Eric Siu explains how free marketing tools drive brand mentions and leads that convert to paid services. NP Digital built Ubersuggest and Answer the Public this way. Now one engineer plus AI can build and launch a tool that used to need five, making the strategy finally accessible to most companies.
I've been pitching people in marketing how they should release free tools because free tools is a great way to get brand mentions, backlinks. Although back in the day I wasn't talking about brand mentions, I was more so talking about backlinks, you know, getting more branded searches and it's one of the most effective strategies and I think in many categories it's actually more effective than just paying for advertising. You know, that's why I like the concept of just giving away tools for free. And we've done this concept with Ubersuggest. I tested it out with Answer the Public as well, and we have quite a few other tools on our websites. Some are just simple like A/B testing calculators, and the list goes on and on. What we found is when I've given talks on how to build a big company, giving away free tools, collecting leads from those free tools, and then selling them on something else. So for us at NP Digital, we give away a lot of free tools, collect leads, sell those leads on marketing services, Yes, we do have paid versions of our tools, but some of our tools are purely for free. What we found is when I gave that pitch or speech at events and shared the data, very few people did it. Want to guess the reason why very few people did it, Eric? Because it takes work. Takes work, and more importantly, that work costs a lot of money. Now, I'm finding so many people to hit me up asking me questions about how to convert tool traffic into revenue. Like, no joke, dude, I'm getting 2 to 3 inquiries a day— I mean, not a day, a week— about it. And when I talk to those individuals, the reason they're willing to do it now is because AI makes it way more cost-effective. So they still hire an engineer that they may have not had before, but instead of having to hire 5 or 10 engineers and pay all these expenses, they're hiring one engineer or a part-time engineer and using AI and then getting something that will get them initial traction. Now, most of them still aren't looking to go full-blown, they're just looking to get something out there and see what traction it gets and then spend more over time, but you're seeing more companies, or at least more marketing departments,
