tutorials - Wildheart's Work's

How to Market Yourself for Free via The Net

May 23rd, 2008 Posted in tutorial, tutorials | 3 comments »

Yeah Yeah I know you hear it all the time and have heard before so many times it seems like information overload at this point. You can get some decent traffic by aggressively following a
few steps. Now I want to warn you ahead of time I don’t have the normal schedule in my life but I can with confidence say that these techniques are working for me.

If you haven’t heard about SocialMarker.com this is a must have free tool that you can use to submit to 47 sites all on one page without having to open up tons of window or tabs. It is Firefox friendly and once you install it in your Firefox tool bar you can go to the perma link for your article and click on the SocialMarker.com icon in the tool bar and your article is instantly propagated into the appropriate fields all you have to do is add a description, and tag your article. Then click on submit and it takes you through the 47 sites it supports. Now I want to caution you to use common sense when submitting. Don’t post to Newsvine if your not really writing a news style article. For me I do not consider Wildheart’s Work’s Newsvine material. Also pay attention to the categories your trying to add to if you have an article on how to replace a broken light bulb safely, just don’t throw it in General if you want targeted marketing you might want to stick it in the Home and Garden, or DIY categories if they are available, only choose General if it is the absolute only best choice. In other words choose your sites, your tags and your categories with care so you reach your target market more effectively.

Once I implemented SocialMarker.com my traffic increased and stayed steady. My top sites since launching Wildheart’s Works has been:

StumbleUpon with an 8 month total of 7104 hits which averages to be 888 hits per month, Reddit with a 5 month total of 146 at an average of 29.2 hits per month, and Propeller with a 7 month total of 112 and an average of 16 hits per month. So you can see that by marketing myself to the right Social Bookmarking and Networking sites I have been able to have a good stream of steady residual traffic.

Now the next thing is get out there and be active in the blogging community. The top 3 blogs that I have gotten traffic from are eMoms now SparkPlug CEO , Scraps of Mind and Life is Risky.Scraps of Mind has given me 186 hits within a 5 month period, eMoms has given me 21 for just 2 months and Life is Risky has given me 93. That is a total of 300 hits that I didn’t have to do anything for except just be an active part of their community. Don’t be rude when you are in their community either, offer constructive criticism just don’t say this article sucks or your design sucks.

With that being said using good common business sense and etiquette is free and goes a long way in ensuring the success or failure of your online and offline ventures.You never know when you might need to call in a favor to someone who may have the resources you need to make or break your next big project. If you can not take the time to present yourself in a professional manner then don’t expect others to do the same to you.

I have only had a couple bad remarks from folks who have happened upon my site and one was about a camouflage tutorial I did and the other was a StumbleUpon reviewer who said my blog theme was ugly. In my defense my theme works for me it does what I need it to do and I fell in love with the color scheme.

For those who do not have access to office software Google Docs is an awesome tool. I use it to write up extensive papers. It is a free service from Google and you can use it to prepare professional looking articles. Also ScribeFire from FireFox is another great free tool and allows you one touch access to publishing your articles quickly to your blog so you can instantly get on to the business of promoting it. If you have a web cam YouTube is another free resource to utilize. You can use it to promote products in a televised style manner and there are more and more Video Streaming sites than ever before, JustinTv is one that I have played around with. Audacity is free and allows you to make audio clips to put on your blog. I am still working on that.

So there you have it some great ideas to market yourself for free as well as tools that are free and do quite a bit. There are tons and tons more I can add to this and maybe Wendy will let me add to this at some point, but for now I will leave it at this and let you get back to work.

Please Bookmark Wildhearts Works

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you can get updates to Wildheart's Work's. Thanks for visiting, Have a Great Day!

My first space scape ever attempted the tutorial helped.

Jul 1st, 2007 Posted in gradients, nansonsplace, paint shop pro, tutorial, tutorials | one comment »

This was done from how to create a background tutorial from yet again nansonsplace.com. I added the sparkles and the transparent orbs.

The reason I am doing this series- if you will -on nansonsplace in particular is because nansonsplace does an extensive amount of tutorials with gradients and I also love working with gradients because they give a design a very unique feel and look. Especially when you find the more metallic ones like gold,silver,copper, and bronze. When I finished my Web Tech U paint shop pro courses I looked for places online that focused on gradient tutorials and I came across nansonsplace and it was a great way to sink my teeth into the meat of paint shop pro and get my hands dirty and my creativity going.

See I like to do an equal amount of trying to make my own stuff and trying tutorials because if you don’t try tutorials then you can’t ever learn how they do that in the world of digital design. The tutorials give you the skill set needed to help you grow as a designer especially in the early stages of your career. Now I am not getting paid yet to do digital design but I have been doing this long enough and have seen changes in my skills drastically since I first bought paint shop pro 9 and today.