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COVID-19 Relief: Paid Courses And Tools That Are Free Now

UPDATE: Marked the tools and courses that are no longer free ๐Ÿ˜ข

During the last few weeks, you probably noticed that the affiliate marketing recession is upon us… ๐Ÿ˜”

In this post, I decided to help you to cope with self-isolation and anxiety by collecting learning resources and tools that used to be paid but are free now ๐Ÿ‘

All this is thanks to the generosity of resource owners who want to help the community to go through challenging times of COVID-19 โ˜ฃ

Here, you will find:

  • 13 paid learning resources that you can sign up for free right now
  • 6 paid SEO& marketing tools that you can sign up for free right now (or get more in the free tier)
  • 3 predictions of the SEO, blogging, and affiliate marketing future from the leading experts in the industry.

I hope you will find my collection useful – let me know what you think! ๐Ÿ—ฃ

I update the post regularly once I find more free resources. At the end of the post, see how you can monitor my post updates automatically (maybe it can be useful for you in other situations as well!)

BTW, if you need help with managing your remote team and are looking for cool remote tools, AppSumo got you covered! Check out their Remote Tool collection (please note this is an affiliate link and these tools are not free).

Paid learning resources that are free now

Quite a few SEO entities have opened up their premium courses and made them available for free during these troubling times.

It’s a great time to invest in your future!

Free SEO Training by Craig Campbell [free until further notice]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ craigcampbellseo.com/free-seo-course

Craig Campbell is an SEO expert with 18-year expertise. He offers his SEO course for free for anyone who signs up in the next 7 days.

Its not just a FREE SEO Course, there are modules on affiliate marketing, Facebook ads and a few other bits and bobs.

Watch this video where Craig explains what it is about:

Cardone University Business courses [free for 30 days]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ gc.grantcardone.com/cudeal3

Cardone University is an online university specializing in business education. 

They offer courses about sales and negotiation, business scaling, personal finance, and more.

You can get access to all these goodies for 30 days for free

Cardone University membership is for people who are looking to increase their income, influence and impact in their company and their community.

Traffic Research Bunker [no longer free]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ mytrafficresearch.com/free

This training โ€œteaches you how to get FREE Google visitors back to your affiliate, e-commerce or service website… during a recessionโ€ and is free till April 15, 2020. So the date has passed and it’s no longer free.

The Traffic Research Bunker Edition is a compilation of carefully selected trainings designed to help you get started with your new affiliate, e-commerce or service business. You’ll get access to case studies, Google link secrets and access our private SEO forum.

It contains a full range of beginner, intermediate and advanced SEO training that introduces you to Traffic Research Premium. 

The training creators claim they add new content regularly and the last update was in March 2020.

Digital Marketer Lab [no longer free]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ digitalmarketer.com/lab-plus

This is a marketing course and it is open at least till the end of March 2020. So the date has passed and it’s no longer free.

Inside, you will find:

  • 36 marketing โ€œplaybooksโ€ with actionable, step-by-step checklists
  • 11 marketing courses & certifications
  • An online community
  • discounts and deals on the tools youโ€™re likely already using

LRT Associate SEO Links by Simplero [free until further notice]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ linkresearchtools.com/seo-training/lrt-associate/

This course is about building links and after finishing it, you will get a certificate.

This is what you will find inside:

  • Comprehensive online videos with Christoph C. Cemper
  • Backlink Analysis
  • Link Audits
  • Google Penalty Recovery
  • Link Quality Checks
  • Competitor Analysis
  • And more

Blogging For Business by AhRef [free until further notice]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business

Ahref has also opened up their blogging course for free access for the unknown amount of time:

Learn how to grow your blog past 100K monthly visitors and turn thousands of your readers into paying customers.

Here’s what their course is about:

  • The compound effect of content marketing
  • Two major strategies of growing a blog
  • How to analyze the traffic potential and ranking difficulty of a keyword
  • How to find great content ideas with high business value
  • How to optimize your article for a target keyword and generate maximum search traffic with it
  • How to create link-worthy content that promotes itself (and stop worrying about link building)
  • How to promote your content & make it rank high in Google
  • How to build backlinks

In total, the course has 10 tutorials of 4 hr 56 min.

Moz Academy [free until May 31]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ academy.moz.com

If you are not with AhRefs but with Moz, they have also made their courses (except the “SEO Essentials Certificate (Series)” one) free of charge till May 31.
In order to get access to it, you will need to sign up and use the code wegotthis at checkout to redeem the training.

The courses include such topics as:

  • keywords
  • links
  • local SEO
  • page optimization
  • site audit
  • and more

The Moz courses are much bigger than the one by Ahref and cover more topics.

MOZ Academy is free till May 31, 2020

14-Day Script Challenge by Harmon Brothers [free for 30 days]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ harmonbrothersuniversity.com/14-dsc-special-relief-30days

This course is about how to write an ad video script that sells.

In this course, you will find:

  • Daily video lessons that walk you through researching, writing, and polishing each section of your own effective video script.
  • โ€‹Daily behind-the-scenes access into the process of harmonbrothersuniversity.com as they collaborate, generate ideas, and problem solve on a real client’s video
  • Practical, hands-on workbook exercises to help you get your script done effectively

As we know with YouTube being the second biggest search platform after Google, the popularity of videos is only growing. Bryan from Backlinko even included a whole section about making videos in his epic guide released last month.

While the course tackles a video ad creation, I think it will be useful for anyone who wants to produce more videos and just writer better sales pitches.

I tried it myself and I learned quite a lot. It’s not just about how to create a video ad, it’s about how to research your competition, how to write an engaging copy, and more!

A paid Slack group for The Blueprint Training by Ryan Steward [free until further notice]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ bit.ly/blueprint-training-slack

This is not a course but a Slack group run by Ryan Steward from ryanwashere.com. The group usually comes with a paid course but Ryan decided to open it up for everybody.

The group has multiple channels including one for web site quality audit and one for technical SEO.

From what I see, Ryan is pretty active in the group and answers many questions.

From my experience being a member of various Facebook groups, having a great community where you can ask your questions and find resources is invaluable.

LinkedIn Remote Working courses [free until further notice]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ linkedin.com/learning/paths/remote-working-setting-yourself-and-your-teams-up-for-success

LinkedIn has opened up its 16-course library about how to work remotely.

It contains a whopping 13h 24m of content.

While we, affiliate marketers and niche webmasters, are used to working from home, it is always useful to learn how to optimize working from home and learn more productivity tips.

SkillShare Premium classes access [free for 2 months]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ skillshare.com

SkillShare is an online learning community with thousands of classes on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more.

Currently, they run a promotion offering free access to their Premium tier that gives you access to an unlimited number of classes. The promo access lasts 14 days.

CodeAcademy [no longer free]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ pro.codecademy.com/learn-from-home

CodeAcademy is an education company specializing in teaching coding and programming languages.

While not marketing training specifically, you still might like to learn how to do coding. It is often useful in digital marketing – think of HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

it used to be free for 90 days from activation but it seems to me they have stopped offering it๐Ÿค”

ShawAcademy Graphic Design course [free for 4 weeks]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ join.shawacademy.com/online-graphic-design-course

ShawAcademy is another online learning platform specializing in arts and other creative training. They offer a 4-week free online course in graphic design.

Similar to CodeAcademy, itโ€™s not marketing training but you might want to learn some graphic design skills that are very useful in digital marketing. I often create designs I use on my sites.

The course is 16 weeks long and you get 4 weeks free.

Paid tools that are free or partially free now

SEO and affiliate marketing tools

SpyFu, a competitor keyword research [free for 2 months]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ spyfu.com/blog/spyfu-is-free-for-anyone-that-needs-it

SpyFu is a competitor keyword research tool.

In order to get access to it for free, you need to reach out to them either through email ([email protected]) or live chat.

The free access will work for 2 months and if you need more time, you can reach out to them after.

Yay Images [no longer free]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰  yayimages.com

Yay Images is a premium stock image library offering stock photos, vectors, and illustrations.

They have decided to help struggling businesses and used to offer all stock image plans for free for the first 3 months from now until April 30th

However, they decide to stop their promo before April 30 ๐Ÿ˜ข

Now, you can get 75% off your first 3 months with the promo code YAYCARES.


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I love my subscribers and often send them exclusive content that nobody else sees ๐Ÿค—





HootSuite Professional Plan [free till July 1, 2020]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ hootsuite.com/pages/stay-connected

HootSuite is a social media automation platform similar to Buffer and Amplifr.

They have started offering free access to their Professional plan until July 1st, 2020 for businesses that are affected by COVID-19: restaurants, hotels, event venues, performing arts, etc..

In addition, youโ€™ll get access to a free library of social media training courses.

In response to the global economic impact of COVID-19, Hootsuite is offering free access to our Professional plan to help small businesses and nonprofits stay connected to their customers and audiences.

In order to sign up, you still need to add your credit card but your credit card will not be charged and you will not be automatically billed later.

Netpeak Spider [free until April 30]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ netpeaksoftware.com/spider

Itโ€™s a desktop tool by Netpeak that is used for a day-to-day SEO audit, fast issue checks, comprehensive analysis, and website scraping. Similar to ScreamingFrog I think.

For getting access, send a taco ๐ŸŒฎ to the chat and the guys over there will do the rest (found on AppSumo.)

Netpeak Checker [free until April 30]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ netpeaksoftware.com/checker

Itโ€™s another tool by Netpeak and it does SERP scraping and data aggregation from top SEO services to analyze and compare websites in bulk.

For getting access, itโ€™s the same thing here: send a taco ๐ŸŒฎ to the chat and the guys over there will do the rest  (found on AppSumo.)

UberSuggest [no longer free]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ neilpatel.com/ubersuggest

In the wake of the upcoming affiliate marketing recession and as a part of COVID-19 Relief, Neil Patel has decided to open some paid features of UberSuggest for free till the end of March.

However, the date has passed so this offer is no longer valid.

You could have full access to historical data of keywords. You also get access to more keywords.

The content ideas report and the top pages report showed 4 times more results than before for free.

Neil also has other thoughts about how he can add value to the tool while it’s in this “more free” mode. To see them, head over to his post.

Predictions

Here are a few pieces of content I came across recently that talk about possible future trends under current circumstances.

For me 9and I am sure for you as well), uncertainty is the worst thing now. So, I happily dug in these articles to see what the industry experts think about our future at the moment.

 Coronavirus and the SEO Industry – Will a Recession Affect your Business? By Matt Diggity

Here, Matt talks about SEO, price trends, acquiring new businesses and, most importantly, opportunities that the upcoming period can bring.

What The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Means For Marketers by Neil Patel

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ neilpatel.com/blog/coronavirus

Some words of wisdom from Neil that pretty much tell you not to panic. You are not the only one affected these days.

How A Recession (might) Affect The Website Investing Space by Dom Wells

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ onfolio.co/how-a-recession-might-affect-the-website-investing-space/

Dom Wells (the founder of HumanProogDesigns where I bought one of my websites) talks about what a recession might do to the website investing space.

What risks are there? What opportunities? What will happen to multiples? What will happen to earnouts?

In his post, Dom discusses these questions and more.

How to monitor the updates of this post

I will be updating this post regularly in the next couple of weeks. So make sure you wonโ€™t miss my updates!

Check back often. Or, even better – make the update checks run automatically ๐Ÿ˜‰

You can do it with the Visualping extension for Chrome

The free tier allows you to monitor 2 links per day.

You need to create an account in order to manage the links that you monitor.

Then, while being in this post, click on the Visualping icon in your browser and choose the following options:

  • Set check interval: Every hour
  • Choose trigger: Medium change

and press “Start monitoring.” Now, you should get the page updates right into your inbox.

visual_ping_monitor setup

You can see all the pages you monitor in your dashboard at visualping.io/jobs :

I used the extension in the past (while hunting for expired domains ๐Ÿ˜œ) and it saved me quite some time.

Or just follow me on Twitter ๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ twitter.com/livingoffcloud where I publish updates to this page ๐Ÿ˜‰

What do you think guys? About the affiliate marketing recession and about my post?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Also, please share my post with your peers so that more people can benefit from free learning resources!


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I love my subscribers and often send them exclusive content that nobody else sees ๐Ÿค—





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