Many of you may know that you don’t necessarily need to spend a fortune anymore to get the tools that are essential to your Internet Marketing activities.
When I started, it wasn’t quite so cheap to do the essential functions, or maybe I didn’t know where to go. So I bought tools that I considered essential, and I was right, they were essential.
For example, I needed an HTML editor with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) capabilities, Dreamweaver was recommended to me, and I tried it but it ended up making changes to code on pages I had, making it look different, so I had to scrap that idea. I ended up buying Adobe GoLive, in fact I bought it again years later when a new release came out that fixed bugs in the first release. So, chalk up $1000+ on the 2 copies.
I needed, of course, to be able to read and write documents and spreadsheets, so I purchased MS Office, I forget how much that cost, not cheap.
And I held out until recently to find a graphics editor, and always envied the people that could purchase cheap header graphics and manipulate them simply by adding text layers.
Over the years I found that open source software is nearly as powerful as the original, in some cases more so.
Here’s a list of products you can get for free that you really need if you’re going anywhere:
NVU – for editing web pages
Open Office – for reading and writing documents, spreadsheets, databases, power point presentations, and more. Includes the ability to export documents ad PDF’s, another thing I paid for originally.
Gimp – for image manipulation, can do almost everything you will likely need to do with Adobe Photoshop unless you’re really a power user type.
Learning to use those 3 tools will save you well over a thousand dollars, compared to purchasing the ones you have to pay for. They don’t come with as much documentation or vendor support, but you’ll generally be able to find a user community that will help you, and tutorials all over the place.
Save your money, or better yet, use it to educate yourself by purchasing information that will teach you a skill that will earn you money. For example, my book. 
Or join a great membership site which gives you 20+ new business ideas every month, called Instant Cash Generators. At only $9.95 a month, just one idea a year will earn you a fantastic return on your investment (ROI).
Or purchase a more powerful computer.
Or save your money for a rainy day, or just to celebrate your first affiliate commission.
Later, once you start bringing in some serious income, if you find a need to “upgrade” to a product you have to pay for (which isn’t likely, to be honest), do it then.
Tags: Business Ideas, gimp, html editor, Internet Marketing ideas, nvu, open office, open source software
