A question was asked of me one morning, followed by an accusation later on in the self-same session we were in. The question asked about free tools available a person can use to build their business. The accusation claimed that if you use something that was freely offered and don’t buy anything further, you are, in effect, stealing and committing intellectual theft! I promised the person asking me the question that I would take time to write out my answer, already anticipating it would be long, but I did not anticipate having to justify my answer as well. This is that response with no apologies. Those readers who figure you can’t go anywhere without cash in hand need not bother reading any further.
There are three currencies in life: Time, effort, and money.
You can creatively use time and effort if you don’t have the money, to make money. Conversely, you can spend all you want on tools, but never put in the time and effort to use them. I have learned in life, that the person most valuable to me is the one who puts in the time and effort. If someone won’t put in the time and effort as a volunteer, I certainly won’t consider paying them as an employee. Their integrity and work ethic aren’t there if they won’t do something without being paid for it first.
Investing in yourself means becoming a self teacher and a #doer. If you are not either one of those things and instead will pay others to teach and do for you, you lack integrity and seriously shouldn’t bother spending the money on their efforts because when their momentum runs out on you, so does any benefit you paid for.
I taught myself so much about troubleshooting computers back in the mid to late ’90’s, that by the time I paid for a course to get my certification to become a certified computer tech, most of what I sat through in class was review and a rubber stamp so I could go into a career that paid the bills while I raised two kids alone. I was one of two women who stayed in the course by the time it ended. The instructor made a statement that would prove to be gold in all the years after.
It isn’t what you know so much as knowing where to look to find the answers.
This led to what I have since termed “research on the fly” as I solved computer problems all over the world. That job continued to pay the bills until my kids were half-way through highschool. They graduated back in 2013 when my health took a severe dive, drastically impacting my income-generating capabilities. I began looking for other career options I could do that would allow me to pay the bills and manage this health condition three years ago and found the path to that new career in February of 2020.
It has continually amazed me over the years just how negative people are toward the concept of anything free. I have free tools available to me that come with caveats that an untrained person can seriously do damage to their PC if they use those tools. But those tools are FREE! One set had the entire tech community worried it would no longer be free when Microsoft bought out the company that released them. But one company I worked for thought that free equalled garbage!!! I looked at the boss in shock!
If you make something free to the larger community, don’t accuse them of theft if they take that free tool and use it to better their lives! You made it available! If you accuse anyone of theft, it is yourself that must stand as the accused. Don’t make anything free you will develop hard feelings over if others don’t buy what you are offering because what you offered for free completely met their needs. Getting upset that people are taking your free product or service and running with it shows an area that needs to be healed and/or changed. Service isn’t as deeply ingrained as you might think, if you get upset others took your freebie and ran with it. Many in the coaching space have already taken notice of this behaviour among freebie-chasers, and are no longer doing free consultations, offering free courses, workshops or lead magnets. Coaches are taught to over-deliver to instill a sense of value being received, but when this is done for free it leaves the consumer feeling they received so much why pay for more? At the same time, just as many coaches are still offering free workshops and challenges and are puzzled by what happens when consumers don’t buy at the end.
There are what we call “Internet purists” out there who are software programmers who make tools available to the masses 100% free, and they personally feel such tools should be free and frown on those who produce paid versions of them. One of those tools grew to the point over the years that now they have a paid version as well as a free version and the free version has a donation button for those who want to pitch in to help move the project forward. But the “purists” don’t feel the masses are stealing from them at all. They put out a free product and they expect it to be used to help making others’ lives better. They don’t feel anyone is stealing from them. The rise of advertising revenue has kept many of these tools free, and some have built versions where if users don’t want the ads, they can buy the no-ad upgrade. Same functions and features, just no ads.
Now to those who are self-teachers, like to poke around and discover how things are done and what things do what, there are many free tools available to you to help you build your business. You need to believe in what you are offering strongly enough to put in the time and effort to learn these tools and make them work for you.
- A website: It is said in the coaching space that you don’t need a website to start your business. All you need is a Social Media Page (not personal profile or group). However, there are other free tools out there that ask you for an actual website.
- A good free website that will let you build whatever you want for a starting place, is wordpress.com. You will get a free subdomain that looks like “mybiz.wordpress.com” and access to a wide number of plugins and themes that let you get off the ground. Another platform that can let you get started for free is wix.com, but their free site comes with a banner that bogs down older systems rather badly. So I don’t recommend them as much for someone starting out.
- Several major email management systems out there offer free packages up to 2000 subscribers and up to 100 sends in a month. Mailpoet3 for wordpress and mailchimp are two such services.
- Free funnel systems exist as well such as the basic plan over at Groovefunnels. WordPress offers various plugins for funnels as well that link up with ecommerce solutions such as WooCommerce. They have landing page plugins you can use, some simpler or more complicated than others to figure out.
- WordPress has booking plugins, calendar plugins, etc that you can use to book clients and share events with your community.
- WordPress offers LearnPress, Tutor and other LMS systems that you can use without putting out large monthly fees on more well-known systems. I have my budgeting course on my author site using Learnpress. WordPress also offers both free, freemium and paid membership site plugins. Gamification is another type of plugin that can be added to the membership area to help staff figure out who won what prizes.
- Graphics creation is big online now that everyone has decided the Internet should be a picture-book. I feel like Alice in Wonderland’s older sister when Alice plops down beside her as she’s reading, takes her book out of her hands, turns it upside down and squints at it, wondering how her older sister could find a book with no pictures interesting. I have an over-active imagination. Reading a book is playing a movie in my mind, I don’t need pictures provided for me to do that. But seeing as the rest of the world apparently needs that help, we need to learn how to create graphics that show what we are talking about.
- E-Sign Capabilities: EDIT January 3, 2025: If you are needing people to fill out and sign important documents and you can’t afford e-sign services, look into the various free plans that a number of e-sign companies offer. Some offer 3 requests a month, some offer 5 requests a month, some offer as much as 15 requests a month(QuickSigner) for free and then you pay to be able to offer more, as well as to obtain more bells and whistles. Some tack on a signed page at the end of the document, useful for those documents where only a single signature is required. Others let you go through the document adding fields where necessary. Some let you create a template for free, others lets you duplicate a previous document to send out to a new signer. Some of the ones I’ve found include Zoho Sign, Dropbox esign, Xodo, Sign.Plus, JotForm, Online Signature, and Sign.com. Register for several free services and then when you are needing more than what they offer, choose one and pay for the upgraded capabilities. End edit
- EDIT January 5th, 2025 Further to the discovery on January 3rd, my research continued until I was able to shortlist two services that allow easy embedding of their forms on your website, only needing an iframe tag to display so your signers can stay on your webpage. Those two are Jotforms SignOnline, and DocMadeEasy. These let you add your form to your website while on their free plan.
- Services I tested out that had 5 or more free sign requests in a month that require an upgrade before you can use their embed feature, are Zoho sign, Sign.com, Opensign, and Docuseal. Of those, Opensign is one of the better-priced alternatives. Xodo requires programming knowledge to get their form up on your site, so unless you pay for a coding developer, this isn’t a wise choice for embedding on your website.
- Continued testing of form creation from a pre-existing PDF that you created, show that in general, the date field is assumed to be for the date the form is signed. If you have other date fields in your form that don’t relate to the signing date, in many cases, you have to use a text field instead. Secondly, simple yes and no items don’t seem to do well as horizontal options for either checkbox fields or radio box fields. They all assume you want these fields vertical. To make them horizontal, turn them into dropdown choices. In addition, ensure your PDF is all single page format and not 2-up, as the fill logic will bounce between both pages if you have 2 pages per sheet. Keep each page to it’s own sheet, and the fill logic will follow the flow through your form better. Just some observations while testing out various services. End edit
Being so huge on finding free tools, I suddenly found myself having to move from a 13yr old computer I’d kept running for 11 of it’s years of life (given to me 2yrs after it was purchased) because it died on me in ways I didn’t have the money to go out and buy parts for. My income changed in 2020 to the point where I was being sustained by my kids income until my coaching could get going. But there I was, suddenly having to bring two old laptops to life using Linux and stay functional. In years past, I always had trouble finding the software that would work for what I do. I fixed computers remotely, I created and edited multimedia content, I write books, I do my banking online, and as of 2020, I was communicating more online verbally and visually than I did in the past, so I had to find tools in the Linux world that would let me stay viable. What I found on Linux has proved useful in Windows as well.
- I found two tools that are cross-platform, meaning they work on Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. One is Inkscape. This one will open your graphical PDF file and let you edit every single element in the PDF! This was great because many of my documents for a choir I am part of were in MS Publisher and I needed a way to edit and update them. Inkscape saves to svg as it’s native file format, but you can export to png.
- The second tool I found is Photopea.com, and that software edits psd files. This is huge for me because the version of Photoshop I had been using wouldn’t install on Win10. They have paid packages you can buy, but they make no sense when you see the tools you have available for free.
- You can get a free account for Canva, and I may use this tool myself for things like infographics and played around with it to see if I could make a flowchart for a video I did for my coaching page. However, be warned that the content you create there, is theirs, which can cause potential problems when using for commercial purposes.
- When I was doing some research back in March and April of 2020, I created a free survey, complete with skip-logic, over at questionpro.com. I fully intend to repurpose their system to create homework for my challenges so that I can use their analytics to help me a) learn what they got from the day before, b) take from that aggregated knowledge and use it to build content for the following day and c) help me export names for use in a prize wheel to draw for prizes.
- OpenOffice and LibraOffice are both 100% free and do everything you’re used to in MS Office, without the hefty price tag. I’ve written all my books in OpenOffice and write a how-to ebook teaching how to use these and other tools for those considering becoming authors. It goes through creating paperbacks and ebooks.
- Many of the world’s famous podcasters and youtubers use Audacity to edit their audio and it works across multiple computer platforms and is 100% free.
- If you are looking for a contact management system, FreeCRM is an option that has quite a few features to help you get going. The last time I looked at it, it was very oldschool in it’s layout, and you will need to spend time poking around until you are comfortable with where everything is and how it all works. Set up a few test clients to get used to things to begin with.
Website creation, email management, funnel creation, landing page creation, graphic creation, audio creation, copy and content creation, contact management, e-signing documents, can literally all be done without putting out a single penny if you are on fixed income, low income, living off government stimulus cheques, etc. You can turn your life around from financially poor to making ends meet to making healthy donations to others all on the back of free tools and you don’t need to feel guilty over it because, guess what??? The authors of these programs made them available to you for FREE! I have a digital Bible on my computer called E-Sword, (the pic here is of my paper Bible) and the makers of that program actually want you to report anyone to them who you see selling their software! It is a breach of their terms of use for anyone to sell what they are making available for free!
My techsupport paid the bills till my health went south! Am I going to stand by while I get accused of theft for making active use of what someone else made available for FREE??? NO!!! Have I paid for courses and trainings??? YES!!!
Understand the value of free and understand the value of paid. Both require you to put in time and effort.
