Automate your blog and business 100% free!
If you can automate your blog everything gets so much easier! Automating is the magic that makes running a blog actually manageable.
Unfortunately, this happens to me all the time; I read about the newest amazing tool. This one will make it so that I will have a successful email list + a gorgeous blog + 3 extra hours every day. And then I find out that its $30 a month and I am a broke university student.
We all know that you have to invest money to make money but if you want all the features that top bloggers use and love you might have to pay over $500 a month.
This list is full of ways to get professional looking features that are often very expensive for free. The only downside is that some of these require using more than one platform, a lot of sign-ups and some puzzling but it is totally worth it.
These are honestly 100% free!
Emails
Building an email list so you can actually interact with your faithful readers is a big part of the Blogging Business. Unfortunately, most of the sites that allow you to build an email list can get quite expensive.
You want to have an email list so you can send emails and update automatically to all of these people!
Luckily, two of them are free if you are just starting with building a list;
MailChimp is free up to 2000 subscribers & 12000 Emails per month, but this leaves out many features including automation. (This is updated now, I haven’t tried it out but automation should be free!)
Mailerlite is free up to 1000 subscribers as well and this includes all their features. + You get unlimited emails! However, Mailerlite comes with lesser features in total. But it does allow you to create an introduction email course with its “automation after sign up” option.
[symple_column size=”one-half” position=”first” fade_in=”false”]Mailchimp
Pro’s
- many options
- easy list segmenting
- integration with sumo-me is free
Cons
- No automation
- Many paid features [/symple_column]
[symple_column size=”one-half” position=”last” fade_in=”false”]Mailerlite
pro’s
- Everything is free till 1000 subs
- easy landing pages
- automation available
cons
- Automation options are limited
- Integration with sumo-me is not free [/symple_column]
Landing pages
Landing pages are an important part of email list building. They automate sign-ups and marketing.
If you are using Mailerlite you already have a landing page option right there. These are highly customizable and the email addresses end up straight on your list which is always amazing.
Another option for WordPress is the plugin Landing pages. This plugin gives you, even more, options to customize.
However, this plugin is slightly harder to use and can be a little bit difficult. But you can pop in your MailChimp signup HTML box thing and create a gorgeous landing page that signs up straight to your email list.
(Example of one of my landing pages made with this plugin. I love that it has the full picture background option!)
Or use something like Mailmunch; which lets you create free landing pages and more like pop-ups!
(Example of a landing page made with Mailmunch here)
E-commerce
It is great when you can just upload your product and the selling happens without you having to do anything. When you automate E-commerce it just means that your clients get the product and you get your profit and you don’t have to do anything!
This one I can’t actually tell you a lot about yet since the things I will be selling soon are not done yet and so I can’t tell you about the paying and uploading part.
But here is the good news;
There are many free plugins that turn your WordPress blog in an amazing shop. (Try this list for the best 7 free e-commerce plugins for WordPress.)
You don’t need the paid options to start off.
Other great ways are trying an Etsy shop or Amazon. But both require a little bit of money in the end so these are not 100% free.
Social media Scheduling
When you automate your social media you can be much more efficient, consistent and active. It makes it so that you spend less time there and more time on content creating without losing opportunities to get your brand or blog out there.
Trafficwonker was a free Pinterest scheduler but has become a paid platform.
Later also lets you schedule 30 Pinterest posts but is mostly focused on Instagram!
(And it has already massively grown my audience, repins and more!)
You can also get around three months of free Pinterest schedule by doing the trials of the bigger sites which will give you a great overview for if you ever do want to have the paid scheduler. If somebody knows anything about a free way to schedule pins please do let us all know.
While HootSuite has many paid features the feature to schedule many tweets are totally free. This is great when you are promoting your own posts and you want to set repeat pins for in a week, month etc.
Buffer has a free version but lets you only schedule up to 10 posts a time. But including pictures is easier.
Metricool is another great option which also shows you analytics and lets you upload up to 50 tweets/posts per month. I also wrote a post on Metricool and how it can help you here.
HootSuite lets you schedule Instagram but you still need to push publish. Many of these sites have the same problem. Scheduling is never 100% automatic.
I personally used Gramblr a lot to upload from my computer and this also lets you schedule Instagram posts. As long as your computer is on this will automatically publish. And, of course, this is also 100% free!
(Warning, there are quite some shady posts on Gramblr!)
Now I have been using Later which has some great features like an overview of what your posts look like when you are scheduling them.
Scheduling
For your blog, you will most likely be able to schedule everything automatically.
If you want to have everything in calendar form, however, this is easily done by editorial calendar plugin for WordPress. This gives you a great calendar overview and you can drag and drop posts.
These were all the things I could think of that you might want for free that you did not know you could have.
Some of these are very well known and some of them are very new. Personally, I am excited for them all and I look forward to using them.
When you search these features for free it sometimes means you need to do a little bit more research or you have to combine some things but overall it’s almost always possible to find a way.
Let me know which other features you are looking for. Which things do you wish were free?
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