Full 100% agreement that even a free tool needs to be marketed, but if we're comparing apples to apples, so does a blog article. My experience has been that it

Full 100% agreement that even a free tool needs to be marketed, but if we're comparing apples to apples, so does a blog article. My experience has been that it's much much easier to market a free mini-service than it is to get somebody to pay attention to a blog article as it's just a better "frame" to put the content in. As opposed to "talking at people" marketing, I just really like the tool creation approach as it feels much more like "helping people" marketing.