Build A Marketing Website Using All Free Tools and Services

David KingBootstrapMarketingTech.com

Feb 3, 2014

It’s possible to build a high quality marketing platform using all free tools and services which are all available on the Internet.

Why would you want to do this?

There are several reasons you might do this...

1. You just want to know what’s possible and learn to build something new.

2. You have an idea you want to develop, but aren’t ready to invest a lot of money into it unless it shows profit potential.

3. You want to develop some technical and design skills in an inexpensive manner.

Another reason could be...

You want to help young people (or people who don’t have access to many resources) to be able to learn a skill which could pay off in the future.

This skill is based around selling information on the Internet. (Information Marketing)

There are many other principles to learn in Information Marketing besides the technical and design portions.

But, has been shown in many cases, the sooner you start taking action and building something the sooner you can start taking real steps towards your ultimate goal!

Without putting yourself in a position of actually needing to solve a particular marketing challenge in the real world...

...then it’s just theory and that’s just a ‘good to know’ thing but not necessarily moving you forward towards your goals.

There are other benefits of ‘just moving forward’ despite a lack of knowledge or experience...

Once experienced people see you taking action and moving forward to the best of your abilities, they are more inclined to help you move past your real challenges and not just the ones you anticipate.

I have designed two kinds of ‘free’ marketing systems.

The first one is completely free (except perhaps for a domain)....

...and the second one is mostly free but could use a small investment into a domain and hosting.

The first system is based on Google’s free “Blogger” system...

...and the second one is based on Wordpress (Content Management System), which also available for free.

Depending on your needs and interest either system would be worthwhile to build.

The system based on blogger may be easier to start with as there are less things to know to set it up completely.

Either system can help you to accomplish your goals in a low cost but effective manner.

So what’s this really all about?

I’ll start with the Blogger based system.

The goal is to be able to sell some information online in a simple and secure manner.

Also, you want to be able to support the customers who purchased from you.

To do all this, you would need the following:● A good website layout for selling● Ability to accept payment ● Ability to deliver content in a secure manner● Ability to support your customers using a:

○ Forum○ Download/information area○ Helpdesk

● Ability to communicate to customers via email● Ability to collect contact information from prospective

customers for future communication● Ability to collect feedback through surveys /

questionnaires

It is possible to do all this using totally free tools and services!

Since it’s built using free services, there are limitations in how much volume (number of customers you can accomodate)...

...but once you are making money, you can invest into your marketing system and upgrade it with money from your profits.

To allow you to understand the full value of this system, I will illustrate some of the problems solved that would allow you to do all this.

As I said previously, the first free system I am describing is based on Google’s freely available Blogger system.

Most people are aware of Blogger, but not everyone is aware that it’s easy to modify the function and appearance of a Blogger website so it doesn’t “look” like a Blogger site.

Also, it’s possible to change the layout to better serve the process of selling and not to just appear like a simple “blog”.

To do this, one of the first things we do is to change the theme, blog width and layout.

Once you have that done, you may want to change the way the blog appears on the home page... ...using a landing page to welcome people instead of a blog listing.

From this: < Home> -< Offer>

Wid-gets

Post #1Post #2Post #3Post #4

To this: <Home> -< Blog>

Offer

● Details● Details Add To Cart

You don’t need to remove the widgets from the entire blog, there is an easy way to use logic to hide the widgets on certain pages.It’s an easy change in the template code.

Menu option 2: < Home> -< Blog>

Wid-gets

Post #1Post #2Post #3Post #4

Menu option 1:: <Home> -< Blog>

Offer

● Details● Details Add To Cart

To collect emails from prospects, you could use Mailchimp which is a great free option (if you are dealing with your own offers).It’s not difficult to create a widget on blogger and insert the optin code. You can enhance the colors as well if you like.

Once they confirm their optin to your list, you can send them updates about your project and remind them of your offers that you have available.

One caveat: There is no autoresponder function on the free version of Mailchimp, only manual email campaigns.

Mailchimp does offer a very affordable pay-per-use option which allows all the functions but does not require a monthly fee.

To accept payment, you can use Paypal which is free, but there is a manual interception required to deliver the product to your customer.

There is another free payment option which integrates with Mailchimp and allows you to immediately deliver a single downloadable file upon purchase.

The only caveat with this is that you only get paid once per week to your Paypal account. For free however, this option is not bad.

To deliver content, you can use either the previous payment solution with or without the use of Mailchimp to deliver the download links...

Or you can use a free group membership website which allows you to have up to 50 members and 250M storage for free to deliver secure documents once you approve their registration manually.

This service has several other functions available for free including a private forum and email newsletters to your group and email discussion lists.

It’s not a bad way to support a small group of people interactively and deliver access to protected content without needing to pay for anything!

The only caveat is a manual approval process after purchase. (Once they register)

There are other free places to store your content like Google Drive, DropBox and Microsoft Skydrive. The links are not secured with a password, but they can be delivered privately in 3 free ways (which I mentioned).

There are additional free services to enhance your customer experience. Freshdesk offers a fully functional helpdesk options for free. This allows you to support your customers in a more organized fashion than email.

When you combine all these services to work together in one system, it’s impressive what you can do for free!

Also, the experience you get from putting this system together and setting it up to do business will give you great experience in understanding the systems its build from before you would need to pay for anything.

So I just described to you the basic system and what you can create for free, but that’s not all you can do...

...you can also set your system up to optimize the best responses from the visitors on your website.

This is important to be sure you get the best ROI (return on investment) from any money you might invest into getting traffic.

It’s important to take testing, optimization and monitoring very seriously when it comes to doing business online.

Without trying to obtain and analyze this information you are basically just throwing your time, money and energy away when trying to do business online.

I’ll explain how you can do all these things for free!

The main free monitoring and testing tool we have at our disposal is Google Analytics.

By properly using several of the features in Google Analytics, you can get functionality that normally costs a notable amount of money.

All it takes is a little bit of setup and you can have almost all of your website monitoring data in one place.

Google Analytics even allows you to set up an A/B split test to try to optimize your main landing pages.

I’ve managed to get this to work on Blogger!

It’s pretty easy to connect Blogger to Google Analytics.

But to get the A/B Split testing to work, it’s necessary to set up the “Conversion Experiments” portion of Google Analytics and make a little change to your Blogger blog so it all works.

Once you have that, you can rotate between 1 or more variations of your original landing page and get the results about which one gets the best response from your visitors.

You can also use a service called StatCounter which gives you more detailed information about your visitors (location, time, specific page) than Google Analytics does.

Google Analytics is designed to aggregate the information about your visitors so you can identify them.

Statcounter will allow you to see some additional specifics about your visitors.

Another thing you can do with Google Analytics is track which links people are clicking on your website.

It does require adding a little bit extra info in your link tags, but for free, you can monitor how many clicks are occurring for important steps on your website.

There are other free tracking options like bit.ly and goo.gl which also shorten the link to a different name.

Either option will work but having it all in Google Analytics is convenient.

So far, I discussed the first option when creating a marketing website for free. (The Google Blogger Option)

The second option I have designed is creating a very low cost Wordpress based marketing platform.

It does use some of the same services as the system I just described, such as Mailchimp, but it does interface better because there are Wordpress plugins which do a lot of the setup work for you.

This second option can be a slightly more complicated option because Wordpress can take a little time to get used to.

To properly set up everything, you need to click to several menu options and save the changes.

This can take a little time and once in a while you might run into something unexpected, which can be a little frustrating.

But Wordpress is widely used all across the Internet and anything you learn about Wordpress should be useful to you for a very long time.

The strongest feature of this Wordpress based setup is being able to use the free version of S2Member Membership plugin.

This plugin allows a lot of functionality for free and call allow you to set up a robust membership website for free.

With the free version of S2Member you can interface closely with Paypal and manage members automatically without needing to manually approve anything.

The paid version offers a few more payment options, but for free, the Paypal buttons aren’t bad.

There’s a lot you can do with a membership site like this... I’ll explain some of the functions.

With the S2Member free plugin, you can set up 4 access levels which can be free, a fixed cost or an ongoing cost. (like monthly).

There is also a free level but without some slight mods, you can’t prevent people from registering because the register link is publicly known. (I did find a workaround to this).

There are also other levels of access you can create called custom capabilities. This works closely with Wordpress’ custom capabilities and you can create custom Paypal payment buttons which include this access.

The free version of S2Member plugin also interfaces with several Autoresponder services, like Mailchimp and Aweber, so you can automatically add new members to an email list.

A great feature which can be used within S2Member plugin is the ‘drip’ feature.

This feature allows you to slowly reveal new content over time so your members have a reason to come back to the website.

If they know new content arrives only once a month, then they wouldn’t need to visit often. The drip feature keeps your website members more engaged with your website.

To create a nice overall appearance for your Wordpress site, you want to find a good Theme.

There are many free themes to choose from but most of them do not allow much configuration or easy modification to your site. (Such as different layouts for different pages).

There is one theme which is completely free and allows a lot of configuration options...

This Wordpress theme is called Atuahalpa and is quite impressive in how much you can do with it without any programming.

The author has made this theme available for free and is continually updating it.

With a little CSS it’s possible it give it most any kind of look you want. I’ve managed to customize it to look a lot like a “Thesis” Theme clone...

Besides utilizing the membership plugin and the free Wordpress theme, I’ve managed to find some excellent free plugins which enhance the functionality of Wordpress and allows for more testing and monitoring.

Along with Google Analytics content experiments, you can also use a plugin called Max A/B plugin which allows for A/B Split testing.

If you want to deliver video as content in your membership site and want to track it for free, I’ve found that with a little Javascript, you can do a lot to not only prevent people from clicking to your YouTube channel but you can also track how long they watched the video and set an ‘event’ to present an offer below the video.

To simplify this whole javascript process, I’ve found some very good “shortcode’ management plugins which allow you to create powerful custom shortcodes.

By the way, “shortcodes” are just a shortcut which inserts more function with an easy to remember tag, like: [video-shortcode].

There are a few free plugins I found which allow you to create professional looking layouts and interactive elements which make your sales page look professional.

By using all these free resources and connecting them together, you can essentially create a professional platform to sell your content without needing to make an upfront investment.

In the process, you can learn a lot about how to set up and configure these kinds of systems before you need to pay for them.

There are few other things I figured out to get the most out of all these services, but they are not worth mentioning unless you’ve decided you want to go ahead and build a system like this.

If you’d like to learn more about how to build this system and get free lifetime access to this course as I develop it (in exchange for some feedback), then please email me at bootstrapmarketingtech@gmail.com or optin at

www.bootstrapmarketingtech.com/product-offer