5 Free Tools to Dominate Your Niche and Monetize Your Audience

Anangsha Alammyan

08 Dec 2022 • 9 min read

Are you a creator looking to grow your audience, manage your followers, and monetize your content?

You don’t need to spend much money on expensive courses to achieve your goals.

In this post, I’ve curated 5 excellent and free tools to help you grow, manage, and monetize your audience faster than ever.

These tools are easy to use and can maximize your online presence without breaking the bank. Keep reading to learn more about these helpful tools.

1. PostApex

What it does: Helps you monetize your newsletter audience by running email ads for relevant brands.

Cost: Free (no withdrawal fee, so you keep 100% of your profits, yay!).

If you run a newsletter, you know how hard it is to ask subscription fee from your subscribers. They already took an extra step to connect with you and spend time reading everything you put. How can you charge for this?

But growing a newsletter demands time and commitment, so you can’t keep doing it for free. There has to be some way to make money for your efforts to provide value in your newsletter.

That’s where PostApex comes in.

It’s a premium advertising network of newsletters connecting you with relevant email ad advertisers. This helps you fill email ad space and make money without charging your subscribers directly.

Popular newsletters like Inside, Morning Brew, The New York Sun, and Sitepoint are already using this platform to monetize their newsletter audience.

PostApex has a cost-per-click (CPC) campaign model where you get paid for every genuine click you get from your newsletter advert. The price depends on the advertisers, but you can earn around $1.50 per click on average. With 10k subscribers and a 2% click-through rate (CTR), you could make $300 per advert!

All you need to do is create your profile on their platform and add your newsletter.

Once they approve you, you're all set to receive amazing brand deals.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: View your allocated ad units

Once you’re approved, the platform automatically matches you with relevant ad units in a few hours.

Your dashboard shows all the ads you’re approved to run. You can pick any of them.

They guarantee that you’ll always have at least one ad available to run for your newsletter.

Step 2: Insert ad links

When you accept an ad, you’ll receive a tracking URL, ad copy, and graphics that the advertiser wants you to include. You can plug their shoutout into your issues and style them as you see fit.

Step 3: Check your click stats

Once your newsletter is published, you will see real-time click tracking in your dashboard. This gets you paid accurately for every click you get.

Step 4: Withdraw money

Your balance will be available in your wallet, and you can easily withdraw money without extra cuts.

Start earning money from your newsletter today!

2. SocialDog

What it does: An all-in-one Twitter growth and marketing tool to help you conquer Twitter.

Cost: Free ($9/month on an annual subscription of Lite+ plan to schedule 30 tweets in a month.

You can click on my link to get 30% off on all paid plans)

Last year, I attended a writer’s meet in our city, where we brainstormed the best ways to grow an audience on different social platforms. One person said something that stuck with me:

“LinkedIn is like a networking conference. Twitter is like the bar we go to after the conference where the *actual* networking happens.”

This is quite true.

I feel I’m closer to my Twitter audience than any other platform.

I’ve made cool friends, got podcast invites, and made long-term client contracts by being active on Twitter.

It took me years to get to 5k followers. You don’t have to wait this long. SocialDog will help you build your audience faster than ever.

It’s used by over 1 million content creators worldwide to monetize and automate their Twitter growth.

You can use it to bulk-create tweets and schedule them for your peak engagement hours. This helps you grow even when you’re not actively using the platform.

But SocialDog goes way beyond just being a “scheduler.”

It has a full range of growth features that help you find your target audience, see what people in your niche are talking about, and put your content in front of potential clients.

Here are some of the features I fell in love with:

1. Twitter contests

Twitter can be grown massively using contests and giveaways. They incentivize people to leave whatever they’re doing and engage with your tweets to win something valuable.

SocialDog helps you create contests and measure their effectiveness. It shows you the accounts that engaged the most so you can reward winners on automation. You can also view whether a giveaway was successful so you can plan effective ones later on.

2. Keyword Monitoring

I love this feature. You can find what people in your niche are talking about by searching a few keywords.

You can also search for “hiring” or “need a writer” to see who’s in the hiring mode. This will help you pitch and close potential clients.

3. Account Management

When you grow your Twitter effectively, you attract people who want to grow their Twitter like yours. You can convert them into clients and manage their accounts using SocialDog. It’ll help you work alongside their team and collaborate effectively.

In short, if you’re serious about growing and monetizing your Twitter, SocialDog is your pick.

Try it out for free.

3. Project.co

What it does: It helps you manage your team, clients, and projects all in one place.

Cost: Free ($8/creator/month billed annually to manage unlimited projects.)

Building your personal brand has many perks. But one of the biggest perks is you’re able to establish yourself as an authority. This helps you land clients from your newsletter and socials.

This is one of the best ways to monetize your audience. You get to charge your worth and create a predictable income stream.

But this poses another challenge — how will you manage internal client operations and track all projects effectively?

That’s where Project.co comes in.

It’s an all-in-one project management hub for your team that allows you to:

track client communications,
manage projects,
store files,
measure payable hours,
request payments from clients,
view each team member’s progress, and
manage every aspect of your business effectively.

Unlike other tools, Project.co is super intuitive and beautifully designed to make project management simple and fun.

It gives your clients an AHA experience and keeps them glued to doing business with you because you’re easy to work with.

You can quickly check tasks in multiple views and get a bird’s eye view of all the ongoing projects. This gives you a better understanding of who’s doing what and track progress so you never miss any deadlines.

Project.co also lets you embed your favorite tools within projects. It seamlessly integrates with Google Docs, Figma files, Airtable, and more. This keeps everything in one place so you never mess around with multiple tabs again.

Project.co also comes with a built-in chat tool that lets you communicate with your clients and the team. Say goodbye to long email threads!

If you’re serious about monetizing your personal brand and scaling your business, Project.co will simplify your life.

Try it for free today.

4. Animoto

What it does: A do-it-yourself video maker to create attention-grabbing social media videos in minutes.

Cost: Free to create unlimited videos (upgrade at $8/month billed annually to remove branding).

It’s no secret that videos attract the most eyeballs.

According to a survey, videos get 3x more engagement than images. This is huge.

As video consumption is increasing rapidly, you can’t ignore them anymore to grow your audience and make money from socials.

But let’s face it — Creating and editing videos is hard. They take up a lot of time, and hiring a professional editor is expensive. So how do you leverage video content without spending hours or throwing money on editors?

By using this powerful video editor: Animoto.

It helps you create beautiful-looking videos in an instant. Rated 4.3 on Capterra, this tool comes with a full library of proven video templates that makes creating videos a matter of drag-and-drop.

Their interface is self-explanatory, and you don’t need professional experience, unlike Adobe tools.

You can easily customize colors, text size, font, frame layouts, and many more to give it the look and feel you want. You can also save design settings to create videos that resonate with your brand quickly.

It has 3,000+ licensed songs to match your videos' vibe without copyright headaches. In short, Animoto has everything you need to cut through the noise and attract your target audience’s attention.

To start with Animoto, go to their template gallery to find what suits your creative needs. You can easily preview the videos by hovering over them without leaving your browser. This is a nice feature that helps you quickly decide which template to select.

Once you choose the template, upload your photos and mini-videos, select music, and hit the publish button. Your video will be ready to be uploaded on all your social channels in a few minutes.

Watch my example video here. It only took 5–10 minutes to create and was a lot of fun.

Use Animoto to wow your audience with your creative videos.

Get started with Animoto here.

5. Planable

What it does: All-in-one social media collaboration tool to create high-quality posts and approve content 6x faster.

Cost: Free to create up to 50 posts ($11/user/month on an annual plan to create unlimited posts.)

When you have:

a monetized newsletter,
a thriving audience,
paying clients,
a project management tool to manage clients, and
a video editor,

the last piece of the puzzle is Planable.

It makes planning and approving social content faster than ever. You can easily navigate the UI, and the interface is, dare I say, extremely pleasing to the eyes.

It brings all your social channels to one place so you can simultaneously plan and schedule content across platforms.

You can also plan your Instagram grid visually to get a feel of what it’ll look like. You can arrange and edit your grid, test multiple layouts, get feedback from the team and clients, and attain the perfect Instagram feed before your posts go live.

This ability of Planable to let you quickly preview posts is what makes it a potent tool.

One of the biggest strengths of this tool is how fast it makes it to gain approval. All your team and clients can collaborate together and directly add comments to individual posts so you can make quick edits.

Once everyone’s satisfied, they can quickly approve the content with one click. It’s that simple.

You can view all the posts in a content calendar to know which post is scheduled for when. This makes organizing and scheduling content feel like a breeze.

If you’re serious about growing social media faster (without headaches), add this tool to your arsenal.

Planable is so visual, clean, and intuitive that you’ll fall in love with it.

Start using Planable for free.

Final Words

Summarizing, here are the five free tools to grow and monetize your audience:

PostApex: Monetize your newsletter audience by running email ads.
SocialDog: Dominate Twitter and get clients using unique growth features.
Project.co: All-in-one project management tool to manage admin tasks.
Animoto: Create videos in minutes.
Planable: Plan, create, and approve content 6x faster.

I hope you found some excellent tools to grow your audience and make money faster. Which of them are you going to use first?

Let me know in the comments.

Author’s note: The links mentioned in this article are sponsored. I love these tools so much and only shared them with you because I think they can add fantastic value to your journey as an online entrepreneur.