Starting a blog, a side hustle, or a new business venture and don’t have money to spend on marketing? Don’t let a small, or non-existent, marketing budget get you down. There are plenty of free resources available online that can help you cut corners and get your marketing off the ground.
Here are five free resources for graphic design, image editing, email marketing, royalty free images, and social media that you can use today.
1. Free Graphic Design with Canva
Like the image I used for the blog header? I created it in less than a minute on canva.com. Canva is a free graphic design website where you can make infographics, social media headers, web & email banners, design resumes, and much more for free.
Canva’s easy to use drag and drop features makes it a godsend for non-technical people that want to create crisp designs. I use it all the time at work to design posters, blog covers, and email banners. Here’s a few examples:
Canva saves your designs and lets you set your brands colors as presets for easy design. Some designs and features require you to pay (they are a business after all), but the extensive free resources make canva.com a valuable marketing tool.
2. Free Image Editing with Pixlr
Need to do advanced photo editing and can’t spring for Photoshop? Then let me introduce you to Pixlr.com. Pixlr is a free photo editing website with many of the advanced features of Photoshop, including my favorite tool, the clone stamp.
Like Photoshop, Pixlr takes time to learn and can be confusing. However, once you master some of the tools you can do some fun things like my duck & goose editing below.
Original Image Untouched: Bunch of geese and one duck I met in Portland, OR.
A little fun with the clone stamp tool and was there ever really a duck?
Or maybe there was only a duck?
3. Free Email Marketing with MailChimp
When I think a company is great, I will be your biggest advocate and MailChimp is awesome.
MailChimp is a marketing automation platform and an email marketing service that I consider the best on the market. It’s easy to use, drag and drop design, and has great analytic tools to see how your subscribers are responding to your emails.
For the marketer on a budget, they should be your best friend. They allow you to send up to 2,000 subscribers 12,000 emails a month for free and won’t even ask you for a credit card (none of that automatically making you pay if you go over).
4. Free Royalty Free Images with Google Advanced Image Search
Looking for images to use for your e-book and don’t want to get sued for stealing someone else’s work off google images? Then checkout Google Advanced Image Search.
With the advanced image search you can select a setting to only search for images that are free to use or share, even commercially.
To use Google Advanced Image Search for Royalty Free Images
1. Visit Google and Type in “Advanced Image Search”
2. Click the first result “Google Advanced Image Search”
3. Scroll down to “usage rights” and select “free to use, share or modify, even commercially”
4. Scroll up and search for whatever free image you are looking for.
5. Make sure to visit the site and check if you also need to give attribution.
5. Free Social Media Planning with Hootsuite
I debated putting Hootsuite on this list because I feel that you have to be living under a rock to have not heard of the social media management platform. Then again, not everyone works in marketing, so if Hootsuite is new to you, great!
Hootsuite allows you to monitor, plan, and schedule your social media on many different accounts including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. The free version limits how many platforms you can connect, but you can still use many of the valuable tools like scheduling tweets to go out over the weekend, while you are hiking.
If you are wearing many hats in your business, it may pay to plan out your social media in advance and have everything ready to go on Hootsuite.
I hope you enjoy these five free marketing resources. I still advocate paying for marketing (I like money), but I know we all need to save money and hopefully one of these resources can help you in the future. Are there any free marketing resources you like to use? Let me know in the comments.
Off the Rip 
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