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 software. Of course you can spend thousands of dollars on high end tools if you want to, but these are the free ones I recommend and will do the job just fine.

• Open Office www.openoffice.org

Open Office is an open source office suite to rival Microsoft Office. It does everything you’d expect from an office suite, like word processing and spreadsheets etc. What we want it for though is for creating ebooks and reports. Open Office has the ability to save any document to PDF which means you just type up your ebook, report or case study and hit the export to PDF button and wham, you have a product ready to put online! Sure, you could spend hundreds of dollars on Adobe Acrobat, but there really is no need.

• Nvu www.nvu.com

Nvu is an HTML editor. Basically, it allows you to create and edit web pages, in WYSIWYG format (meaning you design and edit just like in a word processor, and Nvu takes care of all the HTML code in the background). You also have the option of getting ‘hands on’ with the code for those times when you need to, but most of the time it does a very good job of keeping things simple. Again, you could use Dreamweaver but for now why not save a few hundred dollars and use Nvu!

• GIMP www.gimp.org

GIMP is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program and is basically like an opensource Photoshop. You’ll need it from time to time for editing images for your website, or maybe creating cool covers for ebooks etc. It’s a very powerful piece of software, and if you’re not used to image editing software don’t be put off but the complexity of it. You will probably only use 10% of the features, but once you learn the basics it’s a very useful tool.

• Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Audacity is an audio recorder and editor. It’s incredibly easy to use, just plug in a microphone and away you go. Great for podcasting, or creating tutorials and adding audio to your sales pages.

• Camtasia – www.techsmith.com/camtasia

OK, now Camtasia isn’t free, but there really isn’t a good free alternative. It’s used for creating screen capture video so you might not need to use it right away. Having said that, video is one of the most powerful formats and Camtasia makes it very easy to use so you might want to at least download the 30 day free trial. It’s unrestricted so you can use all the features and upgrade to the paid version if you like it.

So there you go, 4 free tools and one which is at least free for the first 30 days if you want to use video. If you are serious about building a business online, get to know these tools inside out. Get in the habit of producing some fresh, unique content every week, and you’ll start to see your stats soar as people come to know you as their go-to guy (or girl) in your niche.

Over the next week, I’ll look at each of these tools in turn, showing you how to quickly and easily produce high quality content that you can use as marketing material, opt-in incentives, affiliate bonuses or full blown saleable products. Starting from the top, tomorrow we’ll look at creating reports and ebooks using OpenOffice.