So as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve taken the “of the week” out of the title for these posts, since I haven’t been providing weekly tips. I still intend to keep them as a regular feature of our blog.
This week’s tip is something that Jay and I are working on for this blog, and something I’m developing to help my personal project to grow. As always, we’re giving you the techniques that we are putting to use ourselves, so expect status reports of the effectiveness of this latest tip in a few weeks.
It centers around giving away something for free, to help build your popularity. We mentioned several weeks ago that we were developing a new design for this blog, and it’s just about ready. We’ll be unveiling it next week or the week after, most likely. When we update the theme on our blog, we’ll also be releasing an unbranded version of the blog that is free to use - provided you leave the footer link back to our domain intact.
Free Blog Template
The thumbnail to the left is a preview of our new design; it’s basically complete except for one or two minor changes, and after that all that’s left is getting it coded. The thumbnail doesn’t really do it justice, but the design is quite nice. Releasing a non-branded version of the template for free is our way of giving back to our readers! We’re also aiming to create a bit of a buzz about the template, in addition to gaining back links by having people actually use the template.
Giving away something free to the community can generate a lot of publicity for your blog, provided it’s of value. If the template we were giving away was a piece of crap that we whipped up in MS Paint, then it would probably do more harm than good. However, since the template is so nice, it should probably provide some really good publicity. As always, we operate as transparently as we can and we will provide you with the success and failure of this method in a later post.
Free Wordpress Plug-in
For my personal project, I’ve run into an issue monetizing the site with Amazon. I’ve envisioned a Wordpress plug-in that will make my life a LOT easier when inserting Amazon ads into the site, and hopefully it will make the lives of other webmasters easier too. So once the plug-in is complete, I’ll be offering it off the site as a free download, while sending out PR notices to appropriate news sources. I’m hoping this method generates some buzz and back links for that blog as well.
In Summary
For this method to work, the key factors are:
1. Give something away for free. If applicable, include a back link - if not, ask for back links but don’t require them.
2. It has to be useful and of high quality. Free crap is still crap.
3. Create buzz! Contact the news and blogs that would be interested in your freebie. Don’t say “hey link to me”, just drop them a note saying “I’m giving away ‘this’ for free, I thought you might be interested”.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a success report!
Good Profits.
