Welcome to Week Two of your great giveaways bonanza – an unashamed smorgasbord of stupendous stuff you can snaffle for absolutely nada.
Before we begin, a word of advice: only take what you can use. Otherwise, and especially in this week of Black Friday madness, you will do what many of us do at those All You Can Eat Buffets and find that your eyes are bigger than your stomach…
Or, more pertinently, your hard drive.
With that in, let’s start with keyword research tools which are more essential than ever as Google et al demand that your content closely matches what your audience wants and is looking for…although the Google Keyword Planner we all used and loved is no more unless you are an Adwords user (even then, I don’t love it as much).
Ubersuggest is Neil Patel’s excellent keyword tool:
While Keyword Sheeter pulls tons of autocomplete suggestions from Google for you:
As does Infinite Suggest:
https://www.infinitesuggest.com/
The autocomplete tools will give you tons of ideas but no idea of metrics such as search volume. Keyword Surfer is a Chrome extension that will give you monthly and global search volumes for any keyword typed into Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/keyword-surfer/bafijghppfhdpldihckdcadbcobikaca?hl=en
While Keyworddit is a unique tool that gives you keyword suggestions from Reddit – especially useful for niche research:
https://www.highervisibility.com/free-seo-tools/keyworddit/
Finally, Keyword Tool calls itself the best alternative to the old Google Keyword Planner – the no cost version is perfectly adequate:
Let’s move on to other tools you can use to boost your results while vastly cutting down the time and effort you need to expend.
Tailwind is a scheduling tool for Pinterest and Instagram that has a very generous trial period and, importantly, is approved by both platforms:
Buffer is another social media scheduling tool that you can use for nada for up to three social media accounts and one user:
TweetDeck is one of the oldest and best known tools for managing and using Twitter to the max:
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
Let’s round off with some of my favourite plugins, starting with Pretty Links which is an excellent link shortener with some useful analytics capabilities:
Editorial Calendar helps you organise your blog content:
Revive Old Post (formerly Tweet Old Post) automatically reshares your old posts to social sites, thereby extending their life:
And Yoast SEO is an excellent all-in-one SEO plugin and more besides:
So there we have it – a huge list of great stuff you can nab for nada. As I said earlier, only take what you can use or you will simply sink into overwhelm paralysis and we don’t want that…
We want action! And on that note, your TED talk this week is on the perils of sitting (yep, move away from that screen…dance, stretch, go for a walk…you’ll come back refreshed and capable of much more):
