from, what they do while browsing your site, and where they go afterward.
Analytics is vital to any good marketing, advertising, content, sales, and search optimization campaign. Google Analytics offers a complete (and completely free) way to work with your visitor data to understand your business’s performance better.
The Audience Overview, Real-Time, Acquisition Channels, and Behavior Events data reports are the most useful because they cover everything from who has visited my site, whos online right now, where they came from, and what they did.
Marketing
Marketing is a considerable discipline making it challenging to cover every little aspect in one go. However, I think a few standout resources are definitely worth mentioning.
Inbound
The particular demands of the Internet audience led to an evolution in how marketers approached their craft. Inbound marketing was born and espoused a shift in attitudes from telling consumers to buy your products to engaging with them to build trust and authority. At the vanguard of this movement is Hubspot, and there is a lot of precious information on inbound marketing on their blog.
Blogging
For me, blogging wouldn’t be the same without the longstanding service of Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, which offers a massive array of articles, guides, tips, eBooks, podcasts, and other resources on everything to do with creating content for blogs.
While some of the resources on the site are paid, I highly recommend browsing their blog for more actionable advice and tips than you can shake a stick at.
SEO
Search engine optimization is the art and skill of ranking your website and webpages higher in Google (and other search engines) to generate as much valuable organic search traffic as possible. SEO is a considerable discipline encompassing everything from content creation (blogging) to technical aspects such as server speed and performance.
There’s no one better in the industry to offer reliable free advice and insight than Brian Dean and BackLinko.
The best feature about Brian’s site is that he doesn’t produce many articles. You’re lucky if there’s a new one each fortnight. But, each report contains a wealth of precious insight and information. I’ve been in the biz for years and still learn new stuff each time I pop in to read something.
My favorite is his list of 201 powerful SEO tips, which contains enough actionable search optimization hints and tips to keep you busy for weeks.
Software
There’s no single piece of free software I could recommend since any business requires a whole array of software to function. This section will list the most helpful software packages available for download online. Enjoy.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a free (no payment or registration required) utility that can archive and compress files and folders and unzip them using a range of formats – like Windows’ .zip and the superior .tar.gz, as well as its own high compression .7z format.
Skype
Skype provides free online conversations and instant messaging, file sharing, video sharing, conference calling, and VoIP to landline calls.
Avast
Avast offers a free trial of their antivirus software for 30 days. After that, you can choose to extend your free usage period or upgrade to their full, paid protection plan. While there are a few annoying popups to deal with occasionally, overall, their free protection plan is excellent.
Thunderbird
Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a modern, easy-to-use email client that will have you sending and receiving emails in no time on virtually any platform you can imagine – Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
OpenOffice
Apache’s OpenOffice is open source’s answer to Microsoft Office, which used to be bundled free with Windows, but now costs a small fortune to install separately.
Adobe Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader is an essential free utility for reading (but not creating) PDF documents. PDF is a widespread format standard online (if you do any work online, you’ll need a PDF reader).
Dropbox
Dropbox is a free, cloud-based application that allows you to store, share and synchronize files online.
Chrome
Google’s Chrome Web browser has risen to become the most dominant PC browser on the planet. It did this by being fast and easy to use while rendering Webpages elegantly.
Q&A
The best place to get surprisingly good, in-depth, and knowledgeable online advice about virtually every aspect of starting, growing, and operating a successful business of pretty much any size in pretty much any industry is Quora.
An excellent way to find quality answers is to search for questions that garnered many views. Generally, popular questions attract better and better solutions that go into more and more detail as they compete to be upvoted to the top of the answer results.
Tax, Loans & Finance
The government recognizes the importance of startups, innovation, and small businesses within the economy. Small businesses account for almost half the nation’s contribution to GDP and nearly half of the overall employment. That’s huge.
It’s no wonder that the SBA was created to help entrepreneurs and small business owners navigate the tangled Web of tax, legal, and finance laws, regulations, and practices.
While plenty of local and regional resources are available from the SBA, the two most important online ones are their Loans & Grants and Learning Center. The loans section, in particular, offers plenty of valuable advice and information on how to apply for loans, connect with lenders, and access other financing resources.
So that’s the end of my list of free online entrepreneur resources. Hopefully, you’ll find plenty of valuable insight and information to help boost your own business and take you one step closer to success.
Do you already use any of the resources mentioned here? Have they been of help to you and your business? What other free sites, articles, tools, and resources would you recommend?
