Free tools marketing

Building free tools as marketing is one form of engineering-as-marketing that seems to be really effective.

Going to try pivoting from content marketing and focus a bit more on “free tool marketing”. Both are content I guess, but you know what I mean. Less emphasis on written articles and more on tools with utility that people come back to and share etc. – @yongfook

Free tool marketing drives most of my growth too for my Carrd plugins.

Exactly 1 year ago I wrote that my plugins project overtook all my other products in revenue, and one of the tactics that’s working is the free tools.

I’ve been prioritising free tools for 1-2 years now, built 31 plugins on Carrd, out of which 21 are 100% free, 2 are freemium, and the remaining 8 are paid. So that’s about 2.5 free tools for every paid one. My most downloaded plugins are my earliest ones – the accordion plugins. Both bring in the most referral traffic, and had passed 1000 downloads. And the affiliate income reflects that too - since prioritising free tools, my affiliate and referral income had roughly doubled (from people who subscribed to Carrd via my template, or those who give a “pay what you want” token sum for the free tools).

Tim, who does this for his social media scheduling app Pallyy, echos this:

Can confirm this is the best marketing method (especially for devs). I’ve launched 20+ free tools, which brings 8-10K visitors per day. – @Timb03

So this marketing method truly works.

We marketers call them linkable assets because they often attract a lot of links that help you rank better on Google ✌️ – @theandreboso

It’s interesting to observe because people are many times more willing and happy to share links to useful tools than a useful article. I guess it really gels well with a website builder like Carrd, because people use it to build things (websites), not just to acquire knowledge. So building a tool to help them build better, is the job to be done.

I’m stoked for this marketing method, because as a build-oriented maker and dev, building is what I enjoy most. And if the builds can go towards marketing effort, then it’s the best of both worlds. I get to have my cake and eat it. Great for founder passion, motivation, but also great for business.

Definitely an approach I want to double down on, not just for my plugins, but also for Lifelog (free writing tools?!) and the other projects I will build in the future.