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We all love discounts. Sunday newspaper circulation would probably drop off by half if it weren’t for all the coupon flyers they stuff into it. However, free is even better.

Here are five great free online marketing tools virtually every business can use. If you aren’t taking advantage of these, you’re missing out.

1. Google Analytics
There has always been a tremendous demand for statistical analysis in the business world and it’s essential for online marketing. Google Analytics gives you the power to understand your website and your website visitors. All you need to do is sign up for a free account, paste some code into your pages and start looking for trends.

With Google Analytics you can:

• See how people find your site
• Discover how visitors navigate through your site
• Analyze keywords using various filters, geographic areas for example
• Generate reports automatically and distribute them by email
• Uncover trends
• See now landing pages are performing
• Find where visitors drop out of your site

Google Analytics does even more than what we’ve listed here. There are excellent tutorials all along the way that will help you fine tune your SEO and your site’s efficiency. If you need help, you can always get an analytics consultant to provide added expertise.

2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Once you’ve decided to take advantage of the free tools available at Google, sign up for an Adwords account. If you decide to bid on some keywords in the Adwords program, your Google Analytics account becomes still more useful.

However, even if you never mount an Adwords campaign, the free Keyword Tool will prove very helpful for your SEO program. With this tool you simply enter the keywords you have identified for your website and it with generate a long list of related keywords and keyword phrases. Sometimes it’s easy for website owners to overlook great keywords and phrases.

You’ll also see how much Adwords competition there is for each suggested keyword or phrase and how many monthly searches there are both universally and locally. With this knowledge in hand you can take a fresh look at your site for SEO opportunities.

3. Open Site Explorer
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of links to your SEO. Search engines use links to rate a site’s popularity and authority. Open Site Explorer will show you exactly who is linking to your site. And, I should also mention that Open Site Explorer will also tell you who is linking to your competitors.

You use the information Open Site Explorer provides to:

• See who is linking to your site and strengthen those relationships
• Find broken links
• Discover links to old pages
• Compare your web presence to your competition

4. Facebook Pages for Business
You already have a personal Facebook profile, right? If you do, establishing a page for your business is simple. Once you have your Facebook business page up and running, it’s an excellent location to post your basic business information. You can also incorporate your logo and business graphics into your page.

Whenever you change something on your page, or you get new fans, or your fans post something, those activities will be sent out via the Facebook news feed. Each of those little news items is essentially a mini-press release that gets delivered to your target audience. You can also link your Facebook page to your Twitter feed and double your exposure.

5. WordPress.org Blogging Platform
This is free software that can be easily installed on your website. Although it was originally designed for blogging, a plethora of plugins, widgets and themes make WordPress an excellent full website content management system.

One of the basic features that gives WordPress an advantage over other blogging software is that it allows for static pages. These are essential for a complete Internet presence.

Upgrades and installation are simple. You can switch themes with a click or two. There is excellent built-in spam protection as well as control over comments.

Cruise over to the WordPress.org site to see examples of what users have accomplished with this platform.

Now is the Time To Start

It’s easy to see that a savvy businessperson can use these tools to great advantage. All of these sites have excellent video tutorials and help pages.

Dive in and start getting an edge on your competitors.