I run three newsletters, one niche blog, and a small client portfolio at $0/month in tooling. Here are the seven free tools that do it, why each one earned its slot, and the day-to-day workflow that ties them together.
A practical 5-prompt sequence for designing marketing-research surveys in Perplexity — from locking the research objective to planning the fielding and analysis.
A 15-year marketer's step-by-step workflow for shipping a full landing page plus AB test variants in an afternoon — using Claude Artifacts and the same vibe-coding technique Karpathy described for engineers.
Run Llama 3.2 locally via Ollama, encode your brand-safety rules as a structured rubric, and score 100+ email subject lines in one batch — without sending a single byte to OpenAI or Anthropic. The exact 7-criterion rubric, the 60-line Python script, and the real output from running it on a Black Friday send (including the 11 lines I would have shipped that the local model killed).
Forget 30-page brand books. The voice your readers actually hear lives in the posts you've already shipped. Here's the exact prompt, the 12 dimensions I measure, and the workflow to turn your archive into a one-page style guide that AI tools will actually follow.
A practical workflow for using Google's NotebookLM as a marketing research analyst — uploading competitor PDFs, G2 review dumps, and analyst reports, then querying them like a real research analyst. Includes the exact setup steps, the 6 prompts that actually return usable research, the Audio Overview trick, and the three gotchas to watch for.
A production-grade 4-agent content pipeline built in n8n. Each agent has a single job, a structured output, and a retry path. Includes the full workflow JSON you can paste into n8n, the prompts I use for each agent, the state schema that flows between them, and the failure modes that have actually cost me time.
A step-by-step Notion database setup for storing, versioning, and sharing marketing prompts across a team — schema, categories, version control, permissions.
I ran the same ad-copy brief through self-hosted Mistral Small 24B and GPT-4o, blind-rated by a marketer who'd never seen either output. Here's the full setup — Ollama for laptops, vLLM for a single 4090 server, the prompt template I use, and the per-token cost math that decided which one I kept on the production account.
A practical guide to setting up SmolLM 1.7B on your laptop with Ollama and using it to rewrite marketing content — zero API costs, full privacy, and surprisingly good quality for everyday copy work.
Use Claude to write a self-documenting SQL cohort retention query for Klaviyo or Shopify data, then read the M1, curve-flattening, and cohort-over-cohort trend signals yourself — no analyst required.
