Free publicity

There are many forms of free publicity, but many still have allot of work. In this post I will talk about few kinds of free publicity and how they work.

Website / Blog
A website or a blog could be seen as a free publicity but you need to have visitors. Just publishing a website online or a blog without making the needed PR could make your traffic to be close to zero visitors. For me it's not really a free publicity even though you can make a website or a blog for free. You should actually see them as the main goal to get visitors to. However you still need to update your website/blog weekly or daily to keep people interested and also to make sure that people know that your website is fresh and have new things every time they visit it.

Forums
If you are very talk active, visiting forums that have a close subject of what you do or sell could be very helpful. Cause you can actually put a small footer beneath every post you made to guide people to your website or blog. It's not going to work if you just post small things that people wouldn't look at. You should actually post things to make them interested to see more of your work. Post your work and ask what they think of it, help people with great tips or post very interesting things that you have seen or found on the internet.

Myspace / Facebook / Hyves
These friends and groups gathering sites are also a target to aim for. You can open an account to gather friends and also actually trying to gather visitors. These sites you can also join groups or open one. The aim for this is to open a group to find members that wants to join the group. Here you need to try to join groups that are close related to your subject and post interesting things and link them to your own group. Because those sites have allot of daily visitors and different groups you would easily get new visitors that might be interested in your work or the same subject and join your group.

Youtube
Making Youtube movies doesn't always mean people would look at it. However it is a tool to make people to get interested in your work. Just like showing interesting pictures of things, you can also film them and talk about it.

Mouth to mouth
This is probably the best way but really hard to control and to make it happen. With mouth to mouth meaning that people you know would talk about your work and that they would say it to someone else and so on. This can happen on a friend base or business base. On business base you actually supply good work and make it easy for the costumers and that they really liked your service, then they could recommend people to buy things from you instead of the competition. A friend base is just your regular friend. Show them something very special and they would sometimes show other because it is so special they want others to see it to. However both are hard to control because you don't know if they would tell other or not. The best way is to do your best job and provide great service to have a higher chance they recommend others.

Blog to blog
This is same as mouth to mouth but instead of talking you try to put your work on a blog which other pick up and have allot of visitors. This is hard to control but if you can manage this it's probably a great way to get visitors. The way to start this is to know which blogs to aim for. You need to search blogs that is closely related to your subject and actually mailing them with something interesting you putted on your website or blog. This could mean you have a gadget site and you just designed a new gadget which is very special, then you should try to get your stuff on Gizmodo. Because Gizmodo is a website that is visited daily by millions of people. And there are bound to be some that have an own blog, and they could copy the article from Gizmodo and put it up their own blog.

Direct approach (for designers)
This might seem bit spam like but directly approaching people you want to have as a costumer is a big step. You can actually wait for costumers to go to you or you can search for them. There are many ways in finding a costumer.

Using Myspace/ facebook/ hyves is one option I have found as a designer. Their are actually allot of companies that post on those site to find a cheap designer they often search student desigers or the groups that got to do with design. However these companies really search for the cheapest price to make a design for them, and really the lowest prices.

The other way is to search for website or companies and look at their design and write and recommendation email what could be improved. However this is very bold and mean sometimes, but it often have a good result because they don't like the design too. However you should not try this on famous website that already have great designs. Search for starting companies or companies that really have bad designs.

Both these way could easily lead to new costumers which they have use mouth to mouth publicity. They can recommend you to others because you did a good job or really improved their design.

Conclusion
The conclusion is that you really need interesting things to make people to go to your website or want to buy something from you. You can be a designer and have a website online but have logo's or designs that aren't that special, or you can be a designer with a specialty which other don't have. So you need to find what you are the best in and find how you can stand out from the crowd to be most interesting to see. And never think just putting a website online is all you need to get visitor or costumers to your website. And you need to do allot of PR on regular bases to keep the traffic flow or to get costumers.

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