Everyone loves freebies, especially when it comes to free online marketing tools that you can use to help you get new keyword ideas, check who your competitors are, what your competitor’s keywords are, the demographics of your market, the trend and so on…

I get excited to see so many new keyword tools on the market just about every week.  Some are great, some are OK and some are just not worth buying at all.

For newbies, I’d suggest using the free tools first.  In fact, I love these free tools.  They are awesome and I use these tools all the time.  Here is the list of my favorite free tools:

1.) Google Keyword Tool:
Most reliable keyword tool, because Google directly tells you how much the keyword search volume per month, the estimate cost of the keywords, what month is the busiest month for particular keyword…and you can also use this tool to check out your competition’s keywords.

2.) Wonder Wheel:
This is one of the Google search options that most people are not aware of. It shows you keyword ideas one after the other, with most relevant phrase or words related to your original searched keywords when you go deeper on your keyword search.

3.) Niche Watch:
Great place to check who your competitions are, how many backlinks, keywords they have.  I use Niche Watch to find out who my top 5 competitions’ sites are and I study and analyze these sites.

4.) Google Search-Based Keyword Tool:
Once you identify who your competitions are, you might want to use Google Search-Based Keyword Tool to check what the keywords your competitions have on their sites.

Google Keyword Tool also provides such search options.

5.) Alexa:
A very cool site to find out your competition’s traffic stats, ranking, highly searched keywords and audience demographics.  You can compare up to 5 websites.

Another similar site is: Compete

6.) FreeMind Mind Map:
This is such a wonderful tool to outline your business plan, website layout and keep track of your projects.  I especially find FreeMind very valuable because it helps you visualize the sections and pages of your website when you just start working on your website creation.

7.) WordPress.org:
One of the best blogging platforms, WordPress can also be used as full content management system. If you’ve never built a website before, WordPress is one of the easiest places to get started.  The installation is easy and there are a lot of free themes and plugins you can choose from.

With these free online marketing tools under your belt, you are ready to build your first online business that costs you almost nothing!