For the budget conscious entrepreneur, here are some free online tools that are quite powerful and useful. They can be used for email broadcast, communication/marketing, file storage, document creation (word processing, spreadsheet), social media.

1. Prezi – www.prezi.com – an alternative to Powerpoint presentation software. Free. A zooming presentation editing software. Great way to create stunning presentation.

2. Mailchimp – www.mailchimp.com – send up to 3,000 emails a month to as many as 500 subscribers for free. There is a tutorial that explains how to use the software. Choose from several ready made templates.

3. LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 2010 , LinkedIn had more than 65 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Registration is free.

4. Dropbox – www.dropbox.com – Dropbox is an easy way to store, sync, and, share files online. Simply drop your file to an internet folder, which can be accessed by other computers. you can invite people to view private files in a public folder accessible by anyone who knows the address. Great for working and transferring files with clients.

5. Open Office – www.openoffice.org – an alternative to Google Docs or Microsoft Office. You can download free software that you can use for word processing and spreadsheet. Easy to install.

6. Hootsuite – www.hootsuite.com – Using one dashboard, the user can measure, monitor and post to social media including Twitter, Facebook and Linked In. Great for marketing communications and customer engagement.

7. Ping.fm – www.ping.fm – Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

8. Google Docs – www.docs-google.com – a free web-based word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and form application software by Google.com. Free storage of up to 1 gB of data. Documents can be shared, opened and edited by multiple users at the same time.

Filed under: Marketing 101, Social Media & Networking