by Jason McDonald of Stanford Continuing Studies

Marketing is hard these days! You have hundreds of marketing choices - from Google Ads to Facebook, SEO to SMM, Instagram to Twitter, Email to Word of Mouth. It seems like marketing changes on a daily basis. And your boss wants you to do everything for free, or at least for cheap. How can you keep up? And how can you bootstrap your marketing on the cheap? Enter the Marketing Almanac. You have at your fingertips a cornucopia of free tools and information resources to make your life as a marketer easier, and your marketing more effective. The Marketing Almanac is available on Amazon Kindle for less than the price of a Starbuck's Venti Latte, and includes a free, companion PDF copy with easy-to-click links for your Web browser.

The Marketing Almanac has four main sections:

1. Marketing Resources - information websites to keep you up-to-date as a marketer, including blogs, portals, conferences, books and odds-and-ends.
2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - tools, tricks, and tactics to help rank your website at the top of search engines like Google or Bing.
3. Social Media Marketing - how to use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms to build your brand and sell more stuff.
4. Google Ads - with Google the largest advertising platform, resources on how to best use Google ads as well as tools for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.