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
Wldheart’s Works 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 off line 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.