E-books, blueprints, free reports… in this first of a series of guides to producing content I want to show you how to easily create these using the free office suite software Open Office.
If you’ve not already got it, download it now from OpenOffice.org and go right ahead and install the package. What you get is a suite of 5 applications: Writer, which is a word processor to rival Microsoft Word, Calc which is a spreadsheet (like Excel), a Powerpoint style presentation application called Impress, a graphics tool called Draw, …

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the single most important thing for driving traffic to your site is content. Whether it’s blog posts, articles, ebooks, reports, podcasts or videos, good content will attract visitors, convert them (get them subscribing or buying) and get you back links.
There are different types of content, and you’ll need different tools to create each of them. The great news is, that most of the content can be easily created using free software tools.
That’s right, you can do all this with free …

Following on from yesterday’s post about following up with potential customers, I wanted to give a full review of the Autoresponder I have been using on all my sites for some time – AWeber. I have tried others, and I found GetResponse to be the next best, but AWeber for me comes up trumps.
An autoresponder is, essentially, a program which automatically sends an email when some action is taken. That action could be when someone sends an email, or fills out a web form. This most basic …

The success of your online business, no matter what model you use, relies on one thing – traffic. There are essentially two ways to get that traffic: pay for it (PPC, CPM advertising etc.) or get it free (which essentially boils down to SEO). SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of making your website more ‘valuable’ to the search engines and hence likely to rank higher for your keyterms. Here are my top 5 free tools to help in the SEO process:
1. …

Wouldn’t it be great to work from anywhere in the world, carrying all your tools and data with you in your pocket? Wouldn’t you love to have an entire suite of software, everything you need to run your online business, attached to your keyring?
Well you can… for the past couple of months I’ve been trying various software packages which are USB compatible. What that means is that, rather than installing the software onto a computer, it can be run directly from the USB drive which means you can …

While we’re on the subject of defining your niche, I want to share a free software tool with you that you’ll find useful not only for this, but in every aspect of your business. FreeMind is a Java based mind mapping tool that allows you to quickly and efficiently get your ideas down, visualize your thoughts as you clarify and orgaize them and output them to images, HTML, PDF and more.
FreeMind is extremely powerful software and once you get the hang of it you’ll find uses for it in …