We all learned at a young age that, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”, but every once in a while something comes along that goes against this. While most things that are free are really only worth what you paid for it…nothing, a free dashboard software can actually be worth some good money to you and your business. Don’t believe me? Keep reading…

With most free trials, you don’t get all the tools or functionality or only get it for a set period of time (like a free month subscription) then you have to pay to continue using it. Well, with Cyfe, we offer everyone a free dashboard forever! This dashboard has all the features that you’ll need to follow through with the following six ways to make some money with it. So why give it a try?

But before you do that, let’s take a look at how you can make some money with your free dashboard software!

Track your SEO

Search engine optimization is likely something you are already working on or at least have thought about. It’s the process of working to rank on the first page of search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) for identified keywords and phrases. There are a lot of moving parts with any search engine optimization campaign, but tracking your progress will help you identify some of the ‘low hanging fruit’ that is available to you. You can do this with several tools within Cyfe:

Google Webmasters gives you the ability to track specific keywords, make sure your sitemaps are set up and submitted correctly, and manage messages and crawl errors. When it comes to Google (and really any search engine), you want to make sure that everything is up to par all the time.

SERPs (search engine results pages) gives you the ability to track your targeted keywords every single day to get an idea of your progress (hopefully upward).

Moz helps you track how efficient and influential your website is online. It will help you track the number of backlinks to your website, external links that are pointing to other websites from yours, MozRank, domain authority, and page authority. Learn more about the great tools from Moz in our Understanding Your Moz Analytics & SEO Insights [link when blog is live] blog post.

Stay current

Are you using Basecamp, Basecamp Classic or Highrise for your project management software? If not, you probably should be, but that’s not the point here. Using their respective widgets on your dashboard will allow you to keep track of everything happening within your projects in real time. This means that if you set up a dashboard and have it on an extra screen or (even better) on a TV using TV Mode, you can see when something gets updated in your Basecamps as they happen.

Now you may be wondering, “how does this actually make me money though?” It’s simple, the sooner you respond to your customers and clients the faster projects progress and the more likely they’ll be to start a new project with you because the first one went so smoothly.

We all know that customer service is the main reason that a client comes back and by staying current with all projects in a single dashboard, your customer service and attention will be unrivaled!

Pro Tip: You can set up multiple widgets for your Basecamps that feature different things like discussions, to-do lists, events, people, and even widgets specifically for a single client.

Get paid

When you’re a small business, you’re wearing all the hats. You are likely working on marketing, operations, sales, support, finances, management, and everything else that goes into your business. One of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is leniency on accounts receivable – and even missing payments from clients because they are unorganized. Avoid this, get paid, and get paid sooner by adding a widget from Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Stripe, Recurly and more!

You’re in business to make money (unless you’re a nonprofit, but even then you need funds to operate) so don’t let it walk out the door. Monitor your accounts receivable right from your free dashboard! 

Measure your PPC

In today’s world, pay per click advertising is almost mandatory. Whether it’s through search engine marketing on Google Adwords or Bing Ads or social media advertising through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, in order to compete, you’re likely spending money on these ad platforms. It can be a pain and a time suck to be checking all these different platforms constantly to make sure that your ads are performing well and you’re not over (or under) spending. Now with your free dashboard software you can connect all of them and monitor your performance on Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and Instagram Ads (through Facebook) from a single page. Doing so will help you adjust quicker, find opportunities, and determine which network (or networks) is working best for your business so that you can adjust your budgets accordingly.

Pro Tip: Google has placed a big emphasis on the Quality Score of each keyword and ad. Set up a separate widget monitoring the quality score of each keyword so you can adjust faster and get and keep your quality scores high.

Spy

We’re curious. We always want to know what the other guy is doing – what’s working, what’s not, mistakes to avoid, opportunities, etc. Well using your free dashboard to set up competitor monitoring will help you do just that. How are you stacking up? Are they doing something that you’re not? What are they doing better (or worse) than you? Now you’ll have some insight!

We really like to set up Moz monitoring for each competitor so you can see whether or not they’re investing in search engine optimization. Another way to see this is through their Alexa rank. Alexa ranks website traffic throughout the world, your reach, and the average number of page views per user. Are you ranking lower than your competitor? That means they’re getting more traffic to their website. Now you know that you need to work on attracting more visitors to your site. Are your average page views per user lower? That means that your homepage and navigation may not be as efficient as theirs. Now adjust.

We also like to take a look at Instagram. From here you can see whether your competitors are spending a lot of their time on social media to attract customers. Do they have substantially more followers and posts than you? Maybe they have found a good source of leads through social.

These tools will help you identify some of those high level concepts that you can use to adjust your strategy to crush your competitors! They’ll never see it coming!

Learn about your customers

If you don’t know your customers, you’ll never succeed. This is true in every single industry. Taking a portion of your free dashboard to learn more about your customers is definitely a great idea. There are several ways you can accomplish this with your free dashboard.

Email – through monitoring your email campaigns and sends, spam, unsubscribers, clicks, opens, and bounces you’ll get a better idea of what your customers like, don’t like, and what information to provide them with going forward. If you’re seeing a negative reaction to a specific type of email, spend more time developing a different kind of email. If you’re seeing that a specific button or image is being clicked on a lot, your customers likely care a lot about that item and it would be in your best interest to give them more of it moving forward.

Alerts – you can also set up Google Alerts and Google Trends to track things that are trending. Stay current and make sure that you’re providing your customers with information they want to see and are actually looking for!

Social – through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you can monitor spikes or drops in impressions. Likely, if you have a spike in activity, you have posted something that your customers really care about and you should provide them with more of it. If you’ve got a big drop, something in your content didn’t resonate. It’s best to avoid it moving forward.

The moral of this story is that all things that are free are not useless or watered down. Starting a free business dashboard with Cyfe will help you do all of these things and more! We’ve got over 200,000 monthly users and hundreds of apps that integrate directly or through Zapier or open APIs into your dashboard. No matter your business, no matter your customers, no matter your needs, you’ll get value out of a free dashboard.

Get started with Cyfe today for free. Get top quality data analysis and discover countless ways to improve your business based on informed data-driven analysis. No credit card. No obligation. Just insight! Free has never looked so valuable.